NEAR MYTHS: "THE DEVIL OF THE CONGO," (JUMBO COMICS #28, 1941)

{Note: the story-title "The Devil of the Congo" appears only on the cover of the magazine.)

I continue to visit Fiction House's SHEENA stories every once in a while because, as pedestrian as many of them are, every once in a while I've spotted strong myth-material, though no full-fledged mythcomics yet. 

I don't recall whether or not "Devil" is the first Sheena story to display a well-dressed, implicitly Westernized Black man in contrast to the tribesmen with whom Sheena interacts. But his position in the splash panel, looking upon the bound figures of Sheena and her mate Bob, clearly denotes him as the villain, and from the first page he's clearly going to be held responsible for the assault upon the peaceful Wasuri tribe. (Like most of the tribes in this and other jungle comics, the tribe will never appear again.)

After a short encounter with a couple of the missing Wasuri, Sheena and Bob are told that the other tribespeople have gone to Elephant River in response to a "white man's curse." Then two more warriors show up and capture the heroes, and the warriors' cowled commander says something about taking them to see a "Great Black Father." The warriors, who are also identified as Wasuri, take their prisoners to the hitherto deserted village, and it happens that the Great Black Father himself has just arrived there as well. I guess he came from that Elephant River place, which is maybe his HQ, but the point is never elucidated. 

Even kid-readers in 1941 probably would have recognized the play on words in the villain's name. The name "Great White Father" was used by American colonials as a high-flown title for whatever authority they reported to-- be it the English king or the American president-- when speaking to various Native American tribes, And the same kid-readers would probably know that the name carried paternalistic associations, even if they might not have really cared that much about conning some Indians. So even just a few pages into the story, it's obvious that this "Great Black Father" is supposed to seem like a numinous presence that can impress simple minded natives the way "Great White Father" was used to impress Indian tribesmen. Unlike the representative of White superiority, though, the villain of the story is a liminal presence. Though he uses the implements associated with White culture-- a gun, a cigar, a megaphone-- and is dressed in suit-clothes, he also wears a stereotypical African headdress. 

At any rate, Sheena and Bob somehow break free and escape the Wasuri village. Their main concern seems to be to find the missing Commissioner Fletcher, but Sheena's attacked by a leopard and must kill it. This delays the duo long enough for the Wasuri to overtake them and drag the heroes back to the village, where, mirable dictu, it turns out that the corrupted tribesmen are torturing Fletcher. Fortunately, the one thing Sheena manages to do during her brief freedom is to send her pet chimpanzee for help, and the chimp manages to stampede a herd of zebras into the village. So this time the heroes escape with Fletcher in tow, and he provides the big reveal: that the Great Black Father is the tool of fascists seeking to "exploit" the natives. (This trope is identical to the one in the 1946 WONDER WOMAN story "Invisible Terrors," though the Sheena tale was published a little before the summer of 1941, about six months before America declared war on the Axis Powers.)

Sheena leaves the injured commissioner with Bob and goes looking for help. She encounters a group of colonial soldiers, several Blacks led by one White guy, but they're actually the fascists who have empowered the Great Black Father. (One may presume the real authorities were Brits, since Kenya is mentioned as a neighboring country and Great Britain controlled Kenya from 1901 to 1960). Sheena gets away and encounters yet another expedition, but this one is headed by Fletcher's wife, and all the colonial soldiers with her are also Black Africans. Sheena has Mrs. Fletcher send the soldiers ahead to the Wasuri village, and the rather dim villain assumes they've come to join him, resulting in his capture. Then the real fascists are shot down and everyone in the Wasuri celebrates because they're impressed with the show of force. 

Though the tribe conveniently forgets the "white man's curse" narrative when it's convenient for the unknown writer of the tale, it's interesting that an escapist story like "Devil" even alluded to native discontent with colonial rule, which topic was almost entirely off limits during the heyday of the jungle-adventure genre.

