A Primordial Rumble in the Comic Book

Jungle: Sheena Rehabilitated

 

by Doug Mann

 

1. Representing the Jungle Queen

            Swinging through the trees provocatively clad in the pelt of a leopard she had killed herself, the Sheena of the Golden Age of comics was something new, and for some, something scary. She was a noble savage, a white woman raised by Africans. She killed both animals and men without hesitation, dispensing jungle justice to maintain peace in her leafy realm. She had a mate, not a husband. Her only "powers" were speed, strength and cunning, her only weapons a knife and a bow. Beating Wonder Woman to the punch, she was the first heroine to get her own comic title. She had many imitators, from Judy, Camilla, Rulah and Tygra to Princess Pantha and Shanna the She-Devil. But her fiercest enemies were not ravenous lions or evil slavers, but critics from Frederic Wertham in the 1950s to Bradford Wright in the new millennium, who attacked her

adventures as being too sexy and too violent, charging her with sexism, imperialism and racism. A careful study of both the covers and the stories from Jumbo Comics and Sheena from 1940-1953 will show that although she's certainly a violent and sexy heroine, she is largely innocent of two of these charges, and only partly guilty of the third. This essay aims to engage in archaeology of comic-book knowledge to rehabilitate the jungle queen's tarnished reputation, stripping away decades of confused criticism with a careful study of the original source.  

            The essence of most genres of comic books - superhero, horror, science fiction, crime, jungle, cowboy and war - is conflict. Not a conflict of economic interests or ideas, but of flying fists, zinging bullets or fiery lasers. Yet such violent conflict is outlawed by most civilized societies. That being the case, the trick for writers and artists is to invent a space, which I'll call primordial, where the ordinary ethical and legal prohibitions against violence don't apply, and thus where a death-defying adventure is possible. This could be a historic space where civilization has yet to develop, e.g. the African jungle or the Wild West. It could be a present space where the mutant powers acquired by heroes and villains allow them to ignore ordinary human law enforcement, e.g. the New York of Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Or it could be an asteroid belt in the future menaced by space pirates hungry to populate an alien zoo. The essence of all these spaces is that they are outside of law, and thus of what we usually think of as civilization.

            Not only is this primordial space one where the rules of civilized society don't apply, but also one where the laws of evolution are loose at best. There are ordinary humans there. But there could also be super-humans, beast-men, sea monsters, even dinosaurs. And not only are the laws of biological evolution upturned, but those of sociological evolution are often defied too. Deep in the African jungle we might find a whole city of Egyptians living as they did in the days of the pharaohs. Drifting down the river we might encounter a pirate ship that has seemingly sailed straight out of Blackbeard's Caribbean. This breakdown of law, whether criminal, biological, or sociological, is the essence of the primordial space. And it's also the essence of Sheena's world. Sheena's narrative space is a fantastical African jungle outside of civilization, and to some extent outside of time and the laws of physical science. It is a primordial space.

        Why Africa? Because for the mid-twentieth-century American popular mind, it was still a mysterious dark place, unlike North America, Europe, Russia, China or Japan. As Mike Madrid notes, the "1938 concept of Africa from which Sheena arose was still a forbidding place of mystery and romance, born of the men’s dime novels that spawned her" (35). It’s where a man from civilized Europe or America could enter a fantastic, barbaric world of adventure and "fall in love with an intoxicating savage princess" (Madrid 32). Though the jungles of the Amazon or tropical south Asia might have fit the bill (and have in other adventure comics), Africa was ideally suited as a blank slate onto which project the weird and violent adventures seen in Sheena's comics. Here we might find, at least in the minds of the boys and girls who read the books, a lost world where water-skiing natives worship Thor or scaly sea monsters swim through murky waters, where lions and panthers are ready to strike at any moment. In the 1940s Africa was the continent best suited to project these pulpy primordial fantasies onto the comic-book imagination.

            There are a number of representations of Sheena scattered throughout pop culture over the last 75 years. She was created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, who ran a successful work-for-hire comics shop from the late 1930s to the 1950s that churned out titles for a number of publishers. Sheena appeared briefly in the British magazine Wags #1 in 1937, then moved to T. T. Scott's Fiction House titles from 1938-1953, where her stories were published under the fictional pseudonym "W. Morgan Thomas". Fiction House was a pulp publisher which climbed on the comic-book bandwagon early in the Golden Age. In addition to Jumbo, their core stable included Jungle Comics, Planet Comics, Fight Comics, and Wing Comics. Their covers often featured sexy heroines placed in positions of dire peril, infuriating critics like Frederic Wertham. Sheena appeared in Fiction House's very first comic, Jumbo Comics #1, in September 1938, going on to become the title's star attraction from issues #17-160, ending her run there in #167 in April 1953. Four years after her debut she got her own title Sheena, which published 18 issues from 1942-1953. Her last appearance for Fiction House came in 3D Sheena, Jungle Queen in 1953. Fiction House stopped producing comics in 1954 under pressure from Wertham's anti-comics crusade and a decline in comics sales thanks in part to the rise of television.

            Though on the surface a female Tarzan, Sheena's pedigree (as Eisner has admitted in interviews) really goes back to H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She, about English adventurers discovering the lost city of Kôr ruled by the immortal beauty Ayesha, "she-who-must-be-obeyed".  This is important because Haggard's novel was less an explicit defence of imperialism than a complex adventure story in the "imperial gothic" mould with debatable racial politics - for one thing, Ayesha was Egyptian. Sheena briefly appeared in Fiction House pulp stories in 1951 and 1954. She surfaced once again in a syndicated TV series from Nassour Studios in 1955-56 with Irish McCalla in the lead role. In it we see a de-fanged Sheena whose spear rarely penetrates flesh. Lions, panthers and hippos appear only in stock footage. Having inexplicably lost the ability to speak English properly as she does in the comics, the show presents a tepid version of Sheena, something like she would have appeared if her comic had survived into the Comics Code era. It lasted 26 episodes.

            After three decades of silence, Sheena returned in a 1984 Columbia movie starring Tanya Roberts as the jungle queen. In Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, the new Sheena is raised by a female shaman of the Zambuli tribe in the fictional African kingdom of Tigora. She develops telepathic powers that allow her to communicate with animals, now her allies. The evil Prince Otwani wants to steal the throne from his brother and rob Zambuli territory of titanium, so he assassinates the king, framing Sheena for the deed. After a jungle chase Sheena triumphs over the Prince and his mercenary friends. Along the way Roberts rides a zebra (really a painted horse) and does two nude scenes, which no doubt caused Wertham to turn in his grave. Marvel Comics published a two-issue adaptation of the film titled simply Sheena in December 1984 and February 1985. With interest in the character revived by the film, Blackthorne Publishing reprinted the 3D comic with a new cover in January 1985, adding some more reprints in Jerry Iger's Classic Sheena in April 1985.  Sheena appeared in three new stories in Blackthorne's Jungle Comics from May-October 1988.

            A decade later London Night Studio presented a re-imagined Sheena in two comics mini-series: the three-issue Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (February-August 1998) and the five-issue Sheena, Queen of the Jungle: Bound (December 1998-March 1999) This new Sheena had red hair, wore a leather cat suit adorned with a leopard vest, and lived in South America. A bad girl, she fights Trevor Enterprises, which is trying to force an eruption of the volcano Mt. Hansha to uncover uranium ore which it will mine and sell to the highest bidder. Another brief Sheena flurry followed: in 1999 AC published The Golden Age Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, black-and-white reprints of classic Sheena stories, while in October 2000 Sheena returned to the TV screen with Gena Lee Nolin in the lead role. This Hearst Entertainment syndicated series lasted until 2002, featuring 35 episodes. Once again, Sheena’s mentor was an African shaman (this time named Kali), but now she is able to take animal form in which to do battle. In 2007 Devil’s Due Publishing not only published the first of two full-colour volumes of Jumbo Comics reprints, but also rebooted Sheena once again in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a five-issue mini-series published from June 2007-January 2008. This was followed by a second mini-series, the three-issue Sheena, Queen of the Jungle: Dark Rising (October-December 2008) and two one-offs in 2007 and 2008. DDP’s Sheena had once again moved to South America, this time to the fictional nation of Val Verde, where she fought developers lead by Cardwell Corporation. She returned to her revealing costume and bad-ass attitude of the late 1940s, though had become a mythical  jungle spirit called the "Maytenda" who could talk to her "friends" a monkey, parrot and black panther.  The Sheena of the 1984 film, 2000-2002 TV series, and 1998 and 2007 comics series had become an anti-capitalist eco-warrior with a mystical bond to animals.

