KA'A'NGA #18, Fiction House, by Maurice Whitman



The jungle comics are the place to go for beefcake and cheesecake both!

FRANK BUCK #3, September 1950, Fox Features Syndicate



“Bring ‘em back alive”?! Or, barring that, fire a bullet straight down their throats? It’s appealing if awkwardly colored cover, but Frank looks pretty happy to be brutally dispatching that constrictor in such a grisly manner, doesn’t he?

Frank Buck was a well known public figure, a hunter, animal collector, and author, who gained popularity in the 30’s and 40’s starring in adventure films based on his exploits.



Buck’s motto—and the name of his successful memoir--was “Bring ‘Em Back Alive”, and he brought many an exotic animal to America.

The scripter and artists of this issue have not been identified. 

“The Graveyard of the Devil Lizards” begins with Frank meeting Mynheer (a Dutch title of address) Doktor Kupsch as he visits with the Resident Governor of Sumatra, in Indonesia, following a long safari. Dr. Kupsch, a government geologist, claims to have had an adventure as strange as any of Frank Buck’s…

The doctor claims—to Buck’s skepticism--to have found the last of the living dinosaurs while exploring with his daughter on an uncharted island. The island is considered taboo by the natives, which the doc attributes to its active volcano, but he does find a big lizard—not dinosaur sized, more like a Komodo dragon, I’d say. He shoots again and again, uncertain whether he hit it, but it turns around and disappears.



Later that night, as Kupsch suffers from a fever, a guard vanishes, leaving a trail of blood, and the volcanic eruption sends the expedition fleeing. The governor suggests the doctor was delirious from malaria, but that doesn’t explain the healthy daughter’s having seen the beast.

The daughter entreats Frank to visit the island, and bring some lizards back alive. Frank’s Muslim assistant, Tuphon, confirms that such monsters are rumored to dwell on the island. Later, Frank Buck, Tuphon, the doctor and his daughter set sail for the island.

The natives try to shoo off the new expedition, claiming that the Lizard God living in the volcano will be angered, but Frank’s convinces them that the doctor’s camera is a magical device to make peace with the god, and they are permitted to proceed.



Frank kills an attacking leopard when they set up camp—“Bring some of ‘em back alive, maybe?”—and they dig a trap for any lizards that may approach. That night, strange noises are heard outside camp, and in the morning, the men head off to check the traps, while the daughter develops film from the automatic camera, and sees one of the lizards!

Sure enough, the guys find a lizard in the trap, and then find another menacing the doctor’s daughter, so Frank shoots it.

The doctor comes down with another fever, and gets sent back to the boat, and the next day the volcano begins to erupt again.

The many jungle animals stampede in fear of the eruption…all but the great lizards, who appear and head toward it! Frank, Tuphon, and the girl bravely (?) follow!



Soon, though, the lizard heads away from the volcano, leading the humans to the lizards’ instinctive graveyard:



Unfortunately, the volcano prevents our hero from exploring further, and even worse, the natives turn violent, thinking that the whites have angered the Lizard God. So Frank shoots them:



Exactly what, if anything, does Frank Buck bring back alive?

Well, that was a disappointment. I don’t know if the artist misunderstood the assignment and didn’t draw proper dinosaurs like he was supposed to, or if they were just supposed to be biggish lizards that we were intended to get all excited about. Frank doesn’t come across as particularly competent, nor does the creative team with its clumsy storytelling.

Next is a one page educational feature, “African Game”. These were pretty common in jungle comics, and this one has some fairly interesting animal facts illustrated in a crude manner:



And then we have “The Ghost Tigers of Assam!”, which sounds pretty interesting, and has some cheesecake and bloody animal fighting in the splash, but I’m not going to get my hopes up…


The Maharajah of Rajipur is worried about “ghost tigers” scaring his subjects. Frank Buck is skeptical, but the Maharajah is a believer in these “weird emmisaries of the spirit powers of the lost temple, in the heart of the Forbidden Jungle.”