"Devil" also provides a minor turning point in terms of the depiction of Sheena's skill set. A lot of early stories show the heroine fighting only with such weapons as spear, knife, and bow-and-arrow. "Spoilers of the Wild" may be the first story to show her using a judo throw, but the artwork for "Devil," attributed to one Robert Webb, shows her punching and kicking full-grown men around, which is generally the way Sheena is depicted for the remainder of her comics career.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #14

 While scanning through issues of JUMBO COMICS to chart the progress of the character Sheena, I came across a "weird western" feature named "Wilton of the West," which lasted from issues #1-24 of the title. While the majority of early forties western comics are depressingly isophenomenal, "Wilton"-- allegedly drawn for three issues by Jack Kirby and then by Lou Fine-- had his first brush with the uncanny when he encountered a red-garbed masked crusader, the Crimson Rider in JUMBO #9 (1939). The Rider turns out to be female, making her one of the first masked heroines in comic books, though she's not in every story and is always a support character.

Wilton has a few other encounters with bizarre phenomena, such as a mutilating serial killer (no mutilations actually seen, though) and a town full of Lilliputians, liberally borrowed from the Travels of You Know Who. But the only story worth exhuming I've titled "The Ghost of Moose Ridge." While even in 1939 phony ghosts in the Old West were commonplace, in issue #15 Wilton and the Crimson Rider encounter a weird spook with some "Headless Horseman" similarities. For some reason Crimson Rider becomes an expert in the occult for this one story.

By comparison, for those first 24 issues Sheena's issues are fairly pedestrian, except for #20. Sheena, as a tiny number of fans know, was not the raised-by-animals type of jungle hero. Instead, she was a white child adopted by a tribe of Afro-Mongols, from whom she learns skills with knife and spear. The story, given the mostly irrelevant cover-title of "Spoilers of the Wild," has Sheena and Bob explore a hidden valley. They're taken prisoner by a bunch of gorillas under the control of a human female, Keela, who's as strong as a gorilla and was apparently raised among them. Keela tries to edge Sheena out with Bob, and Sheena uses superior skill to vanquish "Keela of the Apes." Since at least one gorilla is unusually hostile to Bob and Sheena, I find myself wondering if he was a rejected suitor, though the story does not say so. (Also, what's with a tribe of apes having a place where they "make wishes?")

Neither of these stories is articulated well enough even to count as a "near myth," but they do present some odd "raw material."

NEAR MYTHS: ["THE BEAST WOMEN OF ZARGA"] SHEENA #12 (1951)

Given how deeply Edgar Rice Burroughs tapped the depths of myth in the jungle-adventures of Tarzan, I might have hoped that I'd come across even a fair smattering of near myths in Golden Age jungle comics. However, I'd have to say that most of the ones I've encountered were far too formulaic to allow for that much symbolic discourse.

Still, I found one mythcomic for Fantomah, and one near myth for Sheena, so I decided to blow an afternoon scanning through online reprints of the latter Queen of the Jungle to see if I could find anything worth writing about. The result is this story, which appeared in 1951, close to the end for both the Sheena comics of the Golden Age and their publisher Fiction House.

We begin with jungle-queen Sheena and her mate Bob agreeing to help an eminent scientist investigate the superstition of strange "beast-women" who rule over "devil beasts." Oddly, though, the jungle duo don't just meet the doctor the ordinary way. Lightning knocks them off a cliff and into a raging river, and it's just by dumb luck that eminent Doctor Crane happens to be there in his boat to pick them up.

By this time it was practically de rigeur that the "devil beasts" would be a bunch of prehistoric survivals, though at least the artist didn't just cadge the images out of some high school science text. First the expedition encounters a tentacled "serpoquid" (Sharktopus, take note). Then along come the hairy-armed (but still comely) Black Amazons known as "the Beast Women of Zarga."Sheena gets separated from her comrades, and almost killed by giant spiders known as "spidrons." The Beast-Women take Bob and the other men to their giant idol Zarga, who by his silence agrees that the intruders must die. On a peculiar note, Doctor Crane thinks that the women-- whose men are never seen-- are "offshoots of some ancient race, preserved by the glowing rocks." What glowing rocks, you ask? The ones the artist forgot to draw, apparently.

