330 JUNGLE COMICS
be considered a slightly short minidress.). When the series ended, McCalla fi nally took
acting lessons, but ironically, she had been typecast, and could only get roles in B movies
with names like She Demons and Five Gates to Hell. None of this bothered McCalla
much, as she had returned to her fi rst love, painting. She became a successful Western
artist, selling to, among others, Pat Nixon.
Over 25 years after the end of McCalla’s TV series, Columbia Pictures made a
Sheena movie, starring ex-Charlie’s angel Tanya Roberts. It was a disaster. In the name
of political correctness, the new Sheena wore leather instead of leopard skin, and her
acting made Irish McCalla seem positively Shakespearean. On the other hand, the
syndicated Sheena TV series, which debuted in 2000, was, if possible, even worse.
Encouraged by the success of their jungle queen, Fiction House followed up with
three new jungle characters that ran in two of their six titles. Tiger Girl started in 1944,
as the last story in Fight Comics but quickly moved up to the cover and the fi rst story in
the book. Stylishly drawn by the artist Matt Baker, she was a strawberry blonde who
wore a tiger-skin swimsuit, and also had two pet tigers, Togara and Benzali. All the
Fiction House jungle heroes had interesting origins, and Tiger Girl’s is one of the most
interesting. Th e daughter of an Indian rajah and an Irish princess, both killed by a lion,
she was brought up in an ancient crumbling stone palace in the jungle by her faithful
Sikh servant, Abdollah. As she is half Indian, she is one of the rare non-white heroines
in comics at that time.
Fiction House’s aptly named Jungle Comics featured not one but two jungle heroes.
Ka’anga, a bronzed, blond masculine version of Sheena, starred on the cover and in
the lead comic. His “mate” was Ann, a shipwrecked American girl who chose to don a
two-piece leopard-skin bathing suit and stay in the jungle with her man. She was very
much the Jane to his Tarzan, and most covers depicted him rescuing her from some
sticky situation.
Taking up the back pages of Jungle Comics was yet another jungle queen, Camilla,
known variously as “Queen of the Lost Empire” or “Queen of the Lost City.” She debuted
two years after Sheena’s fi rst appearance in Jumbo Comics. In Camilla’s earliest stories,
she is far from being the jungle queen she later became. Her empire is populated by
Norsemen, who for some reason came to Africa during the Crusades, thus giving the
queen and her subjects the opportunity to wear winged Viking helmets.
Camilla is more like Ayesha, the immortal heroine of She than Sheena was. Th e
queen and her subjects drink from a magic sulfur spring that has kept them young for
600 years. Th e fi rst few years of the comic saw her leading her people in battles against
evil kingdoms, until fi nally, a little over two years after her origin, she changed from her
midriff -baring harem outfi t into a two-piece zebra bathing suit and joined the jungle
girl club. No longer queen of any lost empire or lost city, but simply Camilla, she was
occasionally referred to as “jungle queen” or “Congo queen.”
As a jungle girl, Camilla was a loner. She had no white hunter “mate,” like Sheena,
but she did have the requisite pet: an immense gray dog named Fang, who raced
through the jungle at her side, and helped as much as a big dog can. In her stories, she