That sounds like fun to Frank, so he investigates, even under a warning: the Maharajah is the only one to survive having crossed the sacred river that separates his kingdom from the Forbidden Jungle. When he dared to break the taboo, his men were slaughtered by tigers who seemed immune to his men’s bullets:



Somebody doesn’t want Frank to investigate, and sets him up for death by cobra. His attempts to hypnotize the snake with the traditional Indian flute buys him enough time for his lady friend Paula to kill it:



Frank deals with elephants, tigers, and water buffalo before he and Paula, who is accompanying him, discover the Lost Temple. It seems like some important information got skipped over, but eventually we find Frank and Paula under attack from a Raj who wants the Maharajah dead, as part of his plan to conquer India. Frank’s taken prisoner, Paula is set to be the new guy’s bride (of course), and Frank is finally forced into gladiatorial combat against the tigers.

He breaks the other guy’s platform so that the evil Raj is killed by the tigers:



I was right not to get my hopes up. There were some potentially good ideas here, and some shameless padding, and some really bad storytelling.

The obligatory 2-page text story is “Safari’s Bride.” It’s a pretty brutal tale of murder for jungle gold. The murderer finds his gold is of no value to the natives, so he dies because he can’t recruit any help in transporting his loot across the jungle. The twist: if he had only offered the natives his pocket mirror, something they actually did value, they’d have helped him eagerly!

Finally, Frank Buck goes “Behind the Granger Falls”. It begins with a theft of Franks’ animals from a rubber plantation. The next morning, the native helper is found tied up at the empty pen, so Frank gets some horses and heads off in pursuit, accompanied by his host, plantation owner Jeb Stark. The trail leads to the plantation of Hank Granger and his daughter, Theo. They’re “troublemakers”, and Jeb hold the note on the Grangers’ estate, which is next to his.

The confrontation between Jeb and Hank is heated, and Frank Buck has to tackle the Grangers’ overseer Carl, who has a rifle pointed at Mr. Stark. It all leads to bad feelings, and the initially-peaceful-minded Theo sends Frank and Stark away at gunpoint.

Frank decides to trespass on the Grangers’ land that night, seeking the animals, and finds that the tracks lead to a stream that leads to a waterfall. Before he can investigate further, he’s knocked out from a bullet grazing him.

It was Carl, the overseer, who didn’t like Buck snooping around that waterfall! Carl ties a rock to Frank’s feet and dumps him in the stream to drown, but Frank escapes:



Turns out it was really Carl and Jeb himself framing the Grangers, so that Jeb could foreclose, but Frank finds out their scheme.

Of course, there’s a cave behind the waterfall, and Frank is left there to face a freed orangutan. When Frank punches out the ape, he frees a tiger:



Frank Buck is saved by Granger and Theo, he slugs Stark, and Theo closes the story with an admission that she had a little thing for the murderous Carl:



I’ll give this one a little credit for the twist, then take it away for the scripter feeling obligated to explain away Theo’s behavior as being lovestruck for Carl. It’s an odd detail to introduce, and an even odder thing to focus on at the conclusion of the story.

So far Fox is delivering some pretty dismal content, which makes me dread having to come back to them for several more jungle comics titles. Fox has at least seven more jungle titles I’ll have to deal with, so I’ll space them out sparingly!

One thing that distinguishes American comics of the 1950’s from other decades is the proliferation of comics headlined by celebrities. Virtually every cowboy worth his spurs had a comic book issued under his name—or screen name, anyway. Comedy stars like Bob Hope, Lewis and Martin, Pinky Lee, action stars Buster Crabbe and Alan Ladd, and, as we’ve seen, glamour girl Dorothy Lamour all had comics. Dell issued comics about Annette Funicello and the Andrews Sisters. Poorly reproduced photo covers and familiar names were to be found every month. This was the final issue of FRANK BUCK, and I’m sure at least one factor was that Buck had died just before the previous issue. The final two issues were of course well underway at the time of Buck’s expiration, so they made it on sale, but I suppose it was considered unseemly to print new adventures of the recently dead, so FRANK BUCK disappeared after this issue. It was no great loss, because this is Jungle Junk. Not the worst of the junk, to be fair, but not delivering the quality that was available, inside or outside of the jungle comics genre. Sub-par art and unsatisfying stories characterize this sample, and a quick skim of the other two issues confirm that this was the standard.

