Welcome to the Jungle!

Welcome to my jungle... the world of the Jungle girl.  Through this site I hope to introduce you to the wild and tame heroines of the golden age of comics.  I have tried to make this a fairly complete site in the hopes of serving as a reference as well as a place to introduce new fans to the fray.  With the escalating prices of older comics, new fans may never get a chance to read or meet these great comic heroines which is a real shame.  Hopefully you enjoy your stay and find some gems for yourself.  Please note that all characters depicted, their names and the comic material shown are copyright of the various publishers.  The scans provided are believed to be in the public domain, if you have authorized rights to any of the material on this site and you object to it being shown here, please email me and the material will be removed.
 

Sheena is by far the quintessential Jungle Girl. Her success ushered in a whole genre. Although Tarzan's Jane predates Sheena and there are a few other historical predecessors, none grew to the icon status of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Her popularity spawned numerous clones and variations. Most of the classic Jungle girls were published during the notorious pre-code Golden age era (click here for my tribute to this era). In this era the two most important publishers of Jungle material were Fiction House and Fox.  A few other publishers had minor interests in the Jungle girl genre, including Marvel/Atlas who had several relatively tame Jungle girls.

I have been collecting golden age books for about 15 years now and I have come to some generalizations.  There are two primary roles that the Jungle Girls played in these comics, both were equally as common.

The first of these was pioneered by Jane, the damsel in distress always being captured and tied up. The victim Jungle Girl is a very common theme and these Jungle Girls were invariably paired with a some Jungle hero(otherwise the series would have lasted one issue). Ann of Jungle Comics and her hero Kaanga are probably the best example of this. A quick look any Jungle comics cover or Kaanga story says it all.   Tanee, JoJo's mate was another good example.

The second role commonly played was that of the heroine. Sheena is a good example of this as she was usually the hero rescuing her hapless mate. Not to say that Sheena did not get tied up a lot(she did) but that she would usually be the one to escape and save the day.  There were several different approaches to this.  Sheena was a proud and strong figure whereas Rulah comically bungled her way through many an adventure.

Some of the Jungle Girls would interchange this role depending on whether it was a solo adventure or there was a man around. As pointed out to me by another fan, Shanna is a good example of this. Very independent and strong except when Ka-zar was around, then she immediately fell into the role of victim.

Jungle girl genre comics were notorious for a lot of suggestive material, skimpy suits, bondage, violence and racism. They played a large role in the formation of the comic code. You can not pick up a copy of Jungle or Jumbo comics without finding something objectionable on every other page. God bless Fiction House. To find out more about the comic code visit my Comic Code Page. For more information on the type of material in comics that led to the code, please visit my Seduction of the Innocent Page .
 

To Enter my Jungle Girls Site, please click the gals below.