Saturdays will be devoted to pre-Code comics for the foreseeable future, mostly due to the fact that we find many of these wild and wooly stories more entertaining than the weekly offerings at our not-necessarily-friendly neighborhood comics shop.
(We picked up a copy of that DC Zero thingie and … no, just no.)
This week, the Keeper ventures into the wilderness of Jungle Girls comics - a genre that is admittedly fraught with sexual and racial stereotypes. While we have no intention of justifying such comics’ excesses, the Keeper firmly believes the best stories do portray no-nonsense heroines who kick butt just as competently and cheerfully as the Golden Age Batman.
(In fact, one of the first comic-book heroines - Fletcher Hanks’ typically bizarre Fantomah qualified as a jungle girl. Sheena, the most famous jungle queen of all, headlined her own title long before Wonder Woman.)
Some even manage to portray African tribes as more than savages wearing “ooga booga masks,” a sad stereotype that Lisa Fortuner recently addressed.
(Man … we’re just stepping into a pile here, aren’t we?)
Golden-Age publisher Fiction House was famous for its “good girl” characters, many of which were illustrated by Matt Baker - a legendary “headlight” artist and one of the few prominent African-American artists working in the field at the time.
Yet, despite the obvious cheesecake (many stories feature the heroines taking a quick tub bath), the Keeper can’t help but notice that Baker’s figures were drawn much more realistically than, say, Michael Turner. Neither do such characters as Tiger Girl and Senorita Rio rely on male benefactors to get them out of fixes.
So, with no further ado, here’s Tiger Girl’s titanic struggle against white slavers from Fight Comics #49. Despite the Allan O’Hara byline, we’re pretty certain the art is by Baker or Jack Kamen.
As always, scans are provided by Golden Age Comics Downloads.
