This is day two of our Jungle Jive theme week, here with the first of two postings featuring blonde jungle women. You’ll see Sheena on Wednesday, but for today you’ll be reading a couple of stories featuring one of Sheena’s competitors for the Miss Clairol of the Jungle award. Sheena came first, of course (created in 1938), but Lorna covered some of the same jungle territory. She protected the local tribes. She came up against constant menaces which she conquered handily. The difference in Lorna is in her man...Sheena’s man, Bob, is not a male chauvinist like Lorna’s Greg. That’s where the fun comes in. Greg is constantly telling Lorna men are superior to women, even after Lorna has pulled his sorry ass out of a deathtrap. Lorna smiles and goes along with Greg. I suppose she figures the guy is good for something, but considering his attitude we wonder what.
In these stories Lorna takes on communist infiltrators who come into the jungle trying to bamboozle the “superstitious natives”, and then, in the second story she channels some old jungle movies. She gives a Tarzan yell to keep dying elephants from trampling Greg.
It wasn’t the first time Lorna’s comic book creators borrowed an idea. In my last posting, Lorna dealt with a King Kong-size ape called Agu. At the bottom of the page you'll find a link to that post.
From
Lorna the Jungle Girl #9 (1954). Art by Werner Roth, stories by Don Rico.
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Click pic to go to Pappy's #1143.
Well, I see the position of "Jungle Girl" doesn't mean you have to protect any animals. Kill them willy-nilly for whatever hunk of man -- a white hunter, i.e., animal killer, also! -- comes along.
ReplyDeleteEvidently, the real job of "Jungle Girl" is to get the jungle nice and clean of all animal life!
There are some real oddly shaped close ups of Lorna in that second story.
Brian, I agree that some of Werner Roth's close-ups of Lorna make her face look squashed. I'm not sure what that's about.
ReplyDeleteI haven't pointed it out before because I didn't want to get into a huge discussion over it, but conservation of animal species and not just rampant killing of any animal in sight seems fairly new in the history of humankind.
As an example, the book King Solomon's Mines, which was published in the 1880s, has the hunters just shooting whatever animals came in view. "Hey, here's a herd of elephants! Let's shoot 'em!" and they did. Attitudes, at least publicly, have changed, but as one of my former coworkers, an avid hunter, "explained" to me once, "Man's favorite sport is to kill." Gee, and all the time I thought man's favorite sport was getting laid, so shows how much I know.
Conservation?!? We don't even have conservation of energy in “Devil Bird”! (Lorna has far more potential energy in in 6:4 than she had in 6:1. If the claw and its corpse had been massless, and there'd been no losses to friction &c, then she would have been able to swing back up to the level from which she fell.)
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