            In her comics origin story from the late 1930s Sheena comes to Africa with her explorer father Cardwell Rivington. When the friendly witch doctor Koba accidentally kills Rivington with a botched potion he is remorseful, so he decides to raise Sheena himself, teaching her native languages, English, and the ways of the jungle. In later stories her parents are missionaries, while Koba becomes a witch woman named N'bid Ela. In a steamy scene in her young adult life she meets the white hunter Bob Reynolds, who is transfixed by her cascading blonde hair, naked shoulders, and "direct and fearless eyes" (quoted in Madrid, 37). She takes Bob prisoner, but eventually chooses him as her mate.[1]

            Though the shifts from one period to the next are for the most part quite subtle, one can divide the original Sheena comics into four periods. First we see the pre-war Ur-Sheena of issues 1-19 of Jumbo Comics, from September 1938-September 1940. The character is still working out her kinks here. The first eight issues involved brief stories in black and white. The full-fledged Sheena character is really only born in her "apotheosis" in Jumbo Comics #10 (Oct-Nov 1939), where she vanquishes Namu the killer-lion and a leopard, then replaces her city dress (a symbol of urbanity) with the leopard’s skin (a symbol of the jungle wilderness). Bob is stronger here, and the stories more directly sympathetic to colonialism. Only toward the end of this run does Sheena become the star attraction of Jumbo's covers.

            Second is War Sheena, comprising Jumbo issues #20-78, from October 1940 (the end of the Battle of Britain and the fading of American isolationism) to August 1945 (the dropping of A-bombs on Japan), along with Sheena issues #1-3. Here the character breaks out into full pulpiness, in every issue wrestling crocodiles, fighting Nazis and white slavers, or discovering lost civilizations. The art is relatively crude and primitive (as it was in the Ur-Sheena period), the panel layouts usually static. In this period Bob is portrayed as a semi-competent partner in Sheena's efforts to bring justice to the jungle. Although colonialism as an explicit theme begins to fade away, these stories are somewhat harsher on native African culture. Yet the art rarely descends to the crude stereotyping seen in other jungle comics.

            In the third period we see the Classic Sheena of Jumbo Comics issues #79-130 (September 1945-December 1949) and Sheena issues #4-5. This post-war period begins with Sheena's battle with the statuesque Hawkina, ending with the last cover before Sheena's suggestive costume was "filled out" by in-house censors. Her adventures are still very pulpy, though the Nazis have, for the most part, disappeared. Bob has reversed gender roles, becoming a damsel in distress who is saved by Sheena in pretty well every issue. What's striking about this period is a noticeable improvement in the art and panel layout: the former is now fluid, sensual and naturalistic; the later considerably less static, with "whirlpool" layouts and figures often crossing borders.[2] This is the sexy and violent pre-code Sheena who Wertham feared was such a bad influence on kids, and who is also the most fun to read today. Partly under the influence of the Iger-Eisner shop's black artists Andre LeBlanc and Matt Baker and its half dozen or so female artists and writers, there are fewer visual or narrative slights to Africans in this period, and the colonialist theme further fades in favour of lost tribes and beast-men.

            The last period, comprising Jumbo issues #131-160 (January 1950-March 1953) and Sheena issues #6-18, I call Sanitized Sheena. The story themes here are more-or-less the same as in the previous period, though because of the critiques of comics from Wertham, Sterling North, Gershon Legman and others, the sex-and-violence quotient is toned down. Sheena now appears in a relatively modest one-piece pelt suit, though she's still a sex symbol, a fact emphasized by Baker and Baker-inspired art. Sheena stares down violent beasts (e.g. a wart hog in Sheena #12) instead of instantly killing them. Pro-colonial stories have pretty well disappeared. The action is still there, though characters tend to speechify: for instance, the story in Jumbo #131 is very talky, word balloons dominating most pages.

            What's interesting is that much of the ammunition used against the Sheena comics by latter-day critics comes from either the raw Ur-Sheena period or the earlier part of the War Sheena period. Critics tend to ignore the Classic and Sanitized periods, where the charges that the Sheena comics are sexist and imperialist just don't stick, and the question of racism is more "problematic". Yet it's only in these last two periods that the whole notion of Sheena's primordial space is fully developed.

            My archaeology of comic-book knowledge will be based on a careful reading of all 164 covers of Jumbo Comics and Sheena on which Sheena stars, the 19 full stories collected in Devils Due Publishing's The Best of Golden Age Sheena reprints of 2007 and 2008, along with one story presented in full on a website. I chose these for their accessibility. Lest one think that DDP chose a "politically correct" version of Sheena for their reprint editions, editor Steven Christy remarks in "Sheena and Censorship" in volume 1 of the reprints:

No doubt you will have noticed that the preceding 100 pages of stories are filled with racist, sexist, and colonialist propaganda and hoo-ha… Sheena was always a comic that reveled in its no-holds barred, politically incorrect pulpy roots. (114) 

Annotator and Sheena reviver Steven de Souza says in the same volume's introduction that these adventures are "to the west of Politically Incorrect", being full of "every complacent ism" of mid-twentieth century America (DDP Volume 1). Yet he praises Sheena for being cold-blooded, practical and egalitarian in dealing with her enemies (DDP Volume 2). DDP appears to have chosen which stories to reprint based on their quality and iconic status, leaning somewhat toward those originally published in the late 1940s.

            One of the major themes found in cultural studies, which has repercussions for the study of comics, is how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in cultural texts. This interest is almost always motivated by egalitarian and constructionist impulses, i.e. writers are offended by all representations of racial or sexual inequality yet assume that all such representations are mere cultural constructions, not based on any facts. The moral status of representations is a key issue in analysing jungle comics, which have been heavily criticized by pop cultural historians. When we see a given race, gender or sexuality represented in visual media such as comics, we can hold one of four theories of representation:

·  The Bubblegum Hypothesis: cultural representations are mere entertainment, and neither reflect, nor have any influence on, the real world. Such a theory is naive, as Jewett and Lawrence point out in The American Monomyth.

 

·  Radical Symbolism: Each time we see a given representation, say of a woman, black man, or gay person, we should take it as a symbol of all people in that group for all times. So seeing a housewife in a film implies that the writer/director thinks that all women should be housewives, regardless of the situation or era being pictured. The polar opposite of the bubblegum hypothesis. Taking this theory seriously makes the writing of fiction very difficult.

 

·  Statistical Symbolism: A more moderate version of radical symbolism, this theory looks at the statistically typical representation of the group in question, e.g. black people in Hollywood films in the 1970s, as evidence for a general social inequality, regardless of the sociological realities or attitudes of audiences in the day. This theory emphasizes the weight of representations in a given period and medium, and is willing to forgive the odd anomaly. Useful in the present day for effecting social change, though sociologically dangerous as a way of interpreting cultural artefacts from another era.

 

·  Existential Realism: This theory treats representations as individual and as tied to the historical period in which they took place. So a film about Germans joining the Nazi party in 1933 doesn't mean that all white men in all times are fascists, though it does say a lot about German men in the thirties. That being said, if the weight of representations of a given group in a given period show evidence of racial or sexual prejudice, this must be recognized and critiqued. Whereas radical symbolism is atemporal, existential realism is more sympathetic to historical contexts.

I'll be using an existential realist position in my archaeological expedition to map the contours of the original Sheena's comic-book territory. But first the charges must be read.

 

2. The Charges Against Sheena

            The charges against Sheena are clear. In general, she is too sexy and too violent - like almost all comics of the 1940s (or of the 1990s or 2000s, for that matter). Specifically, her stories are racist, imperialist and sexist. To investigate these charges we need to get out our hermeneutical shovels and trowels. As we strip away layer after layer of criticism of the Sheena comics as the spearhead of a wave of jungle lords and ladies in the 1940s, we will get closer and closer to the original source of the triple accusation. Bradford Wright’s 2003 book Comic Book Nation contains two short sections on jungle comics. For Wright, they "championed Western interests and sensibilities in savage lands plagued by internal chaos and eternal threats", often explicitly defending the interests of the European colonial empires (Wright 36). The intervention of Tarzan, Sheena, Rulah, Tiger Girl and Princess Pantha was necessary because:

...the childlike nonwhite peoples - whether well-meaning or malicious - proved woefully incapable of self-government. Left to themselves, they fell prey to manipulation and domination by false prophets, evil chieftains, and hostile foreign agents. Paternalistic, imperialistic, and racist, the jungle comics showed the reductionist comic book style at its ugliest. They posed justification for Western colonial domination and white supremacy enforced through violence. Africans appeared as either brute savages or minstrel-show stereotypes with huge white eyes and white-rimmed lips, often speaking an imbecilic hybrid of pidgin English and exaggerated African American slang. Above all, they were stupid.  (36-37) 

Even after the war the jungle comics remained the same, showing jungles to be populated by "childlike, superstitious, and mischievous brown people in need of paternalistic guidance"(73). And Fiction House was guilty of another misdeed: its female characters wore short skirts, had long slender legs, and exaggerated breasts to beckon "randy young males" with sexually suggestive images to buy their books. In short, jungle comics were racist and imperialist with sexual and sadomasochistic overtones (73).

            When we flip to the endnotes linked to his takedown of jungle comics, we find that Wright’s prime source (other than a handful of stories, and only one Sheena story discussed in any detail) is William Savage’s 1990 book Commies, Cowboys, and Queens. Savage is also rather savage on Sheena and her ilk, arguing that jungle comics were imperialist, colonialist, paternalistic, and racist. They treated black Africans as an inferior species, part of the local fauna that, like lions, panthers and elephants, required the rule of jungle lords and ladies (Savage 76). Like Wright, Savage sees the Africans in jungle comics pictured as incapable of self-rule, superstitious and gullible, easily taken in by rotten chiefs and false gods. It seemed to Savage as if "each jungle lord and lady presided over a vast nursery filled with dark children who were often disobedient and sometimes rebellious, but always loveable and, in the end, generally tractable - except for the few who had to be killed to save the rest" (77). And he too noticed how the jungle queens had long hair and legs, large breasts, and physical agility, reflecting the typical male criteria for the "ideal woman" (78). After reading a few pages it becomes evident that Wright has repeated Savage’s critique of jungle comics almost verbatim.

