(1947) “The Monkeymen of Kul”

Canada is famous for its Mounties, huskies and gold miners but it also produced one Jungle Lord, Zor the Mighty. Superior Comics was a Canadian company that ran from 1946 to 1953. They reprinted American comics but also produced comics of their own, such as Zor the Mighty #1-2 (1946). The two Zor stories were […]

(1926) Bomba the Jungle Boy

Bomba the Jungle Boy came out of the Stratemeyer syndicate that produced the Tom Swift and so many other novels for kids. Written under the name “Roy Rockwood” the authors are not known today. Racist in many ways by today’s standards, these books feature a white boy with amazing gifts living in the South American […]

(1953) Ape-English Dictionary

Rudyard Kipling can take credit for anthropomorphizing the different animals of the jungle and giving them a shared language. Edgar Rice Burroughs took this a step further and created a lengthy primer for Tarzan’s jungle world. This language is that of the Mangani, or ape folk. Dell comics offered this two page primer in 1953.

(1901) The Crystal Sceptre

The Crystal Sceptre (1901) is one of my favorite obscure adventure novels. It’s a one-off so there isn’t a whole Burroughsian pile of them but I’d love to write a sequel for it. Or a comic book adaptation. The plot concerns a man who is dumped in the jungle and finds himself part of a […]

Tarzan Is Alive and Well and Living in ….

The jungles of the world are places of adventure. Whether in Equatorial Africa, the Amazon basin, Borneo or the Philippines, anywhere there is jungle, there is danger from hostile tribes, man-eating predators, quicksand and disease. The jungle is no place for the faint of heart. Some of the greatest characters live in the jungle. Mowgli […]

(2016) The Legend of Tarzan: A Review

Reviewing a Tarzan movie is a difficult task. First off, they usually fall into two categories: low budget stinkers or big budget hits. Casper van Dien in Tarzan and the Lost City (1998) is a good example of the first and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (1984) the second. But no matter the budget, the […]

Jungle Adventures in The Triumph

Jungle adventures date back to the days of H. R. Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. They also formed a large portion of most Pulp and popular publishing after 1900 whether in America or the UK and Europe. When Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzan in 1912, the jungle exploded once again with jungle lords and ladies galore. […]

(1944) Zudo the Jungle Boy

Zudo was another short-lived jungle boy, in the tradition of Bomba, who had adventures with his pet lion, Lao. The strip was drawn by Ken Battlefield. Unfortunately, it features typical 1940s racism towards Africans. They did get a little retribution in issue #2 when the Africans spear two white marauders. (Remember this was before the […]

Jungle Stories in Argosy

All-Story and Argosy and all the combinations of those two titles were home to their share of jungle adventures. The Weeklies served up a mixed bag of adventure tales including Westerns, Foreign Legion, South Sea, Northerns and every other kind of tales, as long as it had adventure for dad and romance for mom. The […]

(1930) The Invisible Bond and Sheena

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle got her start as a comic book character. Created by the same man who gave us The Spirit, Doll Man, Blackhawk and Plastic Man… Will Eisner. Eisner and S. M. Iger did the strip under the pseudonym W. Morgan Thomas, not because of embarrassment but to give the impression that […]