I love that oddity of a collection, which attempts to imply some continuity between a variety of "coming apocalypse" stories. It has a couple of glaring omissions that were probably an oversight: it doesn't include the only two "Tales of the Great Disaster" stories from issues 51-52, which directly reference Kamandi's world "A.D.", despite including "Day After Doomsday" stories in issues before and after those two!

(I get a little kick out of detecting omissions from these supposedly complete reprint collections, like BRAVE & BOLD #102 missing from the BATMAN BY NEAL ADAMS OMNIBUS, or Marvel overlooking one B&W Dracula story in their otherwise exhaustive collection.)

This is one of my most-loved areas of comics, so I simply can't pick a favorite from among them. But I will list a few that haven't been mentioned yet:

Marvel's trio of adventure comics aimed at females--THE CAT, NIGHT NURSE, and SHANNA THE SHE-DEVIL--were all better than I guessed when 12-13 year old me (unsurprisingly) passed them by. NIGHT NURSE was actually the best of the bunch, in my opinion!

RIMA THE JUNGLE GIRL: along with SHANNA, I'll be sampling this in my Jungle Gems thread. Beautiful Nestor Redondo art over Kubert layouts with Alex Nino drawing the backup guaranteed that this was a good-looking comic, at least!

DOORWAY INTO NIGHTMARE: I recently discovered the joys of this one--it was not what I expected it to be! What I expected was the usual DC spooky short stories with Madame Xanadu as the host, but these are all full-length stories of supernatural romance, with Madame X used sparingly as an in-story character. Interestingly, the claimed editorial mandate was that every issue would be produced by a different writer/artist team, with only Kaluta persisting as the cover artist.

KONG THE UNTAMED was part of DC's attempt at a "fantasy" line; this caveman adventure was the best of them, especially if we don't count JUSTICE, INC., inexplicably promoted as a part of this line (along with CLAW, BEOWULF, and STALKER).

And then there are the most underachieving of them all, MAN-BAT, SHERLOCK HOLMES, and WESTERN TEAM-UP, each of which I have terrific fondness for!

THUN'DA KING OF THE CONGO #1, Magazine Enterprises, 1950




You can read this public domain comic here!

"King of the Lost Lands"



In Thun'da's origin story, military pilot Roger Drum's plane loses a wing to a mountain peak and crashes in a swamp in the "Lost Lands", somewhere in Africa. He barely escapes from the prehistoric living dinosaur that attempts to eat his aircraft, and is then taken by a pteranodon!

With only seven shots in his automatic pistol, Drum uses two to killy the flying reptile, and discovers that he has amnesia. As he wanders, he is next attacked by "hair-matted cavemen of the Pleistocene Era", who take him into their dwellings high in the cliffs.

Determining that he is to be sacrificed in five nights, when the moon is full, Drum makes his escape, toppling the ladders to slow any pursuit from the cavemen.

Drum is forced to spend three of his remaining five bullets taking down two of the three troglodytes that catch up to him, and kills the third with the club of one of his dead tribesmen.

With only three bullets, Drum decides to prepare his own weapons in isolation in the deep jungle.

Elsewhere, the beautiful female Pha and her tribe of more evolved "valley people" of Shareen are fretting over the savage and dangerous cave people. Pha spots Drum from on high, and they keep watch as Drum spends months crafting weapons and honing his physical abilities, becoming a master of this jungle environment.

Drum and the valley people finally meet when Pha and her men are attacked by the cavemen. The cavemen, unfamiliar with Drum's "invention" of the bow and arrow, find themselves dying from "tiny sticks"--a sight that also astonishes Pha and the valley people!

On returning to the forgotten city of Shareen, Pha summons their spearmen to take "the man who slays from a distance". Clueless about their intentions, Drum approaches them first, hoping to gain their friendship by warning them about a coming attack of cavemen.

Hampered by not knowing their language, Drum absconds with Pha, to show her the approaching enemy.
Pha leads her new ally to the Drum of Kalla, a giant gong that summons "the ancient god of evil". But Roger Drum doesn't understand, and bangs the gong...

The thunderous crash of the gong brings the cavemen to their knees, and summons a gigantic serpent!



