Showing posts with label year 1953. Show all posts
Showing posts with label year 1953. Show all posts

Sunday, February 16, 2014

YEAR 1953: LORNA THE JUNGLE GIRL



Prior to Atlas Comics' debut of JANN OF THE JUNGLE, writer Don Rico and artist Werner Roth conceived one of the better jungle girls of the comics-medium: Lorna, usually known as "the Jungle Girl" though technically her earliest tagline was "Jungle Queen."

In contrast to Jann, who was pretty much a cookie-cutter imitation of every other Sheena-imitation that had come down the pike, Rico's scripts for LORNA were usually literate.  That's not to say that they were sophisticated: Lorna still ran into the usual menaces every other jungle-hero did: evil witch-doctors, prehistoric beasts, foreign spies and treasure-hunters.  But though at this time the feminist movement was still far from influential on the body politic, Lorna did prefigure the feminist desire to puncture masculinist priorities.

I've mentioned that Sheena was one of the toughest representatives of the genre she founded in the comics-medium. Lorna could be tough, but as seen in the excerpt above, she was equally adept at skewering the male ego of her beloved, jungle-guide Greg Knight.  Whereas Sheena's mate Bob was just a marginal figure, whom Sheena generally overshadowed, Knight actively preached to Lorna that the jungle was no place for a woman-- despite the fact that she was much better at slaying wild beasts than he ever was.

That said, she loved him, and frequently tried to please him, up to a point.  She would mock him by calling him "my lord and master," but in the 26 issues of the LORNA comic, she never managed to convince him that she was his equal, much less his superior.  Nevertheless, Knight was clearly the butt of the series' humor, for all that he was your typical "man's man."  While LORNA was not precisely a satire of the jungle-adventure genre in comics, its light-hearted approach marks it as a superior example of same.


Wednesday, April 11, 2012

YEAR 1953: PRINCESS KNIGHT


PRINCESS KNIGHT, the English-language rendition of Osamu Tezuka's RIBON NO KISHI ("Knight of the Ribbon"), originally appeared in the manga magazine SHOJO BEAT but went through various differing iterations by Tezuka.  The essential idea seems to remain the same in most of them: in a psuedo-medieval kingdom, a girl is born to a king and queen, but the angels in heaven screw things up by giving her both a girls' heart and a boy's heart.  This gives Princess Sapphire co-equal traits of maleness and femaleness.  To confuse her gender identity even more, the king and queen have Sapphire masquerade as a boy so that she will be eligible to inherit the throne and preserve the kingdom against assorted vile villains.

Some critics assert that PRINCESS KNIGHT essentially launched the shojo (girls') manga category.  I can't speak to that but from my imperfect knowledge she does seem to be one of the first female manga-characters who's regularly seen running around beating up opponents and fighting with a sword-- though at the same time proving capable of showing her softer side as well.  She is therefore at the very least one of the most important ancestors of the many Japanese femmes formidables-- Takahashi's Lum, Takachiho's Dirty Pair-- who perhaps come closest to rivalling the accomplishments of the United States in this respect.