SHOWCASE #67, April 1967, DC Comics



Featuring B’Wana Beast in “Track of the Immortal One”
Written by Bob Haney, art by Mike Sekowsky and George Roussos

This was B’wana Beast’s second appearance, but an illustrated text page gives us a recap on the character’s origin:



Notice that the explanation of his powers is a bit vague: he “can control the animals”. They don’t just mean the usual “command the animals” we’ve seen every jungle hero since Tarzan doing, although Mike (B’wana Beast) Maxwell can indeed do that, thanks to his magic helmet. He’s pumped up enough to go blow-to-blow with a gorilla, as if he “had become part animal, with animal strength, cunning, and reflexes.” B’wana Beast’s main super power, granted by the “strange minerals and an ancient helmet” is quite a bit more unique: he can cause any two jungle animals to merge into a single hybrid creature under his command. I suspect the creative team was already feeling a little bit embarrassed about this bizarre capability, hence the soft-pedalling here.

The story picks up on a cliffhanger from the previous issue, with B’wana riding a green hybrid rhino/water buffalo beast of his own creation against a mechanical dinosaur under the control of He Who Never Dies, Hamid Ali, the Immortal One, whose skull-like visage can be seen on the cover.

Overhead, Mike’s friend Rupert Kenboya is in a chopper, stopping his fellow military man from grenading Mike and the Immortal One. Seems Rupert is assigned to bring in the presumed criminal B’wana Beast, who he knows to secretly be his good buddy, so he has to put up a good show of trying to apprehend B’wana without actually hurting him. Rupert’s grenadier speaks some embarrassingly primitive dialog, like referring to the helicopter as the “iron bird”.
As the battle continues, the scene cuts to the elephant Tembo, who, under B’wana’s command, is toting a truck-bed of copper ore through the jungle. He passes through a river filled with crocodiles, pressing on despite their bites! His master has ordered him to deliver the ore so that the Zambesi people can fulfill their contract:



With B’wana getting the upper hand, the Immortal One bails under a cloud of smoke emitted from his robotic monster. From the air, Rupert descends, ostensibly to capture B’wana, but actually intending to dispel the smokescreen, to allow B’wana to get away before he’s asphyxiated.

B’wana Beast commands a buzzard to track his enemies, and it leads him to a spot where the river vanishes into a cavern. Still riding his hybrid behemoth, B’wana enters the cave in pursuit, leading to another confrontation and a tumble over an underground waterfall!

Haney launches into his standard Part 2 on page 10, which sees B’wana use his powers to separate the rhino and buffalo so that all three of them have a better chance of surviving the falls. The animals skedaddle, but B’wana is stunned, an easy target for the Immortal One!

Not so fast, Hamid Ali! B’wana’s powers work even when he’s unconscious, and a swarm of vampire bats (in Africa?) comes to block the jungle hero from harm and bring him to shore.
As B’wana comes to, he realizes his powers are fading, so he sends a mental signal to the gorilla Djuba, who guards the magic potion up on Mount Kilimanjaro. Unbelievably quickly, Djuba makes his way to B’wana’s side, with a vial of potion tied around his neck:



The situation gets further complicated when Rupert’s father, the chief of the Zambesi tribe, sends his warriors after B’wana, thinking that he and the Immortal One are fighting over who will keep the tribe’s stolen copper. Rupert can’t convince the officials that B’wana is only trying to keep it from Hamid Ali, so he’s assigned, once again, to join in the hunt for his old buddy.

Next, Haney and Sekowsky bring in newspaperwoman Eve Carstairs, who wants to score the scoop on B’wana Beast’s true identity. And she has a pretty good lead on that scoop:



Heading into Part 3, B’wana’s next task is saving Tembo, the elephant, who has become caught in quicksand while he’s toting his load of copper. B’wana and Djuba mount up on some giraffes (!) to head to the rescue! As they approached the paralyzed pachyderm, they find Tembo under assault from their enemies, who see the precious copper as easy pickings:



All our featured characters converge now, with Rupert Kenboya falling from his chopper into the crocodile-infested waters around Tembo, Eve lurking with her camera in the trees nearby, the Zambesi warriors arriving in their canoes, and the Immortal One firing his big guns at everyone in sight!