Roger expends his last three bullets slaying the snake, and the cavemen hail the man they had previously planned to sacrifice, dubbing him "Thun'da--lord of the magic drum! Thun'da--who killed the snake that surrounds the world! Thun'da--King of the Lost Lands!"

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Well, that's a pretty rousing opener, eh? Throughout the issue, Gardner Fox is scripting over plots that have been attributed to the artist of the comic, Frank Frazetta. I can certainly buy that, as the panels seem to be packed with exactly the kind of thing Frazetta liked drawing: dinosaurs, savage man-beasts, gorgeous females, rugged battle, fantasy landscapes. Fox leaves a clear trail of his scripting with things like the Lovecraftian names scattered throughout this issue's stories. The premise is a strong one: modern man crash lands in a lost world of prehistoric monsters and primitive humans and subhumans. Maybe it's not the most original settings, but it offers more than the typical jungle man story does, avoiding some of the awkwardness inherent in the old white savior trope that brings forth racist and dismissive depictions of Black Africa.

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"The Monsters from the Mists" begins with an attack of wooly mammoths, mounted by ape-like riders, stampeding a variety of men and prehistoric beasts toward the ancient ruins of Shareen. There, Pha is explaining how an earthquake sealed off the lost lands ages ago, preserving the otherwise-extinct life forms.

Hearing the stampede, Roger Drum runs to view the dreaded Druthga--"the shaggy ones"--who annually invade and kill. The Druthga direct their mammoths to kill a sabretooth as the seek out Thun'da and Pha to bring to "Kwa Kung". Thun'da soundly defeats the savages, and the mammoths depart peacefully.



But Pha and Thun'da follow, hoping to learn more about their enemies. They discover the city of the monkeymen, where "the path of evolution must have taken a queer twist" to create monkeys with the intelligence of men.

Kwa Kung turns out to be the biggest and strongest of the tribe, and when he spots our hero, he and Pha are overcome by a mob of 20 monkeymen. Pha is taken to Kwa Kung, who wants to take her as his bride!

Thun'da's having none of that, and engages the monster in combat, until the cliff edge collapses, sending them both into a plunge! Thun'da stabs Kwa Kung to death on the way down, and Pha climbs down to join him. Together, the head back to Shareen, pursued by monkeymen on their mammoths.

Thun'da attempts to ralley the combined hill people and valley people to resist the Druthga-riding monkeymen, but everyone is fearful of the enemy. Thun'da promises that he has a strategy to defeat them, and he puts that strategy in play as they approach:

The fire causes the mammoths to panic and flee, tossing the monkeymen to the ground where they can be slaughtered by Thun'da and his human tribe. The united valley and hill people praise Thun'da over "the shredded bodies of the monkeymen!"

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Now that's the way to do "monkeymen"!

It's notable that we're seeing episode-to-episode continuity, rather than setting the stage and then doing interchangeable one-off shorts. Thun'da has now gained the respect of two tribes, and the enmity of two others.

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The next story is "When The Earth Shook". As we learned in the previous story, the Lost Lands were cut off by an earthquake, or "N'Gath'Ga" in the language of the natives. The splash promises that another quake is about to open the Lost Lands to outsiders...

...and we get right to it, as Pha and Thun'da must run away from a sudden quake that is shattering the cliffs above them. Thun'da has to fight Krag, the sabretooth tiger before they can reach safety, but his knife allows him to deliver the fatal blow.

He finds that he's just killed a protective mama cat, and adopts the tiger cub, raising it over the course of months to be a faithful hunting partner!

Meanwhile, a white bwana ("Shiv Islip") and his bearers have found a path into the Lost Lands opened by the earthquake. Spotting Thun'da, whose arms are clad with gold bands, the bwana raises his rifle and fires at our hero, achieving only a knockout with a plot-convenient skull-creasing.

When Thun'da recovers, he finds himself tied to a stake, to be tortured with fire until he reveals the location of the gold from which his bands were fashioned. Helpfully, "Sabre" comes to the rescue, freeing his master Thun'da, who heads up into the trees to avoid being shot.

Thun'da makes his way back to the Drum of Kalla, and strikes it again to summon the hill and valley people.



The villagers are turned back by the invaders' firearms, allowing them to gain access to Shareen, where the gold mines are.


