Guest Post | The Jungle Cover Triangle

By GW Thomas

Looking at copies of Jumbo Tales I was first struck by how lush these covers were (and who could refuse buying them?), but secondly how each followed a formula of construction I like to call the Triangle. There is some variation, but the most popular examples feature three main focal points set in a triangle. These included the star hero or heroine, a threat (an animal or villain attacking), and a victim to be saved. The artist could vary which was largest in the picture but all three had to appear within that triangle. This got me looking back. When did this start? Did all jungle-themed comics have this cover formula?

I started with the oldest comics, the Tarzan newspaper strip that began in 1929 (the Ape Man actually came late to comic books in 1947). Typically, especially during the film cover era, these were not "triangular" but usually a double image, Tarzan striking a pose with a weapon or object in his hand. The publicity stills of Lex Barker or Gordon Scott were easily produced and promoted the film's main asset, the actor. The later covers were paintings and required more animals and fantastic villains to be featured in them.

But when Real Adventures Publishing entered the scene in 1938 with their general audience comic, Jumbo Comics, they didn't know that within their second year every cover would be a jungle cover, as their character Sheena, Queen of the Jungle rose to prominence in their stable of characters. By #18 (August 1940), the superhero covers were gone and the jungle would be featured on every issue until #159 in May 1952. That's 141 issues over 12 years! But that's just Jumbo Comics. Their sister magazine Jungle Comics, featuring Kaanga, would run 163 issues from January 1946 to Summer 1954. And then there was Kaanga, 20 issues on his own from Spring 1949-Summer 1954, with every cover a jungle triangle.

The triangle had become the norm. Whether it was Rulah, Zoot Comics, Zegra, Jungle Lil, Jo-Jo, White Princess of the Jungle, or Yarmak in Australia, they all used the same formula. The one exception was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a solo comic that for 18 issues ran from Winter 1942 to Winter 1952-3. The Sheena covers sometimes returned to the Tarzan-style double image, with Sheena holding a weapon. Her star had risen high enough she could stand with the Ape Man.

One variation of the triangle is what I call the Square. This works the same as the Triangle, but the artist sneaks in a fourth figure, usually a second animal, such as two hyenas rather than one, or a mount upon which the hero/heroine rides, such as an elephant or zebra. The Square came along in later years as the cover artists must have been quite bored by the typical cover of Sheena throwing herself from a tree limb to intervene with an evil hunter or tribesman.

Where did the Jungle Triangle come from? Was Jumbo Comics #15 (the first full Sheena cover in May 1940) the first to use it? Not at all. I got to thinking about the very first Tarzan illustration of them all, Clinton Pettee's cover for Tarzan of the Apes (All-Story, October 1912). There was the triangle! Tarzan straddling a lion, about to plunge his knife into its side, while on the ground, John Clayton lies, the intended victim.

And of course, the jungle pulps later became jungle comics, as companies like Real Adventures phased out or doubled up their pulps - like Jungle Stories - with comics. These too had covers and what do you know... the Triangle! Clinton Pettee started it, the pulps and comics continued it, and even Frank Frazetta, the master painter, used it in 1952 for his Thun'da comics, which he abandoned when the strip dropped the caveman and dinosaurs angle. Frazetta returned to it in the 1960s when he came to paint his Tarzan covers like Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. The fierce lion attacking Jane is about to get a surprise as Tarzan comes to the rescue.

Later jungle comics such as Shanna the She-Devil and Ka-Zar did not use this formula as often (what would be so old-fashioned by the 1970s), but rather the typical Marvel-style cover. DC's Tarzan and Korak under Joe Kubert harkened back more to the old days, but Kubert adds a sizzle to the old formula that makes it his own. The most modern jungle girl covers by Dave Stevens or Frank Cho look more like publicity stills to a Sheena movie or pin-up art. The triangle lives on but only in subtle ways.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Close to the Edge: Albums for Science Fiction Fans [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

I think the first sign that you're "getting old" is you start wishing everything was the way it "used to be." In most things, I can stop myself and ask, "Now is this really any worse?" You have to remember I survived disco. It helps you keep your perspective.

There are a few things from the past that I think younger people are missing out on though. One of these is fantasy album art. Beginning in the 1960s, with covers like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, album art took off in directions that have become iconic.