As his iron crocodile-shaped ship is sunk, He Who Never Dies beats a retreat, and B’wana’s heroic intentions are demonstrated, leading to the tribe’s gratitude:



In a hasty wrap-up to set everything in place for an ongoing series, Eve confronts Mike about photographic evidence that proves he’s B’wana Beast, the evidence is destroyed by one of B’wana’s monkey friends, and Mike makes his moves to establish Eve as the obligatory love interest of the feature:



B’wana Beast, unlike most of the SHOWCASE tryout features, only got two issues, reportedly because Mike Sekowsky refused to do any more, but I suspect it was more of a team decision at DC that pulled the plug on this concept. After that, B’wana Beast was pretty much scrubbed from the DC Universe, not appearing again until the requisite cameos in CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. The character was later swapped out for a black African wearer of the helmet, going by the name of Freedom Beast, in ANIMAL MAN.

One might ask why this feature made it to print in the first place. While jungle comics weren’t exactly undergoing a renaissance in 1967, old jungle adventure movies were still routinely broadcast on TV, so it may have seemed a genre with some sales potential that was being overlooked, although Gold Key was still pumping out TARZAN and KORAK, maintaining what probably appeared to be a permanent lock on that license. As we’ve already seen, BOMBA would take over the jungle comic slot on DC’s schedule soon after this second and final installment of B’wana Beast.

I’m sure B’wana Beast was little-missed, if at all. I do admit to liking the character’s helmet; it’s a unique design with a striking silhouette. What passes otherwise for a costume does a fair job of evoking “super-hero” at the same time as “jungle hero.” Superheroes were there right at the start of the jungle comics genre, with the White/Red Panther, who we met in the look at Fiction House’s JUNGLE COMICS #2, and his compatriot features Fantoma and Tabu. The explicit adoption of a superhero premise makes it easier to explain the jungle hero’s standard ability to communicate with animals, but that never seemed to be much of a concern to all the jungle features that employed the trope. I assume there was readership crossover in the 1940’s between superhero fans and jungle fans, but then again, maybe not: Fiction House was the leader of the tribe during that decade, and they phased out superheroes early on in their publishing history, so they may have been onto something. In the second big phase of jungle comics, the 1950’s, superheroes were out of fashion, so the jungle superhero never did manage to really catch on. B’wana Beast was certainly not the character that was going to change that.

I liked the Weird Tales vibe of Hamid Ali; I've always liked the idea of immortal villains, who have a much more convincing path to accumulating the kind of power and wealth and arcane wisdom than most. He wasn't what you could call a richly developed character, judging from this issue, but he had potential. As far as I can tell, no one has dug this guy up for any repeat appearances in the decades of DC comics published since. That's a shame...I could see him fraternizing with Vandal Savage and General Immortus on the periphery of a story somewhere.

Jungle Gem? Absolutely not. Jungle Junk? Arguably, but it’s at least up to the usual competency of Haney and Sekowsky, and has an undeniable charm for those who, like me, appreciate the oddball experiments, half-baked ideas, and goofy concepts that litter the 1960’s comics scene. And there was a lot packed into these 24 pages, perhaps too much! If B’wana’s tryout was initially anticipated to be the standard three issues of SHOWCASE, maybe Haney had to pack more than he’d planned into this one, resulting in a rather unsatisfying rushed sense of story-telling. It didn’t give B’wana Beast a fair chance, if you ask me!

This is a good enough excuse to churn up my annual gripe about the execrable "Last Christmas."

My problem is that the lyrics botch the central metaphor of the song:

"Last Christmas, I gave you my heart. But the very next day, you gave it away..."

OK, to "give someone your heart" is an expression meaning "to express your love for someone." This song conflates that euphemism with the Christmas tradition of giving physical gifts, which is fine, a good premise upon which to craft a song lyric.

The problem is, if someone "gives you their heart", you cannot then "give it away" in the way that you can "regift" an unwanted present. That would imply that whoever George Michael "gave his heart" to then gave Michael's heart to someone else, i.e., arranged it so that George Michael was now in love with someone else entirely! No, it doesn't work that way!

I could stomach it if the lyrics were "the very next way, you threw it away..." You can discard another's expression of love in the same way that you can toss out an unwanted gift, but you simply cannot "give it away."


Oh, and my favorite among the relatively recent new classics is the previously-mentioned "Christmas Wrapping" by the Waitresses. Best new arrangement of an established classic, Cocteau Twins' haunting rendition of "Winter Wonderland."

Farrar for me, too.

Once you imagine that Hal Jordan recites his ring-charging oath to the tune of "Sweet Hour of Prayer" it's hard to delete from your brain.

ACTION COMICS WEEKLY #630

STRANGE ADVENTURES #62, November 1955, DC Comics
Art by Gil Kane & Joe Giella