It hasn’t been just too long since I last read the complete run of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, but I’ve never before read Flash’s “topper,” Jungle Jim, in its entirety. Now that IDW’s “Library of American Comics” has completed its reprint of The Complete Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim this seems like a good time to re-read Flash while I’m reading Jungle Jim for the first time.
First of all, I’d like to say that the name “Jungle Jim” strikes me as being extremely silly, but all I have to do is mentally substitute “Bradley” or “Jim Bradley” or “Jim” every time someone refers to him by the strips name and I’m fine. I make a similar effort every time I re-read Milton Caniff’s Terry & the Pirates by simply not reading Connie’s dialogue.
Jungle Jim gets off to a kind of clunky start, but so did Flash Gordon. Once Alex Raymond hit his stride, there’s no stopping either of these strips in terms of excitement, imagination and all-out action/adventure. (I like to think that the two stories occur simultaneously in the same universe, one on the planet Mongo and one on earth.) In fact, I think that Jungle Jim ranks right up there with Terry & the Pirates and The Phantom in terms of action/adventure.
And that’s all I wanted to say.
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I listened to the opening sequence from the radio show at Internet Archive a while back. It's a very faithful adaptation of the Bat-woman story (=Lilli de Vrille's introduction).
When Jungle Jim started Tim Tyler's Luck was set in Africa: Raymond ghosted it for a time. Hal Foster was doing Tarzan. Raymond's daily strip Secret Agent X-9 started a couple of weeks after the Jungle Jim/Flash Gordon Sunday page.
Early on the Phantom's homeland was apparently in Asia, but it was already depicted as if it was supposed to be in Africa. Jim's base was in Malaya, but the early strips mix Asia and Africa in a similar way. Early on he fights a tiger, but also lions and a gorilla, and a moon god cult that recalls the African Leopard Men cult.
The early Phantom often entered by the window, as did X-9 in Secret Agent X-9. It may be that Falk followed Raymond's work, and that he imitated Jungle Jim's Asia/Africa not knowing any better. Falk only decided to give the Phantom a jungle background after his strip was underway.
This is slightly off topic, however... last weekend I visited the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum on the campus of Ohio State University to see the Calvin and Hobbes exhibition. Included was a series of original art pages from strips that influenced Bill Watterson, one being a Flash Gordon page by Alex Raymond. As good as Raymond's art looks in reproductions, I was amazed at the beautiful brushwork and detail evident on the original page - truly a work of art.
And now back to Jungle Jim...
In the second half of the 60s King Features briefly published a comics line, and then switched to licensing its features to Charlton. Wally Wood prepared an issue of Jungle Jim for King that wound up being published as the first Charlton issue. The stories were written by Bhob Stewart, who has posted an account of the experience he wrote for Pappy's Golden Age Blogzine, and further posts with some extra information, at his blog, here. There is adult language in one of the posts. The stories may not be in the public domain (the issue's first page has a copyright notice naming Charlton).
That’s an interesting point about who might have influenced whom. I wasn’t really thinking along those lines, myself. My only point was that, as an adventure strip, Jungle Jim is easily as good as the other two I mentioned, but of the three, I think, the least well known today.
Doc, I’ve never seen an Alex Raymond original (nor even a top-notch reproduction of one), but the more I see of things such as IDW’s “Artist’s Editions,” the easier it is for me to imagine what the original art must have looked like.
I've been buying these and saving them up to read all at once. You say it's over? How many volumes are there total? Not sure I actually have them all!
Four total completes the run. They've all been released.
I have four! I have four!
Weirdly, the books list dates instead of volume numbers, and the dates overlap for all volumes except the last one. I was a little concerned that I missed one in between Vol 3 and Vol 4. But you have assured me that it's not the case, so I'm gonna schedule some couch time and read 'em up!