Sheena faces her biggest threat yet: Tarzan’s lawyers!
Jumbo Comics #13
Real Adventure Publishing Co (March, 1940)
Okay, now we’ll be caught up with this series. It’s not easy needing new ways to open these reviews. Even in speed mode these reviews take awhile, and that’s after, or rather while reading a bunch of comic stories altogether. Sure, they’re short. Sometimes too short to fully tell their stories. However, numbers do count for something. This is just under 70 pages of comics and a text story. That’s a lot to go over, hence why I usually bypass the text stories and lame gag pages. There’s multiple creators so I can’t just do a creator page. So instead I pad out for the homepage with nonsense like this. That’s good, so let’s get started.
Sheena: Queen Of The Jungle by W. Morgan Thomas
Instead of one long story we get a series of adventures…and I’m confused. We have hunters that Sheena and Bob agree to lead to elephants to hunt, then stop them from hunting an elephant that’s trapped and saving her child from a lion. Okay. Maybe there’s a reason they can’t hunt female elephants, or this would be cruel. They stumble upon an elephant graveyard after fighting off a band of Zulus and the two hunters reveal they’re actually ivory hunters, who decide robbing the graveyard is fine, but they get killed by angry elephants, with the one Sheena saved earlier saving her life. Bob gets tied up by a snake and hurts his ankle but then a cobra shows up and Sheena has to save him from that. Then they hobble to a pygmy village and have a feast. There seem to be panels missing, out of order, or both. There are some ideas there but it’s like Thomas decided to do them all.
The Hawk by Willis B. Rensie
With Hawk ill, Jeremy and two of Hawk’s men, Caleb and Fluth, go seeking treasure with the map on Jeremy’s chest. An old enemy, Dr. Snide, tries to steal the gold for himself. Hawk recovers in time to stop him, but most of the treasure is lost to the sea, making the adventure pointless in hindsight. Except for the fun adventure we readers got to see.
Spencer Steel by Dennis Colebrook
A painting goes missing from a vault and Spencer rather quickly figures out how they did it. I won’t spoil the surprise ending, but while it was a nice red herring, I wouldn’t have minded an explanation for what the herrings were doing there, if that makes sense. I linked to the comic if you want to check it out, so I don’t want to ruin the surprise. You guys do read these things, right? My analytics say “no”.
Stuart Taylor In Weird Stories Of The Supernatural by Curt Davis
Oh, this is still here. So in the year 9250 insects will collect the humans instead of the other way around? Ooooookay. From there the story doesn’t really go much of anywhere. Once again this story disappoints.
ZX-5: Spies In Action by Major Thorpe
Someone is trying to stop a new telegraph and telephone line from going up, Our hero leaves his lady love to stop them, only to get her help in finding the saboteurs. Could have used another page or two to really get some good drama in there, but the action’s okay.
Wilton Of The West by Fred Sande
A crooked boxing manager is so crooked he even stiffs the guy he hired to take a dive during a fight. Seeing as the kid needed the money, Wilton takes pity on him and exposes the crooked operation. There’s a page missing not in the scans but in the story. When did Wilton go into town to make his undercover reputation? Outside of that missing moment it’s a good story.
Inspector Dayton by Geo. Thatcher
A baseball player is killed because he wouldn’t throw the game. The Inspector goes to the man who tried to bribe him, but when he’s captured his fiance has to rescue him. Unlike a modern story, Dayton isn’t made to look foolish so the girl gets to be the hero. If anything, it’s a smart plan to have her there. I have questions about how long a spider can stay alive in medicinal jelly (yes, it’s important) but otherwise a good story with a different cause of death.
The Count Of Monte Cristo adaptation by Jack Cortez
Learning that his servant is a princess whose parents were betrayed, and that the betrayer is Count De Morcerf, our hero comes up with a plan to expose him. That earns him the wrath of his son for setting up the trap and the evil Count himself for the exposure. Both have challenged him to a sword duel and the Count’s wife, a former lover of our hero (look, there’s two Counts here: we need to know who’s who) tries to get him to stop. Maybe it’s me, but this story isn’t translating well in the space allotted.
overall
More hits than misses again. There were a few comics that had minor issues, only one real dud and one that just didn’t work for me. They had some good creators on this anthology.
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