Congo Bill had his chance to meet killer trees in1931. Horror writer, Frank Belknap Long, worked in comics in the 1940s. His scripting for Adventures into the Unknown #1 and 2 set the style for all horror comics to follow. But those issues in 1948 were not his first comics. In 1941, Frank wrote “Congo Bill” scripts for More Fun Comics. Issue #63 (January 1941) featured a six-pager called “The Jungle Scientist, a killer plant story!
More Fun Comics was an early DC comics that featured characters that would remain famous to this day, like Dr. Fate, The Spectre as well as a bunch nobodies no one remembers like Biff Bronson. One of the remembered ones was Congo Bill, an African adventurer similar to Alex Raymond’s Jungle Jim. Congo Bill started in More Fun Comics #56 (May 1941) (written by Whitney Ellsworth) then later moved to Action Comics. In that comics Bill would meet Congorilla and the focus would switch away from the humans.
Before that evolution (that would see Congo Bill comics reprinted in the 1970s DC Tarzan, where I encountered them originally) Bill would do some pretty typical African adventurer stuff like shooting lions. That’s how Frank Belknap Long and artist George Papp open our tale.
In an unknown part of Africa, Congo Bill is helping Professor Kent with research when he finds a plant he does not recognize. A lion attacks the two men and Bill’s trusty rifle does its work. The owner of the lion, an odd-looking man in a turban, appears to curse the men.
Bill and Kent continue on into the forest. The tree branches come alive and grab the men. The strange man appears again, his body smelling of weird perfume.
He frees the men from the killer trees. The plants are his specimens in an experiment. He takes them to his secret jungle laboratory. The scientist also has animals for pets, like the lion named Nero.
Once inside, Congo Bill hears a woman’s voice. The scientist tries to deny it but Bill finds her. She is a beautiful blonde who claims to be the scientist’s step-daughter. The mad scientist locks the three of them in.
She admits her stepfather is insane. When the mad scientist opens the door to allow his pet leopard in, Bill shoots it dead with a pistol. In the struggle with the mad man, a vial is knocked over and leaks onto the scientist’s shoulder. He flees.
Before going into the forest, the step-daughter covers the trio in the perfume that keeps the killer trees at bay. In the forest they find the scientist crushed to death by one of his experiments. The substance that leaked onto his shoulder has neutralized his repellent.
This comic is interesting on so many levels. First off we have the classic SF villain of the mad scientist with the pretty daughter. Standard prop of the Pulps like Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories, we see it here too. Strangely, Long doesn’t give either of them a name. The lion is Nero but the main bad guy is …
Also intriguing to me is the idea of the laboratory in the jungle. Manly Wade Wellman used it with “Lee Granger, Jungle King” (March-Sepember 1940). Granger is a scientist-adventurer with a lab of his own in the jungle. It was Frank Belknap Long who got Wellman into writing comics.
Thirdly, the inclusion of killer trees is so Weird Tales, a magazine Long wrote for beginning in 1924. Plant monster stories begin even earlier than that, but later stories like Kadra Maysi’s “Isle of Abominations” (Weird Tales, October 1938) has an island of killer trees created by a mad scientist.
Finally, in the same year, Frank would begin selling his John Carstairs stories to Thrilling Wonder Stories (starting with “Plants Must Grow”, October 1941). This series of SF stories has a detective who uses plants to help him solve his cases.