            Yet this second layer of deposit in our archaeology of Sheena criticism isn’t the final one. If echo Schliemann at Troy and dig a bit further, we find a third golden layer of critique akin to the mask of Agamemnon himself. It comes from none other than Frederic Wertham, who provides the foundation stones for the Savage-Wright critique on almost a point-by-point basis. The general problem with the "crime comics" he studied, which for Wertham included the jungle, adventure, superhero, horror, science fiction and western genres, was that their explicit picturing of immoral violent acts, coupled with sexually suggestive images, seduced the innocent youth of America into lives of juvenile delinquency and sexual perversion. The "superman ideology" found in comics proclaimed that the strong should dominate the weak, as Hitler himself had preached (88). Naturally, Wertham found a connection between the fascist cult of violence and the assumption of white supremacy in the comics of his day. They promoted race hatred in picturing two types of people: the tall blond muscle-man and his pretty blonde girlfriend on the one hand, and a whole slew of supposedly inferior "natives, primitives, savages, 'ape men', Negroes, Jews, Indians, Italians, Slavs, Chinese and Japanese, immigrants of every description, people with irregular features, swarthy skins, physical deformities, Oriental features" on the other (101). Jungle comics were not immune from these racist depictions. They:

...specialize in torture, bloodshed and lust in an exotic setting. Daggers, claws, guns, wild animals, well- or over-developed girls in brassieres and as little else as possible, dark "natives," fires, stakes, posts, chains, ropes, big-chested and heavily muscled Nordic he-men dominate the stage... While the white people in jungle books are blonde and athletic and shapely, the idea conveyed about the natives is that there are fleeting transitions between apes and humans. I have repeatedly found in my studies that this characterization of colored peoples as subhuman, in conjunction with depiction of forceful heroes as blond Nordic supermen, has made a deep - and I believe lasting - impression on young children. (Wertham 31-32) 

In addition to being violent and racist, Wertham found that the comics of his day stimulated children sexually in harmful ways (175). This lead to "sexism", which to his young subjects meant simply sexual stimulation, not discrimination. Wertham saw jungle comics leading his young charges into temptation, specifically, into masturbation with sado-masochistic fantasies in their minds, and thus to adult neuroses and perversions (178). Homosexuality was just around the corner - who knows, after all, what Batman and Robin got up to in the Batcave. Why did this happen? Because too many comics pictured sexually exciting girls with protruding breasts, tight slacks or rounded buttocks that were sure to lead to "rigid fetichistic tendencies" in later life for their readers (178).[3]

            So there we have it, the Wertham-Savage-Wright (WSW) Thesis: the jungle comics of 1938-1954 were too sexy and too violent for their youthful readers' own good, explicitly sponsoring racism, imperialism, and sexism. Wertham was notoriously lax in referencing the dialogue he quotes and images he reproduces in Seduction of the Innocent: to this day comics historians don't know where some of it came from. Also, he deliberately misread many classic stories, e.g. EC Comics' liberal-minded stories such as "Hate" (Shock SuspenStories #5, 1952), which is really an attack on anti-Semitism, not the reverse. Yet having said this, we must still put the jungle queen in the dock to answer the triad's triple charge: is she guilty of being imperialist, racist and sexist?[4]

            Before we move on to our study of the actual covers and stories, it's important to note that we should try to understand jungle comics in terms of the culture of their day, and not judge them solely from our own position of smug moral superiority. This isn't to excuse them if they do indeed reflect the predominant racism and sexism of mid-century America. But looking back at them from the early 21st century, we should remember that we've experienced over forty years of post-colonial Africa, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. These were all unimagined futures for the writers and artists working on Jumbo Comics for Fiction House in the Iger-Eisner shop in the 1940s. Further, comics were not the only popular entertainment that celebrated violence with a sexual edge. The ruling genre of Hollywood film in the late 1940s, Film Noir, featured morally ambiguous and violent men encountering strong and assertive femme fatales such as Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946) and Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy (1950). Now celebrated, it's easy to forget how Film Noir explored the violent and the seedy underbelly of American life, and how much the admittedly shady female leads in its films often anticipated the power feminism of forty years later.

 

3. The Covers

            As hundreds of titles were published in the Golden Age of comics (roughly 1938-1949), and they were put on display in an open market on newsstands and in variety stores, their covers had to stand out for a title to survive. The best artists and the glossiest paper stock were used to attract teenaged customers to pull dimes out of their pockets to buy them. Golden Age covers were in essence supercharged simulacra of the stories within, sometimes having no narrative connection to them at all. They were like movie posters for each title's heroes and heroines. They were often the most exciting part of the book.

            A study of all the covers between 1940 and 1953 where Sheena dominates confirms the hypothesis that her stories took place in a violent primordial space, as opposed to being little more than a Trojan Horse for racism and European imperialism. Here's the data:

 

Covers of Jumbo Comics (167 issues, March 1938-September 1953, 146 starring Sheena)

·  A. Fights wild beasts:                                        87 (59.5%)

·  B. Fights black Africans:                                   25 (17%)

·  C. Fights white Europeans or Americans:      10 (6.8%)

·  D. Fights Arabs or South Asians:                      4 (2.7%)

·  E. Fights both humans and beasts:                 17 (11.6%) (B=11, W=5, A=3)

·  F. Poses, runs or rides:                                       3 (2%)

 

Covers of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (18 issues, Spring 1942-Winter 1953)

·  A. Fights wild beasts:                                        13 (72.2%)

·  B. Fights black Africans:                                     0

·  C. Fights white Europeans or Americans:        0      

·  D. Fights Arabs or South Asians:                       0

·  E. Fights both humans and beasts:                    3 (16.7%) (W=2, B=2, A=1)

·  F. Poses, runs or rides:                                       2 (11.1%)   

 

Both comics combined:

·  A. Fights wild beasts:                                       100 (61%)

·  B. Fights black Africans:                                   25 (15.2%)

·  C. Fights white Europeans or Americans:      10 (6.1%)

·  D. Fights Arabs or South Asians:                      4 (2.4%)

·  E. Fights both humans and beasts:                 20 (12.2%) (B=12, W=7, A=4)

·  F. Poses, runs or rides:                                      5 (3%)

 

Presence of Animals, usually Hostile (A + E + F) = 76.2%

Presence of Hostile Human Beings (B + C + D + E) = 36%

 

Sheena Fights Black Africans (B + some of E) = 37 (22.6%)

Sheena Fights White Europeans/Americans (C + some of E) = 17 (10.4%)

 

Notes: Where human figures are passive onlookers or the victims of an attack, I've ignored them. Where Sheena is seen fighting just "beast-men" wearing disguises, I've counted it as her fighting men alone. On all the category "F" covers Sheena appears with animals. On about one-in-four "A" covers Sheena is saving someone other than her mate Bob, usually an African. In some cases the European, Arab or Asian characters Sheena fights have African servants who are not involved in the struggle.

 

From the above data it’s clear that Sheena’s mortal enemies are not human beings, but fierce beasts, usually big cats. On 61% of all covers, she’s fighting animals alone; while if we include her "posing" covers and human/animal battle royales, the Sheena-plus-animal theme tops 75%. Only 36% of all covers feature Sheena fighting human beings, with only 15% involving her fighting Africans and 8.5% featuring her battling potential representatives of an imperial power (whites, Arabs or south Asians) without any wild beasts present. In fact, of the 18 Sheena covers, 15 feature just Sheena and animals, with only three featuring her battling a mixture of men and beasts. So although it’s twice as likely we’ll see Sheena fighting Africans rather than whites on her covers, it’s over three times as likely that we’ll see her fighting lions, panthers or crazed baboons than we’ll see her struggling with African tribesmen. The covers put into doubt the notion that her comics were just about racism and imperialism: the greatest danger in Sheena’s jungle were animal, not human, predators. Further, given the fact that Sheena is almost always very active on these covers, spearing a lion, knifing a wart hog, or swinging through the trees to save Bob, they also put into question the charge of sexism. In these 160 covers we don’t see a single case of the "good girl" bondage pose typical of Phantom Lady covers which Wertham, Wright and others have lambasted.[5] Sheena is always in motion, sometimes defending herself against cat claws, sometimes attacking a hungry long-nose or fierce warrior. She never allows herself to be tied up, to be a victim.