The Beast-Women are just about to have their reptilian mounts trample the captives to death when Sheena intrudes, insisting that in a duel of true queens, "queens cannot die." This provokes the Beast-Queen into a one-on-one duel, which she of course loses, causing the other hairy ladies to retreat further into the cave. Then everyone-- just goes home. That's it? They disturb an ancient people for their curiosity, and then, curiosity satisfied, they just leave? I mean, the Beast Women weren't nice people, but they weren't really bothering anyone. But of the hundreds of jungle stories in which I've seem depictions of Amazon tribes, I have to admit that I've never seen anyone depict a tribe of hairy ladies. For a myth-maniac like myself, this detail suggests that these ladies are more beast than human and thus able to command all the monsters of prehistory-- and that alone makes this weird tidbit worth writing about.

NEAR MYTHS: 'SHRINE OF THE SACRED SOULS" (JUMBO COMICS #99, 1947)

One thing I can do more of due to scaling back the myth-comics is that I should be able to discuss the more numerous "near myths."

I've mentioned that some genres have proven resistant to producing a significant number of mythcomics. For instance, I've only found one example of a hyperconscrecent teen humor story, and as yet I've not yet found an example of an original mythcomic in the genre of jungle stories. (Re-tellings of stories from other media, such as Tarzan's origin, do not count.)  That said, a lot of the more pulpish jungle comics have at least the raw materials for mythic discourse, though they're usually poorly mixed.

The story titled (only on the cover) "Shrine of the Sacred Souls" has a basic idea with strong mythic potential. It begins with Sheena's mate Bob being blinded by the poison of a spitting serpent. The jungle queen takes Bob to a local temple, where the healer N'Tizah is known to have a healing wash for just this sort of emergency. However, just as the duo approach the temple, N'Tizah unleashes a "devil cat" on the pair.

While Sheena and Bob endure in their little cliffhanger, the story introduces its villain: Panther, a man with "leopard eyes," who's looking to make trouble for a young female mine-owner, Mrs. Adams. Panther takes Adams prisoner, which is the story's cue to switch back to Sheena killing the leopard-- only to find out that the leopard has no eyes.

This turn of events, bizarre even for a forties pulp-tale, leads to the revelation that the villain lost his eyes earlier in a mine-accident, and N'Tizah, no animal-rights activists, surgically transferred her pet leopard's eyes into the skull of Panther. Panther shows his gratitude by kidnapping N'Tizah's son, just in case the old healer didn't do her job right.

Now, an ordinary pulp-story would just have N'Tizah explain that she tried to ward off Sheena and Bob with her blinded leopard in order to protect her kidnapped son. Instead, the unknown writer of this wild story ups the craziness by stating that N'Tizah consulted one of her gods-- apparently one of the "seven souls" of the title-- who gave the old woman a real-for-true prophecy, forbidding her to heal anyone else until "the evil one's blood is brought to you." So she won't heal Bob, who apparently sits out the rest of the story in excrutiating pain while Sheena seeks to capture Panther. Panther and his men intercept Sheena, though, and she's forced to flee by jumping into a river full of crocodiles.

Never having read a jungle comic, Panther presumes that such a paltry threat can stop a jungle heroine. He then gets down to business, trying to force Adams to sign over her mine to him. She caves quickly when he threatens to toss her into a pit full of chained apes. The apes, by the way, are apparently there in the same spirit that Bond villains would keep shark tanks around: just because villains of all stripes just like to keep cages of mean animals around.

