Number 1898: Sheena makes her debut to American readers

Here is the third and last of our Jungle Jive week.

In an event best appreciated by Golden Age comic fans, scans of Jumbo Comics #'s 1-8 have been released by the Digital Comics Museum. In an introduction by Edward ‘Josh’ Petrie which accompanies the individual issues, the story (as much as is understood after 75 years) is told of Eisner and Iger's fledgling business, producing comics, and finding their first markets in Australia and the UK.

As the article says, Eisner was able to buy the printing plates for the issues published, and because of the large size, it made it necessary for Jumbo Comics to be larger than usual newsstand comic books. After those issues were printed, they went to a more regular comic book size. They also printed in one color, black, on a couple of different color papers. It was a bold experiment and luckily it worked. Jumbo was published until Fiction House went out of business in 1953.

Note: The first Sheena is printed on a bright orange paper, and it is hard on my old eyeballs. So I used my software and blew out the color, leaving just the black line on white background. If you want to see what it looks like, here is an example of page 31, the first Sheena page, as it appears in the comic book:

We are dropped into the Sheena story. A number in the first panel say “11” so are there 10 pages missing? Apparently Eisner wasn’t able to get all the printing plates, but it looks like the beginning of a storyline. The man who became Sheena’s “mate,” Bob, is introduced as he meets Sheena for the first time.

The issues of Jumbo Comics are very entertaining, and you can read them by going to the Digital Comics Museum’s Jumbo Comics pages. The art for Sheena is done by comics journeyman Mort Meskin.

Number 1577: Samson, tearin' down the house

Samson is the Old Testament hero, done here in a non-biblical style for Fox Features’ Fantastic Comics #1, 1939. We are only reminded of the Samson of the Bible by his long hair, and that he has a tendency to tear down buildings. This is the first Samson story. without an origin. It just drops him into the modern-day action of a would-be world conqueror plot.

The character was updated by the Eisner-Iger Studio, which provided the ready-made contents for publisher Victor Fox. The page style with large, open panels, and minimal dialogue, also has those annoying captions — which sit at the bottom of the panels and describe to us what we have just seen in the picture — the plague (non-biblical)  of many early Golden Age comics.

The story is credited to “Alec Boon,” a pseudonym for artist Alex Blum.

My favorite panel is on the last page, where Samson, dressed only in furry shorts and sandals, fights off a bunch of guys in futuristic costumes with antennae coming out of their headgear. Samson challenges them with, “Come on you barbarians!”

My scans come from a reprinting of the story in Samson #1 (1940):