 

4. Is Sheena Imperialist?

            Bradford Wright claims that jungle comics "consistently portrayed anticolonial rebellions as misguided threats to the peace and security enforced by Western imperialism", citing one story from the Ur-Sheena period, from Jumbo #19, as evidence that Sheena was in league with the French Empire (in it she is given a medal for defeating a rebellion) (72). Yet the bulk of the Sheena stories from 1940 on give us a different picture. Although we can see Sheena as vaguely "symbolic" of colonial rule, if we look at what she actually does in her adventures, she is by no means an imperialist. In the stories studied we never see her fighting alongside colonial troops: in fact, we never see such troops at all, either in the twenty stories or the 160 covers. We rarely see representatives of colonial regimes other than a lone "commissioner" in a few stories, who is represented as a largely absent and barely competent policeman. Sheena has clearly "gone native", and has little sympathy for most of the white adventurers or entrepreneurs who invade her realm. In her later years she never does anything that could be interpreted as directly defending European colonialism. Bob is much closer to the traditional picture of a white colonial adventurer, but he's a bumbler who is constantly in need of Sheena's assistance.

            First we should situate the Sheena comics historically. The decolonialization process has barely started by the late 1940s. When Fiction House gave up the comics business in 1954, most of Africa was still in European hands. Only Egypt, Ethiopia and Liberia were free states in Sheena's heyday. The key year for this process was 1960, when 17 former British, French and Belgian colonies in central Africa, including Nigeria, Togo, Mali, Chad and both Congos, won their independence. This was seven years after Sheena had disappeared from the pages of American comic books.  Also, we have to remember that Jumbo and Sheena were American comics, and most Americans were not sympathetic to old-style European colonialism (as they made clear in 1776). Several key American leaders were opposed to European colonialism, e.g. Woodrow Wilson during the Versailles conference in 1919 and FDR at his meeting with Winston Churchill in 1941 that lead to the Atlantic Charter, where the American president made it clear to the British PM that he desired the dissolution of the European colonial empires after WWII. In 1956, just after Sheena's first reign, President Dwight D. Eisenhower dressed down the British and French for invading Egypt during the Suez Crisis. If Americans favoured anything, it was corporate-controlled neo-colonialism, not Cecil-Rhodes-style empire building.

            Turning to the data in Appendix 2, we see that Sheena helps white explorers or scientists in 40% of her stories, while opposing white plunderers or murders in 75% of them (indeed, 30% of these stories overlap). The covers tell the same story: there is only one cover where we see her rendering ambiguous assistance to white characters (not counting the hapless Bob), while there's 17 where she's fighting white bad guys, hardly the ratio we'd expect from a rabid imperialist.

            Imperial trading interests seem to be in play in only one story, "Slashing Fangs" in Jumbo #30. Here the appropriately named villain Gaston de Mond tries to impose his version of globalized capitalism on a native tribe by intimidating the chief into selling his tobacco crop for only 500 francs. Sheena and Bob come to the tribe's rescue, leading de Mond's men to open up with a machine gun on their former native allies. Sheena and Bob help the Africans defeat de Mond, in the end ensuring that the tribe gets the "top price" for its tobacco crop. Though the story is somewhat ambiguous, de Mond’s barbaric crew fits the traditional model of imperial exploiter much better than Sheena’s benign fair trade regime. Overall, the white villains in the Sheena stories are an unappealing lot: greasy, fat, usually moustached, wearing a pith helmet and a pistol on their belt. They are Marxist stereotypes of the imperial exploiter, driven by greed alone. In "Death Kraal of the Mastodons" in Jumbo #90 we see white adventurers trick Sheena and Bob into leading them to a sacred elephant graveyard full of ivory. It’s defended by a tribe of pygmies, who Sheena is forced to fight before she captures the safari and returns it to the "white man’s justice", swearing to keep the location of the graveyard a secret. She comments that "greed of wealth but breeds evil" (p. 10). We see more greedy and greasy white plunderers elsewhere: the pirate Jeffers Blaque in Jumbo #31, the ore-hungry Slade in Jumbo #92, the cat-eyed diamond-loving "Panther" in Jumbo #99, the pirate gang led by the whip-wielding Lizzie Burgess in Jumbo #148. Sheena is the constant enemy of these booty capitalists.

            Sheena also opposes other forms of imperial exploitation. In Jumbo #81, Sheena muses on p. 2 that she drove off the unscrupulous mine owner Bronson "many rains ago", though he has rebuilt his mine by convincing the natives he has come with the jungle queen’s blessing.  She puts things right by driving him away once again.  Yet Sheena’s wrath is greatest when she deals with slavers. In "Spoor of the Shaking Skeletons" in Jumbo #79 Sheena faces the formidable Hawkina, a statuesque black woman who has muscled her way into the slave trade, and her hawk men. Hawkina puts Sheena out of action briefly with her drugged hawk-mace, only to fall to her death in round two with the jungle queen. Sheena enthusiastically frees the inmates of the slave ship. In "The Slave Brand of Hassan Bey" (Jumbo #100) we see Jan Stark and his Arab ally Hassan steal an empty prison boat to transport a load of female slaves up river. Sheena is briefly captured, but leads a slave revolt, telling them "break free of your shackles, enslaved ones!" Her punishment for Stark and his men is positively biblical: when he tries to kill her with a bottle of nitro, Sheena tosses it back into the now slave-free ship, blowing it up with Stark and his men aboard. She quips in the final panel, "the hand of fate is sometimes brutal but always just." Hand of fate indeed.

            Sometimes Sheena is relatively lenient with white criminals, as in Jumbo #31, where the pirate Jeffers Blaque is remanded to the "authorities", or in Jumbo #58, where knife-throwing con man Tony Cappozi is hauled away by Inspector Lawson, who arrives with a sling on his arm in the last panel (Tony had shot him and left him for dead). But in other cases she’s more savage, as in her dealings with the slaver Jan Stark mentioned above, or at the end of the story in Jumbo #30, where she allows the capitalist thug Gaston de Mond to be lashed to a stake and fired fully of arrows by the tribe he tried to blackmail. Sheena always doles out (or allows others to dole out) punishments of wrong-doers according to a rough-and-ready scale of jungle justice.  

            Further, if we are to treat Sheena’s stories seriously, as something more than fun pulp fantasies – as the WSW triad demands – then we should take a realistic view of her sovereignty before charging her with imperialism. First, her fastest mode of transport is either a zebra or, in a pinch, a crazed rhino. So it’s doubtful her domain extends more than fifty miles in any direction. Second, her imperial bureaucracy consists of an inept white hunter and a mischievous chimp, making taxation and administration difficult. Third, every month her kingdom is threatened by pirates, slavers, Nazis, lost tribes, power-mad witch doctors, and hundreds of hungry lions, panthers, leopards, gorillas and crocodiles. Sheena’s so-called kingdom is a shaky enterprise on a good day.  

            Sheena’s dearest value, ironic given the violence of her adventures, is peace. At the end of the Hawkina story in Jumbo #79 she tells Bob, "once more the jungle sings of peace, Bob.  Let us hope the melody does not change." Mike Madrid sees this as evidence of Sheena’s status as a symbol of pre-Pearl Harbor American isolationism. Unlike the interventionist Wonder Woman, who travels the world battling the enemies of democracy, Sheena stubbornly stays in her jungle home, defending it against threats to the peace "with an iron will and a flashing knife". Though a proctectoress of her rather simple subjects, she never left her stronghold, digging in and fighting to preserve their way of life (Madrid 41).  A nice illustration of her attitude of just isolationism comes in the final panel of "Meat for the Cat Pack" in Jumbo #48, where she welcomes a lost tribe called the Manji to her realm even though they had previously attacked her. After refusing their offer to stay behind as their new queen, she shows them a radiant lush valley from atop a mountain pass, saying, "I welcome you to it, people of the Manji, and I hope you find peace and happiness there!" If we ignore the vague symbolism of a white woman ruling an African province, there is little direct evidence of Sheena’s stories after 1940 defending imperialism. Quite the opposite.

 5. Is Sheena Racist?

            The charge that Sheena’s stories are racist is a more difficult one to counter. First let’s clear away some obvious misunderstandings. In none of the stories studied do we see Sheena go to any sort of city or town: her home is the jungle, including tribal villages. In fact, there are few identifiable places in her stories: a title might mention the Congo (a Belgian colony in the 1940s), yet the local inspector turns out to be English. The only Africans she meets, other than pirates and slavers, are primitive tribesman. There are no urban Africans in her stories. Second, there isn’t much evidence of the extreme racial stereotyping mentioned by Wright in the art – no white-rimmed lips or bulging eyes like that seen in Eisner’s depiction of Ebony in his Spirit comics, though there are a few sloppily drawn panels here and there with distorted facial features. Nowhere do we see Wertham’s sub-human ape-men, though we do see plenty of weird creatures. Third, the Africans don’t use the "imbecilic hybrid" of pidgin English and African-American slang Wright mentions, though they do sometimes speak in clumsy broken English. Admittedly, the Africans look like the way that actual warrior tribesmen appeared in the earliest film documentaries on Africa, with shields, spears, body paint and the occasional bone in the nose.  The question is whether we should take this as symbolic of the artists’ and writers’ picture of black people in general, which seems rather unlikely.