Sheena shows up at the mine. Perhaps feeling left out at having had no problems with her sight, she challenges Panther to fight her above the ape-filled pit, with both of them blindfolded. Panther agrees, though he just can't resist letting those fabulous "leopard eyes" go to waste, so he rigs his blindfold so that he can still see. Yet even literally blind, Sheena is a better fighter than the evildoer, and she consigns him to his own "horror pit"  Sheena brings back N'Tizah's son and the healer heals Bob. Sheena even speaks of rendering payment to the old lady, everyone having forgotten that N'Tizah sicced her pet leopard on both Sheena and her mate.

While there's no doubt that the writer of the story is primarily just piling one weird incident on top of another, "Shrine" seems like it almost COULD'VE made some sort of symbolic statement, like, "Even a fiend who has the eyes of leopard cannot contend with a jungle-queen with no eyes at all," or something like that. It almost seems a shame that Frederic Wertham never encountered this story, since it combines two of his nemeses: "mannish" females and "the injury to the eye" motif.

Here's the complete story.

QUICK "WHITE GODDESS" COMMENT

An example of a jungle-hero who does conform to [so-and-so's] description [of a jungle hero who excels the natives at their own arts], rather than Tarzan or Phantom, would be Sheena of the Jungle. She's a white woman brought up in the jungle, and in her introductory stories at least, there's no particular reason why she's as good a fighter as any of her Afro-Tartar people. (Yes, for some reason not evident to me, the writer decided that Sheena ruled over a lost people made of a Tartar expedition that made its way down to Africa, staked out a colony, and intermarried with the natives.) Later she stops being a queen as such and just hangs out in the jungle with her "mate," waiting for trouble to strike the local tribes-- all Black Africans by this time-- whom she then saves with her extraordinary skills.

There had been white jungle-queens before Sheena, like the one from 1931's TRADER HORN, but they seem to rule by some implied "white authority" principle. Sheena is at least an exceptional fighter, which could explain why she awes people-- and she does have a vague perceptor, a witch-doctor named Koba who raises Sheena after he (maybe) kills her real father with magic. He sets her up as a goddess and then fades from the picture for the most part, so I guess he had taken his "white goddess" lessons from watching TRADER HORN or reading the Tarzan comic strip.

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES PART 1

In PROOF OF EMBODIMENT I showed that it was bad logic to deem Superman's muscular visualization as simply "idealization," and concluded with this formula:

The best way to sum up the practical difference between true “idealization” and “embodiment”would be the following:

IDEALIZATION pertains to “things the hero does”

EMBODIMENT pertains to “things the hero is”

So let's look at the way Superman has been embodied:

And now the way his most famous female contemporary has been embodied:

Now, is Sheena automatically more "sexualized" than Superman?  Kelly Thompson's argument would say yes, simply because there's more flesh disclosed:

As readers of superhero comics we call ALL agree that most superheroes, both men and women, are subjected to the incredibly unforgiving spandex, latex, leather, etc. Spandex (etc.) is skintight and leaves little (if anything) to the imagination, but women are simply not dressed the same way that men are. Men, almost universally are covered from head to toe, while women are regularly subjected to: swimsuits, thongs, strapless tops, tops with plunging necklines, stiletto heels, boob windows, belly windows, thigh highs, fishnets, bikinis, and – apparently all the rage lately – costumes unzipped to their stomachs, etc. This is not equality.

Thompson's "almost" qualification clearly allows for the exceptions, one of whom she herself brings up:

In line with her understanding that form follows function where male heroes are concerned, Thompson defines this hero's costume (or lack of same) as functional:

When a male character has a crazy revealing costume it’s for a reason. Namor sometimes wears a Speedo. But that makes a certain amount of sense both from a job perspective (he lives in the ocean and is nearly invulnerable) and from a character perspective (he’s a known lothario and braggart who seems like he’d enjoy showing off his body)

At the same time, Thompson mentions another aquatic hero, Aquaman, as being one of those who does not wear a "crazy revealing costume," even though one would think that his oceanic existence would make a lack of clothes as much as a necessity as a similar existence does for Sub-Mariner.  Therefore, whatever factors contribute to Aquaman's being clad "head to toe," they don't seem to have anything to do with "function" in Thompson's sense.

