Jungle Tales

I’ve always enjoyed “The Hunter” by James Shooter and George Papp in Adventure Comics #358. Encountering it once again as part of my Silver Age reread, I found it disappointing.

In an acknowledged reworking of Richard Connell’s classic “Most Dangerous Game,” Otto Orion, the galaxy’s greatest hunter, decides his ordinary quarry have become unsatisfying. He needs a bigger challenge, and who can provide that better than the Legion? By unleashing an army of trained alien beasts on Metropolis, he forces the heroes to surrender, then holds his first hunt with a half-dozen of the team. All they have to do is reach an alien totem Orion’s erected at the end of his extraterrestrial hunting preserve; until they touch it, they’re fair game.

Part of what bugged me has always bugged me: Papp’s interior art is mediocre, much less striking than Curt Swan’s cover. Another detail may only have disturbed me because I’m doing my reread with an analytical eye. Supervillains hunting superheroes is a time-honored tradition, practiced by Kraven and the Golden Age Huntress, among others.But those villains, even when they had allies, were clearly capable of fighting alone. Otto, by contrast, seems to think it takes a village to hunt a creature.If it’s not enough of a challenge, Otto, how about you fight without the backup band?

The second plot point has bugged me in the past but it bothers me more now. At the climax, Invisible Kid has almost made it to the totem —It turns out that Orion wanted life-and-death stakes so he’s strapped a bomb to himself with a touch-triggered detonator on the totem. Invisible Kid touches the totem, the Hunter dies. Why then, does he have his phaser on stun? If he’s as deadly as he’s supposed to be, taking down the Kid should be a slam-dunk … but he doesn’t take the kill shot. Nor was there the usual rationalization when he captured the other heroes that “I’ll execute them once all six have fallen.” The implication is, he’s not looking to kill them at all, which makes the whole exercise kind of pointless.

The second jungle story is “Darwin of the Apes” in Inferior Five #3 (E. Nelson Bridwell, Mike Sekowsky). I haven’t written much about the Inferior Five except in passing but they were my first superhero parody book (originally conceived as a Fantastic Four parody) and I loved them. I never got into mad or Not Brand Ecch! but Inferior Five were different: to my pre-teen eyes they seemed almost like a regular superhero book only a little bit sillier. And, you know, inferior. Which, perversely, put me on their side. It’s hard not to root for characters who suffer advertising like this.The premise was a send-up of legacy heroes before the term was coined. The Freedom Brigade, a JLA-like team active in the 1940s, are now in retirement. When danger strikes their city, it’s time for their kids, whom the parents have trained for years, to step up and take over.

(I still laugh at that “he isn’t even in the story!” tag for the guy in the trenchcoat). Trouble is, they’re less JLA and more like the Great Lakes Avengers. Awkwardman, son of Superman and Lori Lemaris (with the serial numbers filed off. Damn, that must have hurt) is strong, invulnerable, and clumsy as a fish out of water. Merryman, son of Batman and Batwoman, is a 97-pound weakling. Green Arrow’s son White Feather is a coward who makes Shaggy from Scooby-Doo look like the Man Without Fear.

The premises for the Blimp and the Dumb Bunny — fat jokes and dumb-blonde jokes respectively — have aged less well.

The series also suffers a problem I’ve discussed before, that satire and parody can became outdated fast. In their first appearance, Dumb Bunny says she picked her costume because someone told her rabbit ears would improve her TV reception; Merryman explains “rabbit ears” are a type of TV antenna. TV antennae are so far in the rearview mirror I doubt anyone would get the joke now.

Like “The Hunter,” I felt very differently about “Darwin of the Apes” rereading it but this time it trended upwards in my estimation. The story is a Tarzan parody in which the I5 travel to Africa to seek the long-lost Dr. Livingroom. As jungle warfare isn’t exactly in their skill set — almost nothing is in their skill set — they enlist the help of that white jungle god (or as my friend Ross Bagby puts it, that non-native rain-forest authority figure) Darwin of the Apes.

This was my first encounter with Tarzan in any shape or form so I had no idea how many jokes went over my head. Reading now, I can appreciate that E. Nelson Bridwell knew his Burroughs. For example, that Tarzan had an immortality drug.

The list of recipients (in his “biography” Tarzan Alive, Philip José Farmer also proposed Tarzan shared his drug with others, though the list was different) didn’t make me laugh either. As a nine-year-old English kid I hadn’t heard of anyone but Batman and Robin; it was another year before I read my first Perry Mason novel.

Bridwell also knew that Tarzan visited a whole shit-ton of lost cities like the Atlantean colony of Opar. In the Burroughsverse they really are thick as fleas.The end result is I got much more fun out of this one than when I knew nothing of the King of the Jungle.

#SFWApro. Art top to bottom by Swan, Murphy Anderson, George Papp, Sekowsky, Joe Orlandox2, Sekowsky x2.