            The bigger question is whether the Africans we do see are ridiculed. If we ignore greedy and violent personalities (traits shared by the white characters, and necessary for conflict in Sheena’s comics) and the occasional less-than-perfect command of the English language (which for primitive tribesmen in the 1940s is probably realistic), we find African culture subject to ridicule in 15% of the stories studied, with another 15% being vaguely demeaning. Africans are the "bad guys" in 45% of these stories, though in most of these they are lead astray by white villains. To balance this, Sheena helps Africans in the same percentage of stories. There are surprisingly few directly racist insults in the stories. In Jumbo #31 the greedy and violent Jeffers Blaque refers to his African servants as "ye heathen blacks" and "ye black knaves", but that’s as strong as it gets in the Sheena comics, and besides, Jeffers is pirate scum. The bigger problem is the four or five stories where a tribe is easily duped by whites or other Africans, in three cases involving a "false Sheena". These provide some evidence that Africans are portrayed as simple and gullible, as Wright and Savage claim. In Jumbo #58, Tony Cappozi briefly passes off his girlfriend Dolores as Sheena to extort jewels from the natives. In "Drums of the Voodoo Gods" in Jumbo #58, a white couple dresses like Bob and Sheena, faking Sheena’s death so that the tribes will bring glittery tributes to her coffin. When the deception is exposed and Sheena returns the jewels they’ve given the con man, the Africans say to her, "Joy swells our hearts, O Sheena! Whatever you wish shall be yours!" She replies Roger Daltrey-style that they should be careful not to be fooled again. We see some mild paternalism here, but no speeches about racial inferiority.[6] In fact, there’s only one story where Sheena vaguely lords it over her African subjects, not counting her yelling at tribesmen to get out of the way of pouncing panthers or charging rhinos.

            We see a third case of a false Sheena in Jumbo #81, where the corrupt mine owner Bronson has created a realistic-looking wax figure of Sheena and paraded it around atop a zebra-pulled chariot alongside a Bob look-alike to dupe the natives into working for him.  Sheena later puts the same figure atop a rolling ore car to distract Bronson’s men while she attacks his camp. Lastly, in Jumbo #92 an African poses as the mythical warrior the Scarlet Arrow to help a white man get control of a valley’s ore deposits. When discovered, the Africans declare angrily, "We have been duped! Kill the false god!" So there is evidence in a few of the stories studied that the Africans are a rather simple-minded and easily dupable lot, though this is not a constant theme.

            William Savage argues that the fact that the villains are often white doesn’t dispel the racism in Sheena’s stories, since black people were usually their stooges or victims. Further, "in no case did their traditional cultures offer anything worthy of notice by white people" (Savage 77). There’s a Catch 22 here: if all the white characters were represented as good people, wouldn’t this be even more racist? Further, unless the character is a scientist, commissioner or lost female victim, the white people we do see in Sheena stories are invariably criminals. And Savage’s second claim, when applied to Sheena’s comics, is just plain false. The Africans in the Sheena comics are superstitious in the sense that they worship a pantheon of local deities, some of them admittedly ridiculous to the modern scientific mind (though no more so than the ancient Greek, Viking or Celtic gods). Yet Sheena takes an agnostic attitude toward their religion. There are no instances of Sheena, Bob, or anyone else spouting Christian rhetoric and trying to convert the "savages". Further, Sheena herself is basically a pagan. The ultra-pulpy story in Jumbo #93 begins with a wild storm in which Sheena remarks "’Tis the rain god’s fury!" "Vandals of the Veldt" in Jumbo #107 starts with Sheena and Bob going on their annual pilgrimage to the pearl-eating native god Bog-Umbo: neither remarks on how silly the idea of such a deity is. And contra Savage, we do see a few cases of African culture being positively valued. In Jumbo #79, Sheena is brought near death by Hawkina’s drugged mace, but cured by a witch doctor in a "hut of steam". In #90 a vision in temple smoke reveals to the T’Gini chief his own death and that of two others. Sheena says, "such things are only for those who believe!" Yet the events the vision predicts come to pass. Two issues later another chief has "evil visions" of blood on Bob’s hands and of the fangs of an enemy saving him, and once again these come to pass. So African mysticism is positively valued.

            Yet perhaps the strongest case against the charge of rampant racism in Sheena’s books is that almost half of the stories studied have nothing to do with black African culture at all, but with lands that time forgot. We see the strongest evidence of Sheena living in a primordial space in the 45% of her stories where she fights lost civilizations, beast-men or prehistoric monsters. In these tales all three types of law – criminal, biological and sociological – are overturned, ejecting Sheena into a pulpy space outside of the real science and politics of her day. The discovery of "lost worlds" is an old theme in pulp fiction, dating back to Haggard’s She (1887), Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), and Burrough’s The Land that Time Forgot (1918), if not to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). [7] Examples of such worlds abound in the Sheena stories. In Jumbo #48 she meets the "golden-skinned" Manji, who dress vaguely like ancient Sumerians, live in a "cliff-locked" valley, and have a power-hungry queen named Thara-An who is determined to keep her people ignorant of the "outer world". The story in Jumbo #87, "Sargasso of Lost Safaris", finds Sheena helping Dora and her father find the golden Tarus skull after someone murders Dora’s uncle, who was on the same quest. Sheena winds up facing off against dark-skinned worshipers of Thor who wear Viking hats and water ski down the river, not to mention a pair of "devil cats" with gold claws and a giant snake. In Jumbo #131 we get a story about ex-Nazi scientist Heinrich Grote who wants to take over all of Africa through a complicated scheme involving a revivification ray, an unfrozen cave man, fake dinosaurs, and an explorer turned into a gibbering "wild man" with a restrictive mask.

            And then there are the super-pulp stories, where all sense of scientific realism disappears. "The Beasts that Time Forgot" (Jumbo #93) is an obvious tip of the hat to Burroughs’ similarly titled story. In it Sheena and Bob are rescued from stormy waters by one Professor Craig. They sail through an ominous crevice with a weird glow, only to discover the "mighty dawn race", a tribe of shaggy were-women with long tails and a bad temper who ride around on huge amphibians called centopauds. The party is captured by the were-women. Their queen Darma decides that the outsiders must be sacrificed to their grotesque idol Da-Kaahn, who crushes the professor’s assistant in its sharp mechanical claws. Sheena escapes, battles giant spiders, and then defeats Darma in a duel to the death on a log over a pit full of giant crabs. Topping this story in pure weirdness is "The Valley of Whispering Fangs" in Jumbo #84, where Sheena and Bob encounter unearthly creatures "of a time-forgotten land". A whirlpool drags them into a strange land with trees and plants from the "ancient time of Rhusus". After saving Princess Ptlolomia from a crazed baboon, Sheena and Bob are taken to a lost city straight out of ancient Egypt.[8] The pharaoh is about to kill them when the Rhusian city is attacked by their mortal enemies, the bat-men! Bob is captured by the bat-men - who are actually half-bat and half-human, and not Bruce Wayne’s long-lost cousins - and almost killed by a bizarre torture device involving a spiked stone, wooden wheel and tamed panthers. But Sheena makes a deal with the pharaoh to help rid the Rhusians of their enemies, going on to lead a successful attack on the batcave.

To further mitigate the charge of racism, Sheena’s most constant foes are neither whites nor Africans, but wild beasts. In every single story studied Sheena battles one or more such beasts. Further, she doesn’t just kill her lion, crocodile and gorilla attackers silently, but usually adds such lusty remarks as "die, toothy one!", "taste of Sheena’s blade!", or "your blood will redden the sands of this strange land!" (the last is from Rhusus story).  Sheena is much more a wild untamed savage trying to survive in a dangerous primordial space than an agent of imperial or racial domination.  

            We could take a radical symbolist position and assume that since Sheena is white she symbolizes all white people, and thus white supremacy. But there no real evidence in the actual stories that Sheena defends a system of white rule. Further, this involves a logical contradiction: shouldn’t we also assume that villains like Gaston de Mond and Jan Stark, and inept heroes like Bob, also symbolize white people? Yet the morality of each of their actions varies greatly. Second, there were exactly zero black heroes (super or otherwise) in American comics of the Golden Age, which speaks to the racist nature of American society in general, but not especially to the Sheena comics. Third, we face the Sexist-Racist Paradox: if we see a strong white woman like Sheena ruling a group that includes non-whites, the story is called racist. But if she’s portrayed as too weak, then the story is sexist. You can’t have it both ways.

            In the end one must admit that there is an undercurrent of racism in some of the stories studied, for the most part those where African tribesmen are tricked by false leaders, usually by a fake Sheena. There are no doubt much stronger racial stereotypes and insults in the other jungle comics of the Golden Age. However, if we don’t see the African tribesmen depicted in the Sheena comics as symbolic of all people of African descent, but as exactly what they appear to be, primitive warriors, the charge that the Sheena comics are racist is mitigated somewhat. We should also remember that in the real American south of Sheena’s day black people were still being lynched and their churches burned by the Ku Klux Klan. Sheena’s realm is positively liberal in comparison. If we add to this the fact that Sheena’s jungle is a primordial space full of wild animals, lost worlds and weird hybrid races, then the centrality of racial prejudice in her comics fades away.