Thompson goes out of her way to clarify that her problem with the male heroes isn't just their lack of sexy gear, but the fact that they don't expose more flesh:

Let’s look at ten of the (arguably) most popular marquee superheroes – Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Flash, Captain America, Wolverine, and Thor. Every single one of them are covered – almost literally head to toe. The most flesh you’d see on any of them are Thor and Wolverine’s arms. Scandalous!

However, one of the better-known male heroes who goes around wearing a good deal less than some females is curiously neglected by Thompson:

I would argue that the question of "function" is irrelevant to the question of the way in which a hero of either sex is embodied in terms of sexuality.  Not all aquatic heroes wear "crazy revealing costumes" in terms of how much flesh they reveal, nor do all aerial heroes, and so on.  Further, it's arguable that one artist may make the fully-clothed Aquaman more appealing than the nearly-unclothed Sub-Mariner, just as it's arguable that a fully-clothed heroine may be more appealing than a less-well-clad one than Sheena, above:

True, in this 1990s drawing by Jim Mooney of the character he rendered during the Silver Age, Supergirl's legs are bare like Sheena's, but I think it unlikely that any hetero reader capable of being turned on by the Mooney drawing would become less so because Mooney colored those legs so as to indicate the otherwise-invisible presence of leggings.

Throughout her argument Thompson frequently speaks of "sexualization" and "hyper-sexualization" as if they are one and the same, and nothing shows this confusion more than her attempt to lump in every aspect of superheroine costumes that show some degree of flesh-- like Wonder Woman's "swimsuit" costume in the picture seen above-- with those that really can fairly be deemed "hyper-sexualization" as per "thongs," "boob windows,"and "costumes unzipped to their stomachs."

And even though Thompson allows that a few characters might "enjoy showing off [their] bodies," she seems to feel that this would only be the case for those who are extreme extroverts, naming off both the Sub-Mariner and the White Queen as believable examples.  Yet because she recognizes no degree, something like the "belly window" becomes a symbol of hyper-sexualization whether it deserves to be or not. Here's the infamous Supergirl "belly shirt" that's been retconned out of existence:

Now, is it impossible for a real-life female-- much less a superheroine-- to wear such a costume without being an extreme extrovert/exhibitionist?  Of course it is.  I don't have a problem with Thompson's conviction that it gets monotonous when ALL heroines dress provocatively.  But the embodiment of Supergirl as a hot young girl who shows off one part of her body, the midriff, really should not be equated with this:

 

And incidentally, though Thompson doesn't address any of her female examples except White Queen as having their costumes justified by their character, the current Catwoman title does take pretty much the same approach as X-MEN's White Queen, making the long-time "heroic villainess" into a "danger junkie."  So one wonders whether this sort of characterization makes it OK under any circumstance for a female to display the old "costume unzipped to the stomach."

I suggest that though there's merit in Thompson's essential claim-- that female comics-characters are more egregiously hyper-sexualized than male ones-- her scattergun approach to all forms of sexualization robs her essay of any strong insights.  As discussed in EMBODIMENT, it's stunningly inaccurate to assume that male characters are less sexualized simply because they are dominantly "covered from head to toe."  What I believe Thompson truly objects to is the *feeling* of greater exposure for the heroines; the sense that they are always being subjected to the "male gaze" as promulgated by Laura Mulvey.  I'll address some of the problems with this tendency in Part 2.

ADDENDA: I should further note that though it would make a lot of "functional" sense for Hawkman or any aerial hero to be fully clad, as protection against the elements, the most likely reason Hawkman goes around half-clad is probably because his predecessors and inspirations, the Hawkman of Alex Raymond's FLASH GORDON, tended to go around without shirts much of the time-- and THEY probably did it because FLASH GORDON was imitating Hal Foster's TARZAN in its earliest years.  So again, male costumes are often designed with an eye to artistic style and/or previous inspirations rather than according to some pure functionalism.