Now that old square of cardboard (which housed a Long-Play album, or LP for you youngsters) could show photos of the singers or a moody landscape, but the best were the ones that featured science fiction, fantasy, and horror themes. These images in turn inspired the bands to produce music that was even more "far out." Certain artists found their fame painting those covers (and some came after they were famous). We all have our favorites, but here are my picks:

The king of them all, none better, is British artist, Roger Dean (1944-). Dean's covers for Yes and Asia are icons of those bands and their success. Roger Dean is the master of the fantastic landscape, with floating landforms and airbrushed colors that fade off into the horizon. For example, his cover for Yes's Relayer with its weird mushroomy landforms and two rattlesnakes is one of my favorite wallpapers on my computer. Other covers include Uriah Heap's Demons and Wizards (1972) and The Magician's Birthday (1972).









Another Brit I always enjoy is Patrick Woodruffe (1940-2014). His best known cover is Judas Priest's Sad Wings of Destiny (1975), but he also did covers for The Strawbs, Greenslade, and Budgie. Woodroffe is more colorful than Dean and goes for strange, surreal combinations of forms. He is like fantasy's Hieronymous Bosch.



Lying somewhere between Dean and Woodroffe is another Brit, Rodney Matthews, who combines strange landscape with bold, fluorescent colors and weird creatures. His work is often inspired by the novels of Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom, or Michael Moorcock. His best covers were for Nazareth's No Mean City (1978) and Asia's Aqua (1991), as well as covers for Bo Hansen, Arena, and Archiva.







All through the 1960s and '70s the greatest vehicle a fan could own was a van with a version of Frank Frazetta's "Silver Warrior" airbrushed on the side. It was Frank's death dealers that brought sword-and-sorcery and heavy metal together, though oddly not on the covers of albums. Frank Frazetta (1928-2010) is the American grand-daddy of modern fantasy artists. Frank set all the records and has yet to be truly surpassed. He did not start off in album art, actually came to game late, but did recycle some book covers for albums for Molly Hatchet and also Nazareth's 1977 album, Expect No Mercy with its odd paradox of "how is he going to swing that sword down with those horns in the way?"





Frank's first successor was Boris Vallejo (1941-). Peruvian born, and skilled in figure painting, Boris did covers for Ted Nugent, Ozzy Osborne, and even a portrait of the band for Molly Hatchet. Boris (and later with his wife, Julie Bell) brought a sexuality to album covers that had not been there before.



Ken Kelly (1946-) was a student of Frank Frazetta (as well as his nephew) and had his first success on album covers. Kiss's Destroyer (1976) was a big album, but Ken Kelly's art can take part of the credit. He also painted the four musicians for Love Gun (1977).





HR Giger (1940-2014) became famous as the artist who designed the acid-for-blood creature in Alien (1979), but he also did some album artwork for Blondie's Debbie Harry and Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery (1973), as well as for Danzig, Celtic Frost, and many others. Where the other artists mentioned have gone for images with a Tolkienian or Howardian feel, Giger is more often associated with the horror of HP Lovecraft.





Other album covers of note include, Hawkwind's Warrior on the Edge of Time (1975), Lenny White's The Adventures of the Astral Pirates (1978) with cover and illustrations by Mike Kaluta, Jethro Tull's Broadsword and the Beast (1982) by Iain McCaig, and the Canadian band Klaatu that featured a mouse hidden in all of their fantastic covers. Also of note was the 1978 rock opera, War of the Worlds by Jeff Wayne that featured Wells' killer Martians by Geoff Taylor, Mike Trim, and Peter Goodfellow.











All these artists had as much of an influence on the 1970s' love of the fantastic as did the musicians who wrote the songs. I can remember sitting in my tent in the backyard reading The Sword of Shannara (1977) with its Brothers Hildebrandt illos and listening to Yes, Jethro Tull, Klaatu, and Steeleye Span. Enjoying that all-too-short time between being a kid and becoming a working-slaving-tired adult, and thinking of elves and dragons and wizards to the sound of Steve Howe's guitar, the oddly enchanting voice of Maddy Pryor, and the jazzy, rocking flute of Ian Anderson. Days long fled, though I can still watch those images flash across my screen as I wander to the kitchen for another cup of coffee before I go to work.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Sword and Sorcery Cliche No. 2: Barbarian Bikinis [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

I believe the movie was Spartacus (1960) with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. In an early scene, the trainer of the gladiators is showing the new recruits how to kill an opponent. Using a large paintbrush, he dabs on color in three spots, explaining these are the three most vulnerable places on the body. With a cruel switch he cuts at the throat, the belly, and the knees. Why do I mention this? Because if you look at Red Sonja's steel mail bikini you'll see it covers none of these.

Red Sonja was created in 1973, not as an adaptation of a Robert E Howard character, but as an amalgam of Howard's Sonya of Rogotino, CL Moore's Jirel of Joiry, and just plenty of sexy '70s goodness. And who am I to argue with the commercial results of selling sexy babes to fan boys everywhere?