 

6. Sheena as Proto-Feminist Icon

            Lastly, we come to the charge that Sheena’s comics are sexist. This means one of two things. First, her stories are sexist in that they depict a scantily clad attractive woman with long legs, protruding breasts and wild hair, the perfect male sexual fantasy, as Mike Madrid claims (48). Her books thus excite their male readers in unhealthy ways (Wertham), or demean women by reducing them to sex objects (Savage and Wright). I will argue that this aspect of Sheena’s supposed sexism is based on an antiquated version of feminist theory that fears both sexuality and beauty. Second, Sheena is sexist in the sense that she is a natural victim, constantly being captured and needing Bob or Chim to save her. Simply put, she is weak and powerless. I will argue that claim is just plain false, and that it would be far more accurate to portray her as a proto-feminist icon for the Third Wave.
            When the Second Wave of feminism started in the late sixties, two of its prime targets were traditional models of feminine beauty and sexuality, which they took as chains confining women to passive social roles. Thus one of the first targets of the women’s liberation movement was the 1968 Miss America pageant. By the seventies a radical wing has pretty well taken control of the movement, with Susan Brownmiller claiming that all men were potential rapists, Andrea Dworkin arguing that women couldn’t consent to straight sex under patriarchy, and Catherine McKinnon seeking to outlaw all pornography. They produced a very dark picture of male heterosexuality as tied to rape, violence and power. As late as 1990 Naomi Wolf claimed in The Beauty Myth that all aspects of feminine aesthetics (e.g. cosmetics, diets, clothes) were insidious attempts by patriarchy to keep newly liberated women in their place. This version of feminism is the theoretical underpinning of the first sense of Sheena being "sexist", i.e. that there’s something inherently suspicious about female beauty and male heterosexual desire.[9]

            Yet by the 1990s something was happening in feminism: a new wave hit its shores. Naomi Wolf herself partly recanted in her 1993 book Fire with Fire, now arguing that Second Wave radicalism is a sort of "victim feminism" that is anti-sex, anti-money, anti-power, self-sacrificing, and intolerant, seeing women as the passive victims of patriarchy. She argued instead for a power feminism that embraced sexuality of all sorts, female autonomy, power, money and was tolerant of body image choices (and thus of feminine beauty) (135-138). She even went so far as to tell women to embrace their primal animal nature. For Wolf, male sexual attention is "the sun in which I bloom" (186). Camille Paglia when one step further, arguing that the history of art and literature is the history of sexual masks, and that the great ages in the arts – the Renaissance, Romanticism, and twentieth-century film and rock music – saw a revival of the pagan love of sex and beauty. Art is driven by a dialectic of the Apollonian - representing reason, structure and order - and the Dionysian - representing the earth, passions and nature. Quoting an Arab sheik in the movie Ben Hur, Paglia argues that there is "no law in the arena" of human sexuality, so women must exercise common sense in their romantic lives (Paglia 23). Further, she sees strength in female beauty and sexuality, lionizing the singer Madonna for using these to become a star. Women have great power in the sexual arena: for one thing, they choose their mates, as Sheena does in her comic. Lastly, Paglia feels that if you take away a person’s sense of pleasure in beauty, as the radicals tried to do, you're a pervert.[10]

If we adopt Wolf’s power feminism and Paglia’s pagan view of sex and beauty, then it’s pretty easy to absolve Sheena of sexism. She was the first female action character in comics, and the first heroine to get her own book. As underground comics artist and Vampirella costume designer Trina Robbins says in The Great Women Superheroes:

…most of [Fiction House’s] pulp-style action stories either starred or featured strong, beautiful, competent heroines. They were war nurses, aviatrixes, girl detectives, counterspies, and animal skin-clad jungle queens, and they were in command. Guns blazing, daggers unsheathed, sword in hand, they leaped across the pages, ready to take on any villain. And they did not need rescuing. (Goldstein) 

Sheena is never seen as a passive victim on her covers: she is either preparing to leap into the thick of the action, or already there. The limited bondage seen within her stories is always short-lived. Besides, as Goldstein notes, bondage (i.e. being tied up) is a standard plot device in adventure stories, not something invented by Sheena’s creators.

Despite the fact they are "mates", we never see Bob and Sheena passionately embrace in the Fiction House stories, much less have sex. The whole mood of her adventures is rather chaste, despite the odd skinny-dipping scene where the offending parts of Sheena’s naked body are hidden by strategically placed leaves. Yet Mike Madrid is right in linking Sheena’s imagined sexuality to the wildness of her jungle home:

Sheena was not an inviolate virgin goddess living in the wild, but a passionate creature willingly engaging in what could be presumed to be animal sex… Her long blonde hair was wild and free flowing. Stories mixed shades of Eros and Thanatos by showing the erotically drawn Sheena locked in combat with a wild snarling beast, or writhing in the tentacles of a giant squid. Sheena was the untamed fantasy, the wild sensual creature that was not confined by polite society's idea of how a woman should dress or act. (43-45)

She is riding the Dionysian flow in the African jungle of the 1940s, melding beauty and strength in the persona of a pagan warrior.

            William Savage comments that Sheena and her fellow jungle queens can be dismissed as strong role models both because of their sexy images and because they have one or more sidekicks who bail them out of trouble "on a regular basis" (78). In a footnote he claims that Sheena was "forever being dealt blows to the back of the head", and revived either by falling into a river or by being saved by her pet chimp or mate (137). Leaving aside the fact that in adventure stories the hero or heroine has to be put into some danger for there to be any excitement whatsoever, Savage’s claim is a distortion of the facts at best. In the twenty stories studied, Bob and Chim save Sheena four times each, though in three cases Chim’s contribution consists of cutting Sheena’s bonds or tossing her a knife with which she can free herself. By contrast, Sheena saves Bob in 100% of the stories in which he appears (he is absent from one). Admittedly, she is knocked out and/or captured in 60% of these stories, though she’s out of the action for at most a page or two, sometimes for just a few panels, using her cunning or fighting skills to escape. A case in point is page 8 in Jumbo #87, where Sheena is bonked on the head by a "Viking" in panel 3, but surprises the guard and escapes in panel 7, going on to fight a giant octopus, defeat the Vikings and save Bob. Sheena is every bit as tough contemporary male heroes. She doesn’t have the godlike powers of a Superman to bring her easy victories, yet is a clever tactician, as we see in Jumbo #84, when she ignites floating bundles of "fire mud" to blind the bat-men before she and the Rhusians attack.[11] She is one part Odysseus, a woman of many wiles, one part Rocky Balboa, refusing to give up even after absorbing considerable punishment. As she says in the conclusion to Jumbo #74 to some tribesmen who thought she was dead, "It will many suns before Sheena dies!"

By contrast, by 1943 Bob had become a weak-kneed ninny, hardly the model of domineering masculinity radical feminists saw all around them. Time and time again Sheena has to help him escape from evil captors. And when the situation is reversed, Bob has a tendency to cower in the bushes. When Queen N’Dula and two of her warriors scare away a pair of Nazi airmen then capture Sheena in "Monsters with Wings" (Jumbo #51), we see Bob hiding in a tree muttering "I’m be helpless against that mob! Poor Sheena!" Later in the same story, after Sheena saves Bob by killing an attacking lion, he asks "What would I do without you, Sheena?" Bob is even more ineffectual in Jumbo #99. At the top of the second page a snake spits venom into his eyes and blinds him. For the rest of the story Sheena has to drag him around as she defeats the villain Panther then finds an aged witch woman to cure his blindness. In Jumbo #115 she even yells at him when he fails to see a huge log swinging toward them after they’ve tripped a sling trap: "Pah! Foolish mate, must you display the jungle lore of the dull-witted hippo? BEHOLD!" It’s crystal clear who wears the leopard skin in Sheena and Bob’s family.[12]

Sheena is an active and tough, though not invulnerable, heroine. Although she typically uses brute force to defeat wild beasts, when facing superior human numbers, Sheena often resorts to tricks or technology. We’ve already seen how she ignites fire mud to blind the bat-men in Jumbo #84 before attacking their lair. In Jumbo #87 she paints some water buffalos with phosphorescent mud, and then stampedes them into the camp of the ersatz Vikings, scaring them into believing that they are the skeletons of their sacred beasts. She uses the wax model shaped in her image that Bronson created to dupe the natives in Jumbo #81 to distract his men while attacking. Finally, in Jumbo #74 and #107 Sheena dons disguises to infiltrate into her enemies’ camp before defeating them.

            Most critics, including Mike Madrid, argue that Sheena was an erotic fantasy for men, and thus (unlike Wonder Woman) not a role model for girls or women. Though there are no systematic empirical studies of Sheena fandom from the Golden Age, there are enough scraps remaining to suggest that Sheena’s fans were not just horny boys ogling her lithe form. In the letters section from Jumbo #107 reprinted in DDP Volume 2, a male reader says he prefers Sheena since the "old ‘masterful’ male heroes and their passive women become extremely boring – especially to a man". Young fan Mary Ann Rice writes on the same page that she’s started a Sheena fan club and would like a nice picture for their buttons. Yet more telling evidence comes from Sheena’s most committed foe, Dr. Frederic Wertham, whose Seduction of the Innocent is full of interviews with young comics fans of the Golden Age. At least four of these fans, all of them girls, specifically refer to Sheena as a favourite character. A thirteen-year-old told Wertham that she liked the way that Sheena and other heroes of the jungle comics "jump and kick men down and kill them!" She goes on to say that "Sheena got a big jungle she lives in and people down there likes her and would do anything for her" (43). A girl of eleven told the good doctor that she read ten comics a day. Sheena was her favourite since she "fights like a man, swings on vines and kicks people in the face" (100). He quotes Sheena-loving six-year-old who admires clever thieves to show how comics teach the "superman philosophy" of might makes right (88). Of course, Wertham was quoting these girls to show how infectious the violence in comic books was. But it does show us how popular Sheena was with young women circa 1950. This "third wave" attitude of female fandom remains today. Goldstein compares the art in the Sheena comics to the hypersexual images seen in the "bad girl" comics of the 1990s. Despite their exaggerated sexuality, a female fan told him "I love to see powerful women kicking ass and I don’t particularly care how they’re dressed when they do it."

