The Mystery: 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 their two-man operation was a large comics outfit with other artists. Sheena was the first powerful female character in a savage jungle world. To some, she is the first female Tarzan.
Sheena’s first appearance was in the British Wags #1 in 1937 but she soon after came to America in Jumbo Comics #1 (September 1938) and stayed for the entire run of the comic to April 1953. She had her own 18 issue self-titled comic too as well as appearances in Pulp magazines. In 1955-56 she was played by Irish McCalla on TV, by a topless Tanya Roberts in the film version in 1984, and by Gena Lee Nolin in another TV show in 2000.
Sheena holds records. She was the first female character to have her own title, beating Wonder Woman out by months. Her name has been memorialized in the title of the Ramones “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” to the singer Sheena Easton. Sheena has made her mark, being followed by a host of copy-cats: Rulah, Jungle Lil, Lorna, Shanna the She-Devil and so on.
So imagine my surprise when I saw the cover of Weird Tales for September 1930. Certain Weird Tales covers are classics and you see them all the time. Many of the earlier ones, not by Margaret Brundage or Virgil Finlay, are less familiar. C. C. Senf did many of the covers in the 1920s and early 30s, and September 1930 is one of them. It sports a Jungle Queen and a rather racist version of an African saving/attacking(?) a white explorer. “The Invisible Bond” by Arlton Eadie was this cover story. Now I wish I could tell you all about this tale but I don’t have a copy of September 1930 so for now it must remain a mystery, at least to me. What strikes me about this cover is how similar it is to all those Jumbo Comics covers that would appear 8 to l0 years later. Did Eadie write a Sheena-type story years before Eisner?
The Jungle Queen idea predates Sheena by thirty-four years in literature. W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904) gave the world Rima the Jungle Girl. Some think Jane Porter of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (1912) did this but Jane is actually (in the books, not the Johnny Weismuller/Maureen O’Sullivan movies) not a Jungle Queen. She and Tarzan live on a ranch in Africa and not in the trees. Eisner reported that the original inspiration for Sheena came from H. R. Haggard’s She (1887). So did any of these novels inspire “The Invisible Bond”?
1930 was a tipping point for Jungle Lords. Burroughs had been writing Tarzan for 15 years by this time and had most of the Jungle to himself up to then. Bomba the Jungle Boy and Jan of the Jungle were the only competition with Kwa, Kaspa, Sorak, Jungle Jim and a crowd of others soon to arrive. But the Jungle Queens would wait another seven years with Sheena leading the way. That’s why Eadie’s story is so intriguing. And why Weird Tales? Actually there was a precedent. Otis Adelbert Kline had written Call of the Savage for WT in 1927. He would follow up in 1931 with Tam, Son of Tiger. Farnsworth Wright knew Jungle Lords were good business even if they weren’t particularly weird. Had Wright missed out on a Jungle Queen franchise? Lots of intriguing questions but I don’t have the answers … yet. Stayed tuned. I’ll start digging for that September 1930 issue….
The Solution: Well, I’ve read “The Invisble Bond” by Arlton Eadie, and, boy, could I have been more wrong? The tale is not a Jungle Girl story but the worst type of racist silliness. The story opens with an African expedition finding a half-dead man in the wilds. He claims to be Lord Clengarth who had disappeared six week earlier along with the crew and passengers on The Primrose. His tale involves two passengers, Sir Leslie Fanshaw and his new bride, Lady Elna. The passengers escape a mutiny onboard but Lady Elna is injured badly. The ship’s doctor, Tremaine, must give her a blood transfusion, but all the white men are too frail with injuries. A Masai shaman named N’Zahgi offers, and only out of desperation does the transfusion take place. Lady Elna recovers but then she disappears. Clengarth and Sir Leslie rush out into the night and follow the sound of drums to a forbidden ceremony of Ghu-fanti or The Blood- Drinkers, headed by N’Zahgi. They see Lady Elna dressed as seen on the cover, dancing and cavorting wildly, before she plunges a knife into the neck of one of the crewmen and gorges on his blood. Sir Leslie shoots her and is himself killed by an arrow. Clengarth shoots N’Zahgi then flees into the jungle…
Now, Jungle Lord and Lady stories and comics can be seen as racist since the white heroes are always on top, and I have to admit I am always most at ease when Tarzan is accompanied by his Askari warriors or Allan Quatermain stands beside Umslopogass. This Eadie tale is hard to stomach today, and I see why it hasn’t been reprinted. The terror of the tale revolves entirely on a laughable chill. To understand why such stories were written and printed I would refer anyone who is interested to “Weird Modernism: Literary Modernism in the First Decade of Weird Tales” by Jonas Prida (The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy & Horror, edited by Justin Everett and Jeffrey H. Shanks, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and Prida’s concept of “Weird Empire”, where non-whites were seen as continually trying to take over the world:
“… In stories with titles such as “The Lips of the Dead” or “The Jungle Monsters” or “The Mystic Bowl,” Westerners find themselves facing a variety of nonrational forces, usually as a result of interfering with traditional customs or by efforts to reform the locals. As one character says in John Horne’s 1929 short story “The Speared Leopard”: “Magic! Witchcraft! In the tropics the border-line between reality and fantasy grew blurred more easily than most people cared to admit, and it was a bad business when a white man crossed it.” In almost all these texts, the dynamic forces of Western rationalism—technology, positivism, science— are both the causes of the ghostly manifestations and the temporary solutions to the problems. But in these same cases the solution is only temporary: a brief victory for the empire before the irrational forces [read colonized] once again take precedent.”
In Eadie’s case the Western technology is a blood transfusion and the scientific solution is to shoot everybody. I have to admit I would have preferred a Jungle Girl or even a jungle terror tale like Howard Wandrei’s excellent “The Tree-Men of M’Bwa” (Weird Tales, February 1932), with its Lovecraftian feel and unexplained terror. But, hey, you get what you get… and, yes, some stories are best forgotten.