Jungle Queens and Space Rangers 3: JUNGLE COMICS

Jungle Comics, inspired by Fiction House's first pulp mag Jungle Stories, began in 1940 and ran 163 issues. Every one of them starred a jungle lord named Kaänga, backed by a variety of other strips, including The Red Panther, Simba - King of Beast, Wambi the Jungle Boy, Tabu the Jungle Wizard, Capt. Terry Thunder and Camilla - Queen of the Lost Empire. I'm mighty curious why they didn't use Ki-Gor, their already established pulp star, in the Tarzan role, but that's a mystery for another day.

All 163 covers are here in Todd Frye's new Jungle Queens and Space Rangers, along with complete runs of four other Fiction House titles. Here are scans of just a few . . . 

Day before yesterday: FIGHT COMICS

Yesterday: JUMBO COMICS

Tomorrow: PLANET COMICS

Day after tomorrow: WINGS COMICS

Jungle Queens and Space Rangers 1: FIGHT COMICS

A few months back we featured scans from Todd Frye's book AMAZING! ASTONISHING! WEIRD! (that's HERE), featuring oodles of great pulp covers. Well, Todd's at it again, this time bringing us about a zillion action-packed comic book covers from Fiction House. That publisher, as you may know, consistently had some of the finest covers in comics, thanks in no small part to its association with the (Will) Eisner and (Jerry) Iger Studio. 

All this week, we'll be looking at samples from the new book, Jungle Queens and Space Rangers. It leads off with all 84 covers from Fight Comics, published between 1940 and 1954. It's mighty interesting to see the focus progress from two-fisted adventurers like Shark Brodie to the costumed heroes Power Man and Super-American, and eventually find a steady headliner in the Sheena clone called Tiger Girl.

Tomorrow: Sheena of the Jungle and Jumbo Comics