Not only is Sheena something of a power feminist icon, many of the other female characters in her stories don’t fit the "damsel in distress" model of femininity that critics have ascribed to the Golden Age. Though there are relatively few heroines to challenge Sheena’s star billing, the few we do see are relatively strong and independent. When in Jumbo #58 her boyfriend Tony wants to murder Sheena and Bob, Dolores asserts her independence and switches sides, bringing a friendly tribe to their rescue. In Jumbo #99 Lizzie Adams comes to Sheena’s jungle to kill Panther, who had murdered her husband in a supposed mine accident. Further, there is a long line of strong and memorable female villains in Sheena’s stories such as Thara-An, queen of the Manji (Jumbo #48), Darma, queen of the were-women (#93), the slaver Hawkina (#79), Queen Tera and her Amazons (#107), and the whip-wielding pirate Lizzie Burgess (#148). If Sheena encounters a lost civilization or a race of beast-men, odds are it will be a matriarchy.

            In the end, Sheena looks more like a proto-icon of Third Wave feminism than an objectified pinup designed solely to appeal to male teenage lust. The charge of sexism is based in part on an outmoded and puritanical version of feminist theory, in part on a deliberate distortion of what actually happens in Sheena’s stories. Like imperialism, the evidence for her sexism is weak at best. A fair court of comic-book critique will find the post-1940 Sheena innocent of these two charges, and guilty of the third, racism, to a much lesser degree than her accusers have suggested. Case closed. Long live the jungle queen!

 

Bibliography

Goldstein, Andrew. "Fiction House: History and Influences." Connecticut Historical Society. 2002. http://www.chs.org/comics/fictionhouse.htm

 

Holloway, Clark J. "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle". The Holloway Pages. 2000. http://home.comcast.net/~cjh5801a/Sheena.htm.

 

Madrid, Mike. Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy and the History of Comic Book Heroines. Minneapolis: Exterminating Angel Press, 2009.

 

Robbins, Trina. The Great Women Superheroes. Seattle: Kitchen Sink Press, 1996.

 

Savage Jr., William. Commies, Cowboys, and Queens: Comic Books and America, 1945-1954. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1990.

 

Wertham, Frederic. Seduction of the Innocent. NY: Reinhart, 1954.

 

Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2003.

 

Comicography

 

The Best of the Golden Age Sheena, Queen of the Jungle Volume 1. Writers and artists of Iger/Eisner shop. Ed. Stephen Christy. Chicago: Devil's Due Publishing, 2008. Contains nine full color stories from Jumbo Comics, one reprint from Sheena, an early short BW story, two print-only stories, and notes by Stephen de Souza.

 

The Best of the Golden Age Sheena, Queen of the Jungle Volume 2. Writers and artists of Iger/Eisner shop. Ed. Stephen Christy. Chicago: Devil's Due Publishing, 2009. Contains nine stories from Jumbo Comics, three print-only stories, and notes by Stephen de Souza.

 

Covers for Jumbo Comics #1-167. Fiction House, September 1938 - April 1953. http://www.comics.org/series/111/covers/

 

Covers for Sheena, Queen of the Jungle #1-18. Fiction House, Spring 1942 - Winter 1952-53.

http://www.comics.org/series/283/covers/

 

List of Sheena comics titles by publisher, date.

http://www.comics.org/series/name/sheena/sort/alpha/

 

Mark Burkhardt. "Hey There, Jungle Girl". The Time Bullet, January 13, 2011. Contains scans of Sheena story from Jumbo Comics #115. http://timebulleteer.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/hey-there-jungle-girl/

 

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Written by Steven E. de Souza. Art by Matt Merhoff and Steven Cummings. Contains preview and issues 1-5 of mini-series. Chicago: Devil’s Due Publishing, 2008.

 

Shanna the She-Devil. 4 issues. New York: Marvel Comics, December 1972-August 1973.

 

Shanna the She-Devil. Script and Art by Frank Cho. 7 issues. New York: Marvel Comics, April-October 2005.

 

Videography

 

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. TV, 1955-1956. Syndicated, 26 episodes. Starring Irish McCalla as Sheena.

 

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. TV, 2000-2002. Syndicated, 35 episodes. Starring Gena Lee Nolin as Sheena.

 

Sheena. 1984. Directed by John Guillermin. Starring Tara Roberts as Sheena.

 

Footnotes

 

[1] In the 1955 TV show the character is named Bob Rayburn, while in later comics he is sometimes called Rick Thorne.

            [2] Though some of this is seen even in the wartime comics. Compare the polished art and interesting layouts in Jumbo #81, where Sheena faces off with a corrupt mine owner, with any of the first 40 or 50 issues.  

[3] Although not as explicit as in the later critics, Wertham anticipates the “imperialist“ critique of jungle comics in discussing their defence of white supremacy in a colonial setting.

[4] The general “too violent“ critique is really an indictment of almost all comics in Wertham's day, and is linked in part to the imperialist and racist critiques of jungle comics. The part that isn't is so general and vague as not to be taken seriously by cultural critics today, given the more vivid violence seen in movies, TV shows, video games, and music (e.g. gansta rap) in the last few decades.

[5] There are two covers where she’s grabbed by an elephant’s trunk, but it’s clear that this is a very temporary situation, and not clear that elephants are always evil.

[6] Yet if she rejects paternalism and doesn’t help them, isn’t this worse?

[7] The 1999-2002 Australian-Canadian TV series The Lost World returns to this primordial space of lost civilizations and prehistoric beasts when a group of scholars and adventurers discovers a hidden African plateau. They even meet a pseudo-Sheena named Veronica. 

[8] The ambiguous racial politics of the story can be seen in the fact that Princess Ptolomia is in some panels colored pink like Sheena and Bob, in others brown, as we would expect of an ancient Egyptian.

[9] A good example of this way of thinking is William Savage’s conclusion that the only consistently feminist character in postwar comics was the “frumpy woman-child“ Little Lulu (79). In other words, only asexual children unhindered by male lustful desires can be trusted to carry the banner for the women’s movement.

[10] See her lecture “Crisis in the American Universities“, http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html

[11] The pharaoh, the patriarch of the Rhusus civilization, mocks Sheena’s promise to eliminate the bat-men with the insult “brave words for a mere woman“. By the end of the story he’s forced to eat his words, thanking her as she leaves, “thou help is felt deeply, fair Sheena!“

[12] Though in the less subversive medium of television, specifically the 1955 series, Bob is the dominant figure, in part because Sheena fights under a “no kill“ rule, even of animals.

Appendix 1. Brief Summaries of the Sheena Stories Consulted

 

Jumbo Comics #30 "Slashing Fangs" (June/July 1939) (DDP Volume 1): Sheena fights unscrupulous trader Gaston de Mond, who threatens a local tribe to get them to drop their tobacco prices. He bribes the tribe with gold and jewels to include her in a cannibal feast, but shows himself to be their real enemy, machine gunning the tribe before Sheena defeats him.

 

Jumbo Comics #31 "Voodoo Treasure of Black Slave Lake" (September 1941) (Volume 2): Pirate Jeffers Blaque attacks a scientific expedition, stealing their diving bell. He finds an underground lake full of valuable marine life which he intends to harvest and sell. Sheena fights an "octosaur", then defeats Blaque.

 

Jumbo Comics #48 "Meat for the Cat Pack" (February 1943) (Volume 1): Chim is grabbed by an eagle, which leads Sheena and Bob to a "lost world" with strange vegetation and a "golden-skinned" tribe named the Manji led by Queen Thara-an. Thara-an is cruel to her subjects, who want to learn more about the outer world. Sheena fights Thara-an, who is killed by an octopus.

 

Jumbo Comics #51 "Monsters with Wings" (May 1943) (Volume 2): Nazis land in the jungle to set up a secret ammo base, briefly allying with native leader N’Dula, though they fall out. N’Dula tosses Sheena to a lion pit and makes young Samwa watch, while Bob spends most of the story helpless. Eventually N’Dula’s gang is blown up, while the crocodiles feast on the Nazis.

 

Jumbo Comics #58 "Sky Altar of the Thunder-Birds" (December 1943) (Volume 1): The Kulu and Wassani tribes fight over land. Tony Cappozi, a knife thrower, flees from the police into the jungle. He allies himself with the Kulu chief and passes his girlfriend Dolores off as Sheena, who orders other natives to bring jewels. Sheena, with the help of the Wassani, defeat Tony and the Kulus. It turns out that Commissioner Lawson, who Tony had apparently killed, is still alive.