But it raises the question: where did such ridiculous armor come from? Whether it is Sonja's steel attire drawn by Frank Thorne or the equally common fur version for less divine opponents painted by Frank Frazetta? The fur and steel bikini is our second sword-and-sorcery cliché and it has its own history, of course.

The 1960s was a time of expansion, even explosion, for fantasy, whether in print or on the silver screen. It was also a time of changing ideas about sexuality, freedom, and identity. So for every feminist staking out more territory for women there was a paperback with a sexy lady on the cover or a movie with a semi-clad starlet in it. In this way, Ray Harryhausen was one of the first filmmakers to have a beautiful young woman as the centerpiece to the film. Not that he had to animate them. Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC (1966) was quite capable of wearing her own fur bikini. This was not a sword-and-sorcery film, but when Harryhausen would produce later films like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) or Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), he was sure to include Caroline Monroe and Jane Seymour in revealing Arabic garb.

In the paperback world, an area of increasing expansion since World War II, artists like Gray Morrow produced numerous fantasy scenes for novels costing only ten cents to a quarter. His work was solid, but nothing compared to the furor that Frank Frazetta would create when he began painting covers for the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs for ACE and the story collections of Conan for Lancer. Here women wore as little as possible, regardless of whether they were on the sands of an alien planet or in the snows of Cimmeria. This sounds as if I am putting down Frazetta's work. Nothing could be further from the truth. To look at a Frazetta is to peer into a frozen moment of action and magic. His work sold as many books as the thundering great words of Howard or Burroughs.

Frank Frazetta (1928-2010) was a classically trained painter. Unlike the goofy-looking SF covers of a decade before, Frank's images were so believable, so real in the moment of time in which they happen. You didn't stop to say, hey, isn't that gal a little cold standing there in the snow as she's about to be eaten by wolves? That was the power of Frazetta's brush. A power so enchanting that Betty Ballentine published best-selling collections of his work. I can't imagine the '70s without those volumes containing his paintings and sketches.

Whether they captured your imagination or not, Frazetta did perpetuate the fur bikini-ism of Harryhausen, as lesser artists jumped on the Frazetta bandwagon. What Frank could pull off in a flurry of excitement, they could not. And so the cheesy sword-and-sorcery gal with the impossibly huge sword became a favorite of artists making their money at SF conventions (along with that other fave, the gal with the incredibly large bust and a smoking laser rifle).

The transition from fur to steel occurred quite by chance. Red Sonja appeared for the first time in Conan the Barbarian #23 (February 1973), drawn by Barry Smith with a full shirt of mail and sexy hot pants. But Smith left after Issue #24, and Roy redesigned the character's attire when simple dumb luck put an image in front of him. This was an unsolicited, single page, black-and-white illustration by Spanish artist Esteban Maroto. Unlike American (or British, if we included Barry Smith) comic artists, Maroto brought a Roccocco flourish to his art. The bikini Red was wearing looked more like something you'd hang on your porch to catch the wind than a suit of armor.

Roy Thomas saw the potential and so the first issue of Savage Sword of Conan (August 1974) bore a Boris Vallejo painting with steel bikinied Red Sonja and Conan fighting a crew of undead warriors. (These Boris Conan covers are oddly important to me for as a fourteen year old I had a T-shirt emblazoned with a Boris decal that declared to the world my status as a sword-and-sorcery nut. I never quite got around to having a Frazetta painted on my van though.) The look had arrived. Red Sonja, wearing steel coins where any reasonable person would want thick leather and metal armor, danced across Marvel publications, sword in hand. Artists like Frank Thorne would draw Sonja in regular sized comics, attend conventions with steel-bikinied fangirls (including Elfquest's Wendy Pini) and even do his own racier version of Red called Ghita of Alizarr in the '80s.

We are stuck with the fur and steel bikinis. They are part of sword-and-sorcery's history. (As is the terrible movie version of Red Sonja starring Brigitte Nielsen from 1985. Strangely, Brigitte never wore the ridiculous steel bikini but a Romanesque leather corset with fur trim. Not sure why this was so. Red's steel attire was part of her draw. Plenty of cosplay costumes proved it was possible to make such a garment. Perhaps Nielson refused to wear it?) I like to think that we can set this cliché aside now, laugh at our simplicity back in the day, and return to something closer to what Catherine Lucille Moore conceived with her Lady of Joiry back in 1933. But if Dynamite Comics, the latest copyright holder of the She Devil with a Sword, is any indication, I'd better not hold my breath.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Pass the Comics: Jungle Folks and Carson of Venus

Thun'da, King of the Lost Lands



In honor of Frank Frazetta, The Comic Book Catacombs has posted all four stories from his and Gardner Fox's Thun'da, King of the Congo #1. This first one tells the origin of Thun'da.

