JUNGLE COMICS 329
for their own, although, judging from his ineptitude, one wonders why. In one story, the
villainess, thinking she has killed Sheena, has Bob and another explorer dragged into
an arena where they will be slaughtered. “Now that Sheena is no more, you are without
a mate,” she declares, “I off er you half my kingdom. Refuse me and you suff er a fate
similar to the one about to befall him!” Nobly, Bob answers, “A simple choice... death!”
Of course, Bob could aff ord to be noble, because he knew that Sheena, not that easily
destroyed, would leap out of a tree and rescue him.
When she was not saving Bob, Sheena often came to the rescue of other clueless
white folks who ventured into the jungle for various reasons and wound up attacked by
wild animals or imprisoned by evil natives. Actually, the natives were usually not evil,
but simply naive and easily duped. When Sheena stops a tribe from attacking a safari,
their chief explains, “Snake goddess demand goods for idol, or curse fall on village... we
not have things in village, so attack safari!” Sheena, of course, then has to prove that the
snake goddess is a phony.
When viewed over 50 years later, much in Sheena’s narrative is dated and absurd.
Th e natives are insultingly stupid, and everyone in the jungle, including Sheena, talks
funny. Saving a man from an attacking lion, she shouts, “Ho, clawed one... release your
prey!” Taking on a giant octopus, she says, “Th e knife of Sheena is sharp! No more will
you crush and devour!” Of course, Tarzan (“Me Tarzan, you Jane”) did not have great
command of English either.
However, the golden-haired jungle queen burns brightly through the fog of racism
and stilted Tarzan-speak. Leaping lithely across the printed page, dagger in hand, to
save a native child from an attacking lion, or to rescue her boyfriend, she is a thing of
fantasy and beauty. She was a goddess-like fi gure in a world that had not known god-
desses for 2,000 years. Young boys wanted to be rescued by her and carried off to her
tree house. Young girls wanted to be her.
Sheena’s last appearance in a comic book was in 1954, when her publisher, Fiction
House, released a special 3-D Sheena comic; but she had become an icon, and icons
do not die that easily. She moved on to the small screen, in a television series that ran
for 26 episodes, and is still fondly remembered by anyone who watched it. Th e jungle
queen’s role was fi lled by strapping ex-model Irish McCalla, who did her own stunts
until the day that she miscalculated a tree and badly injured her kneecap. Th ereafter,
because it was impossible to fi nd a stuntwoman as tall as McCalla, her vine-swinging
was done by male stunt men wearing long blonde wigs, including, at one time, a young
Sergio Aragones, who would go on to become a cartoonist for Mad Comics, and to
create, among other characters, Groo the Wanderer.
Fortunately for McCalla, the role of Sheena did not require much acting. (Sheena’s
dialogue was on the level of “Me Sheena, you Chim.”) On the other hand, the statuesque
beauty bore an uncanny resemblance to the jungle queen and seemed to have stepped
out of the pages of a Sheena comic book. While a majority of girls may have read the
Sheena comic books, a majority of grown men watched the TV show to see McCalla
romping around in what was then considered a brief and racy outfi t (Today it would