 

Jumbo Comics #74 "Drums of the Voodoo Gods" (April 1945) (Volume 1): Sheena is distracted by a phoney message from King Talo to leave home so Bob can be kidnapped. A larcenous couple switch clothes and pose as Sheena and Bob, the woman faking her own death to get the Africans to make offerings. Sheena sneaks into their temple and exposes their fakery, warning the local tribe to avoid being fooled by "evil men" again.

 

Jumbo Comics #79 "Spoor of the Shaking Skeletons" (September 1945) (Volume 1): Slavers sail up river to meet with Blackbeard, but he’s dead, killed by Hawkina, who has muscled her way into the slave trade. Sheena is wounded by her deadly mace, but recovers in a native steam hut. She saves Bob when he is strapped by Hawkina to the front of a cannon. Hawkina and her hawk men are killed in an explosion as Sheena releases the slaves.

 

Jumbo Comics #81 "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle" (November 1945) (Volume 2): Bronson sets up an exploitative mine in the jungle, getting native support by parading around a wax doll of Sheena. He uses tricks to pretend to have magic. Sheena uses the wax figure to fool Bronson and his native allies in return, then exposes Bronson’s trickery. Bronson dies in a fire.

 

Jumbo Comics #84 "The Valley of Whispering Fangs" (Feb 1946) (Volume 2): Bob and Sheena get stuck in a storm on the river. A whirpool throws them into the Rhusus kingdom, a lost city of ancient Egyptians. They help Princess Ptolomia, but are not warmly welcomed by her father the pharaoh until Sheena devises a scheme to help them defeat their mortal enemy, the vicious bat-men. Bob and Sheena agree to keep the Rhusus kingdom a secret from the commissioner.

 

Jumbo Comics #87 "Sargossa of Lost Safaris" (May 1946) (Volume 2): Sheena and Bob get mixed up with Dora and her father, who are looking for a dead relative who was searching for the golden oxen skull of Tarus. They sail through "the sargossa of the lost safaris", an area plundered by water-skiing worshippers of Thor who wear Viking hats and capture some of the safari, intending to give them a torturous death. Sheena uses phosphorescent-painted oxen to scare them off.

 

Jumbo Comics #90 "Death Kraal of the Mastodons" (August 1946) (Volume 1): Chief T’Gini intends to tell Sheena the secret location of a lost elephant graveyard, but has a dark vision of his own death, which turns out to be true. A safari of plunderers sails through a cave into a lost kingdom of pygmies, whose sacred valley contains elephant bones. They attack the safari, Bob and Sheena, who defeat them, though Sheena returns the greedy safari leaders to colonial justice.

 

Jumbo Comics #92 "Pied Piper of the Congo" (October 1946) (Volume 2): A white adventurer has convinced a native warrior to pose as the mythical Scarlet Arrow to scare local tribes into submission and steal the valley’s ore deposits. Sheena reveals the hoax, and the Arrow is killed. 

 

Jumbo Comics #93 "The Beasts that Dawn Begot" (Nov 1946) (Volume 1): Sheena travels with some scientists up a river, where they encounter a sea serpent and the "mighty dawn race", a tribe of were-women led by Darma, who are angry at these outsiders. Sheena also fights giant spiders while Darma sacrifices some of the outsiders she’s captured in the giant claws of her tribe’s idol. Sheena challenges Darma to a duel to the death: Darma falls into a pit of deadly crabs.

 

Sheena #12 "The Beasts that Dawn Begot" (Summer 1951) (Volume 1): This is a heavily edited version of the story from Jumbo #93. The beast-women are now called "Zarga", and the safari is a group of scientists seeking out the truth behind rumours of their existence. There’s no sacrifice to the idol or random killings of animals, though there is a sea monster and giant spiders. Sheena defeats the queen once again. Contains less overt violence, and Sheena is dressed more modestly.

 

Jumbo Comics #99 "Shrine of the Seven Souls" (May 1947) (Volume 2): Bob is blinded by a spitting snake, so Sheena must seek out the "ancient crone" N’Tizah in a lost city for a cure. Lizzie Adams has come to the jungle to find "Panther", a man with leopard eyes surgically implanted by N’Tizah, to kill him in revenge for the death of her husband. Sheena must find Panther too before N’Tizah will give Bob her cure. Panther wants the Adams diamond mine. Sheena defeats Panther in a duel, then gets N’Tizah to cure Bob’s blindness.

 

Jumbo Comics #100 "The Slave Brand of Hassan Bey" (June 1947) (Volume 1): Jan Stark and Hassan are slavers who steal a prison boat to use as a slave ship. Bob and Sheena are captured. The slave ship is guarded by ferocious panthers. Sheena frees the slaves then blows up the slave boat. 

 

Jumbo Comics #107 "Vandals of the Veldt" (January 1948) (Volume 2): Bob and Sheena are making a pilgrimage to the festival of Bog-Umbo, whose idol is fed pearls by local tribesmen. White plunderer Blimpy Mulligan sets up a scheme in league with Queen Tera’s Amazons to switch Bob-Umbo’s head with a fake, stealing all the pearls. Sheena fights off both the Amazons and Mulligan’s scurvy crew, returning the stolen pearls to Bob-Umbo’s followers.

 

Jumbo Comics #115 (September 1948) (online):  Local tribes are afraid of "the mysterious stalker", who turns out to be a wily old man living in a castle with his granddaughter. His greedy stepson Gus, who caused the death of his own wife, has come back to Africa to find the treasure hidden in the temple. Gus and his crew assault the castle with a flame thrower, but Sheena pierces the fuel tank, starting a fire which a monkey pushes Gus into as a "just" jungle punishment.

 

Jumbo Comics #131 "Congo Giants at Bay" (January 1950) (Volume 2): A safari of scientists seeks out a "wild man" who may be a cave man unfrozen by Dr. Page. Ellen Page has come along, looking for her missing (and presumably dead) fiancé. They are opposed by ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Heinrich Grote, who wants to use Dr. Page’s revivification ray to rule all of Africa. Grote uses tricks like a phoney pterodactyl to lure in safaris. The "wild man" turns out to be Ellen’s lost fiancé. Sheena, Bob, the scientists and a pack of wild animals defeat Grote, who is taken away.  

 

Jumbo Comics #148 "Derelict of the Slave Kings" (June 1951) (Volume 1): Sheena meets Diana Burgess, who is being chased by the whip-wielding Lizzie Burgess. She and George are river pirates. They steal the Congo Belle, carrying diamonds. Sheena drives off the pirates, saving Diana from her cruel foster relatives.

 

Appendix Two. Summary of Themes in Jumbo Comics (19 stories) and Sheena (1 story)**

Issue of Jumbo Comics and Brief Story Name

Sheena Saves Bob

Bob Saves Sheena

Sheena Knocked Out and/or Captured

Sheena Fights Corrupt Whites

Sheena Saves "Good" Whites

Sheena Fights "Evil" Africans

Sheena Helps "Good" Africans

Sheena Lords it Over Africans

African Culture Subject to Ridicule*

Sheena Fights Beast Men or Lost Civilization

Sheena Fights/Kills Animals

Sheena Fights Monsters

30 Gaston

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

31 Blaque

X

X

X

X

(X)

(X)

X

X

48 The Manji

X

X

X

X

X

51 Nazis!

X

X

X

X

X

X

58 Knives

X

X

X

X

X

X

(X)

X

74 Switch

X

X

X

X

X

79 Hawkina

X

X

X

(X)

X

X

X

81 The Mine

X

X

X

X

X

84 Egyptians

X

X

X

X

X

87 Vikings

X

(X)

X

(X)

(X)

X

X

X

90 Ivory

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

92 The Arrow

X

X

X

X

(X)

X

93 Darma

X

X

X

X

X

99 Panther

X

X

X

X

X

X

100 Slavers

X

X

X

X

X

107 Amazons

X

X

X

X

X

115 Family

X

X

X

X

(X)

131 Wild Man

X

X

X

X

(X)

X

(X)

148 Pirates

X

X

X

X

X

Sheena 12

X

X

X

(X)

X

TOTALS

19

4

12/13

14/15

8

7/9

9

1

3/6

8/9

19 (20)

7/9

Percentages

95

20

60/65

70/75

40

35/45

45

5

15/30

40/45

95/100

35/45

 

*I'm assuming here a pre-industrial, tribal culture with polytheist or animist beliefs that is unlikely to have higher education or speak English. This category covers stories that portray Africans as overly simple, open to trickery or ridiculous superstitions, or physically stereotyped. It doesn't cover them being greedy, violent or using primitive grammar, since most of the white characters share these traits.

**Checks in parentheses indicate ambiguity, e.g. the pterodactyl "monsters" in Jumbo #115 & 131 turn out to be fakes. The "saves good whites" category excludes Bob, who is in constant peril in Sheena's jungle realm. I categorize giant squids or octopi as "monsters".

 

Notes: 1. The following stories feature female leaders: JC48 The Manji, JC51 Nazis, JC79 Hawkina, JC93 Darma, JC107 Amazons, Sheena 12.

 

2. Bob does not appear in JC148 Pirates, hence does not need to be saved.