But before the evil white man can capture Thun'da and Pha, another earthquake strikes, killing Shiv Islip and his men, and abruptly stranding Thun'da and Pha in the outside world!



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And suddenly the established concept is abruptly dismantled! The real world intrudes on the Lost Lands, and Thun'da, Pha, and Sabre are ejected from the Burroughseque Shareen into the Congo.

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Finally, "Gods of the Jungle" sets up the strip's new status quo, picking up immediately after the previous tale, as Thun'da and Pha find themselves in the Congo, ready to make a new home for themselves.



Now we have Black Africans attacking an enemy tribe, armed with firearms thanks to a white comrade. Apparently the earthquake has affected Thun'da's head: in the previous stories, he lamented that he couldn't fight back without "guns", and now he flees in fear from the "man-sticks that talk with a loud noise!"



Oh, and Sabre the pet sabretooth tiger has also escaped the Lost Lands with Thun'da and Pha.

Thun'da fights valiantly, frightening the African tribe's white companion, who flees with the natives, leaving behind a wounded man who was protecting a uranium shipment.

Thun'da vaguely recalls terms like "atom bombs" and "Russians" from a previous life, but the words mean nothing to him now. Yep, he's brain-damaged once again!

Turns out the villains are Russians, Josef and Ivan, and they've heard the natives talking of a jungle god called "Thun'da". They decide to create their own incarnation of Thun'da:



Thun'da is confused to find men attacking in the name of the jungle god Thun'da, and responds with gruesome, lethal force:



Ultimately, Thun'da foils the Russians' plans, exposing them as spies, and Thun'da heads back into the jungle, ready to continue in future issues in the classic Tarzan vein, an awkwardly-speaking mighty white jungle lord with a hot girlfriend and a pet sabretooth tiger, King of the Congo.

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Well, this is quite a reversion from how we started out. The story never exactly explains why Thun'da has this change of personality, but the effect is to set him up as a much more familiar type of jungle hero, with his sabretooth tiger the only remnant of the interesting prehistoric setting we started in. The consistency underlying the comic is falling apart before the readers' eyes: why would these natives be worshipping a "Thun'da" when he just arrived to these lands?

Despite its flaws, this one is unquestionably a Jungle Gem. Frazetta's art is so far beyond its contemporaries on the stands in 1950. Throughout, and even when the setting has shifted into the "real world", it's filled with fantastic imagery. The Africans in this closing story, like the ones on the cover, may be rendered as horrifying savages, but at least they are not grotesques or caricatures. Take away the stereotypical garb and makeup and adornments, and you see that Frazetta is drawing realistic human forms and faces. It's a beautiful looking comic, with engaging and often spectacular stories. It's the only comic book Frank Frazetta illustrated in its entirety, which in itself has rescued THUN'DA from obscurity: the original comic has been republished, and Dynamite produced a new five-issue miniseries in 2012 that adapted the first couple of stories in this issue.


The reversion implemented by the close of the comic is disappointing, but I think we can explain why this happened. First, though, a question to the readers:

How many movie serials were based on characters originating in American comic books?

Everyone is probably well aware of the first and perhaps best of them, Adventures of Captain Marvel. You may also be aware that Fawcett also licensed Spy Smasher for weekly theatrical installments. Most forum members are probably well acquainted with both of the Batman serials, and both Superman and Atom Man vs. Superman. We've already mentioned that DC also saw Congo Bill in the serials, and those better-versed in this corner of filmdom may remember that Hop Harrigan and The Vigilante also made the jump from DC/AA to the big screen. Quality Comics were able to interest Hollywood in a Blackhawk serial, and Marvel authorized the use of Captain America--his costume, anyway--in a wildly unfaithful serial incarnation that many speculate was originally intended to be Fawcett's Mr. Scarlet.

And that's about it, right? There were some serials based on comic strip characters who also had comic books, like Captain Midnight, Don Winslow of the Navy, and The Phantom, and the occasional serial character who went on to a longer career in comic books, such as Nyoka, who we'll cover later. But those are all the comic book-to-serial heroes, right?