Thun'da leaps to meet the Monsters from the Mist



In which Thun'da fights woolly mammoths and gorilla-men.

Thun'da stood alone... When the Earth Shook!



In which Thun'da gets a pet.

More Thun'da, Rulah, Kaänga, and a space monster after the break.

RIP Frank

The world's a less imaginative place without Frank Frazetta.

Make sure to check out Sam Hiti's awesome tribute.

Adventureblog Gallery: Three Jungle Girls

By J. Allen St. John.



By Roy G. Krenkel



By Frank Frazetta

All found at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Spaceman Circumstances

Star Wars 1942

This idea is really long overdue when you think about it.

Out with Flash Gordon; in with Knight Rider

Really neither Flash Gordon's cancellation nor Knight Rider's being picked up as a series should come as a surprise.

GalaxyQuest comics



I don't know if this can capture the Awesomeness of the movie, but I'm sure gonna find out.

Larklight

For those of us who like the steampunk movies but were a tad disappointed in The Golden Compass, here's our second chance.

Frank Frazetta's Savage World



More here.

Not too incredible Shrinking Man

Enough with the comedy remakes of cool scifi properties. It's not attractive on Land of the Lost and it doesn't make me want to see The Incredible Shrinking Man either. I mean, Eddie Murphy? Honestly.

Robot McGee explains fine art

Is fine art a mystery to you? Never fear. Now there's a robot who will explain famous paintings to you. Sort of.

Steampunk Star Wars action figures



Somebody give this man a job designing these things so they can be mass-produced and I can buy them.

Steampunk anthology

This sounds like a must-have and Bookgasm's interview with the editors is a must-read if only for the numerous recommendations of other steampunk books.

Giant Styrobot



Pretty self-explanatory actually.

Giant monster attacks inevitable

Why oh why will no one listen to the scientists?

We can say with certainty that there will be a giant monster attack on Washington DC within the next twenty years, and that this monster will probably pee on the Jefferson Memorial...

Wake up, people!

Giant robot imprisons cars

And it's not like we can rely on our giant robots. They're already turning against us!

Stupid scientists plan giant, buzz-saw-wielding, "fire fighter" robot.



This is going to go horribly, horribly wrong.

Kim Jong Il unfolds into giant robot

We're all doomed.

Outlander poster



On a lighter note, the alien vs. Vikings vs. giant monster movie Outlander now has a poster.

Super Robot Red Baron

"Red Baron is a show that's all about chunky-looking giant robots fighting each other and thrashing lots of model buildings, which is a formula that's pretty hard to find fault with."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

Thundercats, Ho!



I guess Thundercats Season 2 is available in the UK now or something.

Image Comics in May

Some good-looking stuff coming out from Image in May.

Pretty Baby Machine #1 (of 3)



Jesse James vs. Machine Gun Kelly isn't the only action Machine Gun Kelly's seeing in the near future. Pretty Baby Machine covers what happens when Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and Machine Gun Kelly have to join forces against Al Capone. And Kody Chamberlain's illustrating it. Awesome.

Frank Frazetta's Swamp Demon one-shot



Josh Ortega + Josh Medors + another Jay Fotos colored/edited Frank Frazetta comic = a nice, warm, swampy, demony feeling.

Monster Zoo



Everything I need to know is in the title.

Proof, Volume 1: Goatsucker



Bigfoot as monster-hunter? Sold.

The Awesome List: New Wonder Woman artist, Dick Tracy song, Killer movie, and Image Comics for April

New Wonder Woman artist

The Dodsons are leaving Wonder Woman and that's sad news. The good news is that the series looks to be in good hands with Aaron Lopresti.



"The Powerful Fully-Transistorized Dick Tracy Two-Way Wrist Radio"

Coolest song ever? You decide!

Killer movie

An awesome director and one of my favorite actors adapting one of my favorite graphic novels? How did I not know that David Fincher and Brad Pitt are planning to work together on a movie based on Matz's The Killer?

Comics about merpeople, pirates, and Bigfoot

Image Comics has released its solicitations for April and there's some good-looking stuff there.

Aqua Leung is finally coming.



I've loved the Death Dealer series, so I'm ready for more Frazetta-inspired comics. Especially one about a "legendary sea raider... battling his way through an ocean of horror."



The best comic about Bigfoot and a chupacabra hunting monsters finally gets an ongoing series.