SAÄRI #1, November 1951, P.L. Publishing
You can read a scan of this comic
here.
SAÄRI (“The Jungle Goddess”) #1 was one of the handful of comics published by an outfit called “P.L. Publishing”. The company, which utilized a Canadian printer, put out a meager 16 comics dated between May and November 1951. Their three Western titles, BORDER PATROL, RED ARROW, and WESTERN FRONTIER, lasted three issues each, as did their horror comic WEIRD MYSTERIES. After those titles ended their brief runs, P.L. dumped a quartet of one-shot comics before exiting the market. Those one-shots included CAPTAIN ROCKET (a science fiction hero), CO-ED ROMANCES and LOVE LIFE (romance, obviously), and SAÄRI.
The creators didn’t waste time providing much foundation for any of the three features included here, and they probably didn’t need any, since the concepts were all well-worn premises with nothing to distinguish them. Saäri is the white jungle goddess, Congo Jim is the white jungle explorer, and Tambor is the white Tarzan analog.
First comes “The False Priestess of Ugandi”, artist unknown. None of the scripting has been identified, either, according to the GCD.
Saäri is worried about Chief Nikola’s very superstitious Ugandi tribe: their confidence that a prophesied priestess will soon come to rule them makes them susceptible to deceitful attempts to rob them. As she heads toward their village, she hears a cry for help: cheetahs are attacking a group of white men and their female companion, Beth.
Saäri saves them, but is a little shaky on both feline anatomy and possessive pronouns:
The leader, Slade, claims to be heading back to “civilization” after a scientific expedition, but Saäri, snooping around in their stuff, finds some curious costumes that alarm her. Before she can get an explanation, one of the men butts her in the head with his rifle, knocking her off a cliff into a river. They are then off to “hit the rainbow route”, reminding the reticent Beth that a pot of gold awaits them.
The Ugandi are deep into their rituals to summon the prophesied priestess, who indeed appears, accompanied by apes. Meanwhile, Saäri has to fight off a “river devil”, delaying her race to the Ugandi kraal.
As you probably already figured out, Beth is playing the part of the priestess, and Slade’s men are wearing gorilla costumes:
Saäri sneaks in through a cave tunnel, and finds the men, counting their loot, with their ape masks off. Above them, they hear Slade, masquerading as the princess’s spokesman, announcing that she will soon journey to the “mistlands”, but will return soon to rule them. He then makes the mistake of assuming a real ape is one of his men in disguise:
Saäri reveals the deception, the villains are captured, and the sacred ape—the
real one—is secured.
The next story is “Congo Chain Gang”, another Saäri story possibly penciled by Maurice Whitman.
The tale opens with panicked men on a boat fighting back against a certain “Sanders”, who is accompanied by dozens of Swahilis. Sanders is on a mission of vengeance, and intends to capture Ben Burton’s boat. Saäri intervenes, first dropping a boulder from a nearby cliff, which takes out the rowboats Sanders and his Africans are piloting, then diving down to engage in some knife-fighting and fisticuffs. They flee like cowards, but when Saäri boards Burton’s boat, she becomes suspicious: Burton is keeping two men in a cage, claiming they, like Sanders, are mutineers. Saäri fights to protect the prisoners from being whipped like dogs, but she is knocked out by a crew member.
Saäri is tossed overboard, where she avoids a berserk hippo and drags herself to shore, still reeling from a blow to the head. A lioness attempts to take advantage of Saäri’s weakened state, but the cat is shot by an approaching horseman. It’s Sanders—Chuck Sanders—who has Saäri tied up, assuming she was aiding Burton. It seems Burton is a slaver! Sanders doesn’t dare trust tribesman Kolu, who tries to vouch for Saäri, so Kolu grabs her up and rides away on a zebra (again, “you can’t ride zebras like they’re horse. You can’t ride zebras ‘cause they’re wild animals.”)
Burton makes a rendezvous with Arab slave-trader Al Kassim, not realizing Saäri knows the slavers’ meeting place. She heads there, sending Kolu to fetch Sanders and the Swahili warriors.
Saäri takes out an Arab and uses his garb to disguise herself as she attends the slave auction. She makes the high bid, then reveals herself, and spills a burning brazier on the proceedings (which, alas, happens off-panel).
Sanders and the warriors arrive to find the place going up in flames. Saäri kills a famished panther that has been loosed on her, then evades Burton’s threats of pistol fire. The Arabs flee, Burton and his men are captured, and Sanders is in Saäri’s debt, as they end the story enjoying the beautiful sight of a burning slave block.
The 2-page text story is “Jungle Vengeance”, and it features the title heroine herself, rather than the usual never-to-be-heard-from-again lead one usually found in these text stories. (I assume most publishers preferred that so that the stories could be slotted into any comic needing one, rather than bothering to develop stories specific to a title. They would usually, but not always, try to keep the stories in the same genre, but since most publisher put out multiple titles in the same genres, they would have had a lot of flexibility in keeping several short stories in that genre available for insertion, since every comic had to have one.) Saäri is not truly the focus of the story, though; she nurses an explorer who tells his tale of suffering typhoid and animal attacks after betraying his cohorts in an attempt to loot platinum from a tribe of headhunters. The man dies under Saäri’s care.