Wrong! Buster Crabbe starred as Thun'da in King of the Congo, released in 1950. It's no surprise that he's not well remembered, because Thun'da didn't have the long-lasting comic book careers that all of the others had. All those serials I listed above adapted established and successful features. Sure, three of them were "only" backup features, and may have only been brought to live action as part of a deal to secure the rights to adapt the company's big gun, Superman, but they all had sustained presence. Thun'da not only didn't have that kind of longevity, he had only appeared in the above-reviewed issue of his comic book at the time the serial debuted!

The serial, should you wish to sample it, is uploaded to youtube:



Evidently, this serial led to some bad blood between Frank Frazetta and Magazine Enterprises. Brian Cronin, in one of his "Comic Book Legends Revealed" columns for cbr.com
boils down the story to:

Frank Frazetta conceives, plots, and draws Thun'da, with Gardner Fox scripting.

Editor Ray Krank orders Frazetta to drop the prehistoric stuff, so that by the end of the first issue, it's a typical Tarzan clone.

Magazine Enterprises then sells the rights to Columbia pictures, who turn it into a serial.

Frazetta quits in anger, and Bob Powell joins as the artist for five more issues, when it's cancelled. The serial, too, is a dud.

I can't help thinking there's more to the story.

I presume that serials like "King of the Congo" were hastily conceived and produced, but the timing seems so tight that I can't believe the serial wasn't in production before the first issue of THUN'DA went on sale. At first I expected that the serial would just borrow the name "Thun'da" and apply it to a generic jungle character, but there really are a lot of shared elements between the comic and the film. Roger Drum, a pilot who crashes in Africa, finds himself with temporary amnesia, using up his remaining bullets, encountering the beautiful Pha and her tribe--here the "rock people"--who are at odds with another tribe, the cave people. Drum is renamed "Thun'da" when he strikes a giant sacred gong that thunderously frightens off the tribe's enemies. Yes, it's a genuine adaptation, but its atypical faithfulness to the source material is suspicious. It suggests that the film and the comic were produced in parallel, to some degree, anyway, with some kind of joint cross-marketing in mind.

My guess is that the first story had already been completed when the scheme was hatched for whatever arrangement was made between M.E. and Columbia. Columbia probably made clear what they could incorporate, but that the fantastic elements like elaborate cities, prehistoric monsters, giant serpents, and ape-men were beyond their budget. M.E. agreed to bring the setting of the feature in line with the serial by the end of the first issue. If that's what happened, it implies that the deal was struck long before the first issue saw print. I suppose we'll never know how this collaboration came about--presuming Columbia wanted to have a concurrent comic on the stands while their serial ran, what would have led them to adapt this comic? I guess there wasn't much else to pick from at the time, other than Kaanga in JUNGLE COMICS which may have required a more complicated business arrangement (for reasons that I'll get into when we sample that hero's solo comic). M.E. may have caught their eye by showing off that gorgeous Frazetta artwork from the first story, convincing Columbia that this was a surefire hit.

It's also notable that "King of the Congo" appears only on the cover, appended to the "Thun'da" logo, suggesting that this was an addition made once "King of the Congo" was chosen over "Thun'da" as the movie title.

So my speculation is that Frazetta had finished the first story, then the deal was reached between M.E. and Columbia. As Frazetta plotted and drew the remaining stories, he was puzzled and disappointed when Krank directed him to move the feature out of its prehistoric "lost lands" to set it up as a conventional jungle feature. Sometime during this phase, or perhaps after publication, I assume Frazetta learned about the movie deal, and learned that he wasn't going to share in the profits. Having a publisher arranging money-making deals while you're developing the feature, without giving the creator a cut, would be good grounds for the kind of angry response Cronin writes about.

If Columbia had been counting an the remarkable talents of Frank Frazetta to boost the appeal of their film, one that came out in the dying days of the serial format, they were disappointed. Bob Powell would be drawing the remaining five issues, and while Powell has his fans, few would rank his work next to Frazetta's.

A research question: without looking it up, which American comic book adventure characters can you name who were adapted into movie serials? Not comic strip or radio characters who also appeared in comics (such as Green Hornet and Captain Midnight) but the ones who originated in comic books, like (and here's a couple of gimmes!) Superman and Captain Marvel?
Again, from memory only, please, I've got a reason for asking!