Hey, gang, don't miss the secret crossover with this thread going on over in the Classic Cover Contest Hall of Fame thread .

And I tip my topper to the troops! Thanks for the votes in another round of exceptionally elegant offerings!

A new contest shall be up as soon as I finish consulting the topic list.

It should get tiresome, but I was always happy to let a Flash story expend a panel to show us this:

SHANNA THE SHE-DEVIL #1 was cover-dated December, 1972. Marvel brought this to the stands as a part of a short-lived attempt to publish comics with more appeal to female readers. Here’s how it was explained in the Bullpen Bulletins:



In the Bullpen Bulletins the following month, it’s noted that “writer Carol (sic) Seuling and artist George Tuska were helped out at the last minute by a bit of additional dialogue from the nifty new ballpoint pen of Steve Gerber—a name we predict you’ll be seeing a lot more of, in the near future! Steve’s an old confidant and correspondent of Roy’s, whom he brought east to help himself and Steve Englehart with the editorial efforts on our ever-expanding comix line.”

SHANNA initially seems like an odd choice for a “girl’s line”, since jungle girl comics, I presume, had a track record of appealing more to boys. The Cat could have been intended as Marvel’s answer to Wonder Woman, and Linda Carter, the night nurse, had potential appeal in a market that sill supported nurse books, romance books, and gothic books on the paperback rack. SHANNA did have a 70’s “women’s lib” vibe and an ecological perspective that lent it a more contemporary feel than the classic jungle girl books, though.

The debut story, “Shanna the She-Devil”, is penciled by George Tuska and inked by Vince Colletta. It opens with Shanna, assisted by her leopards Biri (a black panther) and Ina (a spotted leopard) intervening before “Ivory Dan” Drake can slaughter an African elephant in an illegal poaching expedition on a protected game reserve.

Shanna orders Drake and his men off the grounds, but Ivory Dan intends to defy her commands by moving to a different hunting location. His hired native man, Kula, refuses to assist him: “I will not hunt with you! You are evil! And to evil men, Shanna brings death!”

Drake responds poorly, and beats Kula, who is left seeking revenge for the humiliation. Kula reports his former employer’s plan to Shanna, who heads off to stop the poachers, sending Kula to summon the game warden. Shanna tracks down the sexist pigs and begins upsetting their plans, “asserting her femininity until she gets a cowardly rifle butt to the skull:



The sight of the gun triggers a flashback in Shanna’s concussed noggin. We learn that she is Dr. Shanna O’Harra, a well-to-do Manhattanite veterinarian serving as environmental specialist for the Municipal Zoo. When the zoo’s big cats are slaughtered, Shanna rescues the sole survivor, a leopard named Julani, who Shanna had hand-raised. A panicked guard finishes the slaughter, thinking the leopard was a danger to Dr. O’Hara.

We get another sub-flashback to her childhood, when she tried to prevent her own father from shooting a leopard in Africa, then return to her origin. Not only have zoo animals been under attack across the country, and Americans have been increasingly cruel to animals.



Now another sub-flashback shows that the “leopard” Shanna’s dad was firing on was actually his wife, Shanna’s mom!



Shanna takes Julani’s cubs, who had been safe in the hospital at the time of the slaughter, and makes plans to leave the “civilized” world behind. Training montage time:



Shanna takes a new job opportunity to relocate the cubs (Ina and Biri, as I’m sure you’ve guessed) to the Dahomey Reserve in Africa. She dons Julani’s pelt in order to better bond with the growing cubs and becomes a jungle girl in the classic mold…

…At which point we catch back up with her as she recovers consciousness, bound and helpless before Drake and his men Vole and Zarg:



Zarg is a gargantuan brute, but Shanna’s training allows her to defeat the big galoot. She tries to stop Ivory Dan from shooting the elephants, but he fires before she can do so, starting an elephant stampede that leads to Dan’s demise:



In the closing panels, we get a quick introduction to the game preserve’s warden, Patrick, evidently an Irishman, and Gerber and Seuling establish that Patrick has been wooing our jungle queen with frequent but refused proposals.

SHANNA’s main flaws are its awkwardness, its overblown messaging, and its paucity of jungle atmosphere. The awkwardness shows in the pieced-out flashback to her childhood, which are nested at two different levels of the story (part in the “now” storyline, part within a different flashback. The training scene is necessary to set her up as being capable of jungle survival, but it comes unexpectedly, and is unconvincing. This awkwardness may be due to Carole Seuling’s rookie status as a comics writer, and may be why Gerber was recruited to assist. Seuling only has a few credits other than this one. Her husband was well-know retailer Phil Seuling, and that probably played some part in her getting this gig.

The messaging is endemic of the times, and I admit I probably would have been receptive to it if I’d bought this off the stands. It does transform the tone to make this jungle queen an activist, feminist environmentalist, and it’s a nice touch to give her a Ph.D. and a notable career. The final-page insertion of a romantic interest blunts the effect, though.

