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.
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