“Bantu Blood Curse” is a 7-page yarn that introduces Congo Jim, who is, well, Jungle Jim and/or Congo Bill: just another pith hat-wearing he-man braving the dangers of deepest Africa. The GDC credits the art to Pierce Rice, who know only from his having ghosted some of Bernard Baily’s stories in the 40’s.
Getz and Carson are fugitives from territorial prison, plotting to steal Congo Jim’s boat, a native war canoe outfitted with a motor. They take cover when Jim leaves his hut with a young blond boy, “Champ”, taking him on a crocodile hunt. As they travel the river, Jim hears drum signals that must be in Morse code or something, given the specificity of the message: a member of Prof. Janice Goodwin’s scientific expedition in Bantu country has run into trouble!
The expedition, on Kazami Island, is being attacked by the murderous Bantu tribe of Chief Garoa. Jim and Champ head that way, wondering why the Bantus have turned on strangers, when they are taken by Carson, the “contraband king”, who has, somehow, managed to catch up to them even without stealing Jim’s boat:
Carson’s theft has riled the Bantus against outsiders, and he now commandeers Jim’s boat, ordering him to take them back to the coast. Jim fights back, and Carson lands in the drink where he is attacked by a croc. Jim fires at the beast and saves his enemy, tying him and Getz and heading back to rescue Prof. Goodwin.
During the rescue effort, Carson and Getz get free and attempt to get away in Jim’s boat, leaving Jim and co. behind to die at the hands of the Bantu. But Jim gets to them before they can escape, tosses the Bantu’s stolen treasure on the shore, and flees, leaving the bad guys to their just deserts:
A bit muddled, yes, but not a bad tale. I quite liked Rice’s largely open-lined artwork, and the monochromatically colored scenes were striking.
The final story features Tambor the Mighty in “Death on the Ivory Trail!”, and the GDC’s highly-regarded art spotter Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr (RIP) tentatively attributed the pencil art to Charles Nicholas.
If there were any doubt we’re reading a blond Tarzan, the opening panel makes it clear as Tambor swings into his Weismuller-style tree house in pursuit of his pet chimp, “Nikko”.
Tambor is griping that Chief Zamayo of the Buhutus has been teasing him about needing a mate for his fine little treehouse, when an ox-driven wagon goes out of control nearby. The wagon’s driver is a panicked blonde woman, and Tambor swings off to help her before she crashes into the Buhutu stockade. The villagers are upset to find that the girl’s wagon is transporting a cage full of “tree devils”—mandrills, destructive creatures despised by the natives. The woman, Sheila, is acting under the command of a man called Shaefer, who invades the village with his aid, while the natives are beating back the simians.
Shaefer recognizes the fearsome Tambor, who is making short work of the mandrills, and Sheila—in order to spare Tambor from a bullet-hole, knocks him out with a pistol butt so that the villains can loot the village’s ivory store.
The thieves escape, but Tambor vows to track them down, leaving a trail for the natives to follow and assist him. Miles ahead, Shaefer has made camp to prepare to do the same thing to another village tomorrow, and he confronts Sheila, accusing her of going soft on him.
She is, indeed, tired of the racket, and announces an intent to pull out, but Shaefer beats her down, reminding her that he holds a paper that gives implicates her brother in some unspecified crime. That very paper, though, is pierced by a flaming arrow; Tambor has caught up to them and is setting their camp ablaze!
The natives arrive in time to save Tambor from a bullet, by spearing Shaefer to death. The chief predicts that Sheila will be Tambor’s mate, as he takes her to his treehouse to recover from the psychological trauma she has suffered:
I’ve been pretty strict on myself in trying to sample every jungle comic I can find. SAÄRI is one of the more obscure ones that I overlooked on many previous passes, but it’s 100% jungle, and as far as I can tell, the characters appeared nowhere except this single issue. It’s no Jungle Gem, so its quick demise isn’t greatly lamented. But it’s not Jungle Junk: it’s a competent, reasonably entertaining but very unoriginal comic, that would have been worth a 1951 dime. The creators lifted the three basic jungle comics archetypes: the (white) jungle queen, the (white) jungle lord, and the (white) jungle explorer, so there’s nothing new here, but that makes it easy to just dive in and get to the stories, counting on the reader’s familiarity with these concepts eliminating the need to explain anything.
It probably wouldn’t cost much to collect the entire output of
P.L. Publishing’s comics line, but I bet locating all of these comics for sale wouldn’t be so easy. It’s got to be one of the most obscure publishers to try the comics waters, and one of the most mysterious. The indicia doesn’t list any names as editor or publisher, so we don’t know who the “P.L.” in the name was. The GCD notes that D.S. Publishing, another comic book company, operated from the same 30 Rockefeller Plaza address in the three years prior to P.L. Publishing. They don’t claim any known connection between the two, but the similarity in naming convention leads me to suspect that they represented two different attempts by the same outfit to break into the comics market.
D.S. Publishing had a larger output, including some licensed properties (radio’s LET’S PRETEND and the Oddball Comics classic ELSIE THE COW), crime, Westerns, humor, adventure, but no jungle.