I can’t pinpoint the reason for the lack of jungle atmosphere, though. George Tuska draws decent animals, he draws jungle environments, and Vince Colletta is at least compatible, as he usually was, with Tuska’s work, and I can’t blame things on any obvious shortcuts on Colletta’s part. It may just be the “Marvelizing” of the scripting that saps this book of the immersive feel of a good jungle comic.

For all its flaws, though, the book reads well enough, and if it doesn’t ascend to any heights, it’s not at the Jungle Junk level. At the least, the book seemed to have an intent behind it, rather than just being another adventure book to flood the stands with. I liked Marvel’s efforts at jumping on the “relevance” trend, and its experiments outside the conventional superhero stuff with these female characters, more minority leads, and expanding new material in the Western, horror, and war genres. But I admit to preferring THE CAT and, particularly, NIGHT NURSE to SHANNA.

1. The Suicide Squad




DC and Marvel had tried to use some of their popular, colorful, well-established villains as leads—Joker, Dr. Doom. They’d tried to make teams of them into successful series—Super-Villain Team-Up, Secret Society of Super-Villains. It took John Ostrander to crack the code and make an ongoing work.

While the core concept is not completely novel—it is, after all, a super-hero version of the Dirty Dozen—once you have that premise, so many problems associated with making a super-villain book work resolve themselves and open up fascinating new avenues. Coercion, blackmail, bribery, whatever it takes to force a super-villain to do (ostensibly) the right thing, on threat of the ultimate punishment! And for once, the deep library of expendables made paying off on that threat feasible!

I expect we’ll see both the Suicide Squad and the Thunderbolts hit some number one slots today (foxley has already made the same choice!). I could certainly have included the T-Bolts in my top tier, but I left those praises to others. But even knowing others would offer up the Squad, I loved this series too much not to give it my top ranking. Comparing it to the Thunderbolts, not to denigrate Kurt Busiek’s take but to spotlight some of the aspects that make Suicide Squad appeal to me:
Suicide Squad had better potential for longevity, since Ostrander could rotate the core cast in and out as need be, while Thunderbolts couldn’t pull their gimmick off with an endless supply of new members. Thunderbolts could really head only toward the redemption or reversion of their roster, the Squad could become—and did become—a fixture of the DC superhero universe.
The Suicide Squad could use the costumes, characters, codenames of the villains we’d come to know, where T-Bolts relied on their new personas. Even after the jig was up, and the heroic community knew what was going on at Belle Reve, the Squad could continue.

The Squad had a conceptual viability apart from the superhero community, as demonstrated by two films that didn’t much rely on establishing the villains in context with the heroes. Yes, Marvel’s going to bring Thunderbolts to the screen, but they won’t be able to stay true to its powerful original premise, and will be relying mostly on previously established villains.
And what a name! Plucking a memorable moniker Robert Kanigher gave to a nonpowered team that bombed out of Brave & Bold as well as to the G.I.’s unfortunate enough to be recruited to fight the War That Time Forgot, Ostrander found exactly the premise for a team called the “suicide squad”, a team where the danger was real, the worst could and did happen! Thunderbolts was, intentionally, a generic enough team name that didn’t give away its critical secret.

And sure, depending on your tastes, those might have been to the advantage or disadvantage of either team, and since they were both executed well, Ostrander and Busiek both capitalized on those and other differences between their approaches to create outstanding series.

But the Suicide Squad, with their legacy connection to one of the most obscure of DC’s Silver Age teams, they’ve got my undying affection. They made Captain Boomerang into an endearing, rich character, established Deadshot as an unforgettable personality, brought the obscure Enchantress from Forgotten Villain to big-screen menace, elevated the Bronze Tiger from abandoned Kung Fu Fighter supporting cast member to prominence, and brought a depth and humanity to a large cast, including villains, support personnel, and Amanda Waller, a powerhouse of a character unlike anyone we’d ever seen in comics.
I don’t think you can do a super-villain team any better than this.

This climactic scene from NEW GODS #5:



In the years since, we've seen plenty of instances where the creators try to depict a hero letting his savage side out, but I've never seen it done as effectively as Kirby did it here. In the first few issues, we were told that Orion was repressing a brutal nature, but the readers were utterly unprepared for this nearly sadistic celebration. Snuffing out someone's Mother Box, that artificially intelligent companion of the New Gods, then laughing uncontrollably, taunting the hideous Slig with the destruction of the one "being" that loved him? Gut-wrenchingly brutal stuff...and this guy's the hero of the book?!

This is a page I would shove under the noses of people who say Kirby couldn't write, or that the Fourth World would have been so much better if someone else had scripted it. I can just imagine how Stan Lee would have watered this page down to maintain Orion's "heroic" stature.