Cover from Jungle Comics #89 (May 1947) with art by Joe Doolin. Published by Fiction House.
Posted by the Web-Ed on 11/26/2010.
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We dedicate this page to Tanner, who's been waiting for a long time to see a true Jungle Girl tanning, by which
we mean an actual Jungle Girl getting the OTK treatment rather than just some girl who happens to get spanked while
visiting the jungle (as we saw earlier with Doris Drake in Judy of the Jungle
and last time with Joan in Roy Lance).
As we mentioned there, Fiction House published a lot of jungle-themed comics, and for the fourth in this series of
newly-discovered spankings we return to Jungle Comics, this time to issue #89 (May 1947). At left, the cover
depicts a typical day in the life of Kaanga, the Jungle Lord, as he's menaced by a crazed woman with a spear galloping
towards him on a zebra. Who would have guessed that waiting inside was a story in which Kaanga administered not one but
two spankings?
As it happens, neither of these were given to the crazed spear-woman - now that we think of it, she should have gotten it
too - but to Ann, Kaanga's mate, and Betty, one of those jungle visitors we were talking about before. Since the plot is
convoluted and makes no sense, let's take a look at the spanking panels before we get too deeply into it.
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Kaanga and Ann were the Tarzan and Jane of the Fiction House set. The opening page of our story doesn't give us a whole lot
of information, and it's not until the last sentence of the caption that we know that Kaanga is looking for his mate, Ann.
His friend N'Geeso tells him she's run away because Kaanga wouldn't explain the wrist-band he's wearing. Apparently, it
was a gift from some princess and Kaanga swore never to reveal that fact, exactly why we aren't told. This is the first of
many things that don't make a whole lot of sense in this story. Anyway, Kaanga declares "this simple-witted woman, Ann,
shall feel Kaanga's wrath!" And when he says she'll feel his wrath, he's not just using a metaphor, he means she'll feel it
where she sits down!
He tries to follow her in his canoe, but someone has sabotaged it - he thinks it's another of Ann's pranks, and we receive
no information to the contrary.
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Meanwhile, Ann sees an expedition consisting of a photographer seeking gorillas, his daughter Betty, and the villainous
Cass, who plans to murder them for the pictures. We never thought gorilla pictures were all that valuable in the open
market, but never mind.
Betty wanders off, where Ann notices her "nice clothes." Then suddenly a menacing leopard appears.
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Betty fumbles around with her pistol, and looks like a goner until Ann dives down from the trees and kills the leopard.
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The complete page 5.
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Betty offers her thanks, and Ann requests that Betty let her wear those "pretty clothes". It seems strange that would be
uppermost on Ann's mind after the life-or-death struggle that just occurred, but on the other hand, it does give us
a chance to see both girls standing buck naked in a clearing. Naturally, the exchange of clothes could not take
place off-camera - it's a vital, integral part of the story. And if you believe that, we've got some swampland in Florida
we'd like to sell you.
Kaanga, having survived a falling boulder and a gang of apes, now believes he's closing in on Ann. Of course it's
really Betty wearing Ann's jungle girl outfit. "At last, imp! Your pranks are over!" Then it's spanks for pranks time,
at least several of which must have landed because he's counting off some of Ann's sins: "This is for the dugout! This is for
the boulder!"
Isn't it strange that Kaanga doesn't realize the girl he's spanking has blonde hair? Or that it's not Ann's face?
Or that it's not Ann's rear he's walloping (surely this isn't the first time he's needed to spank her)? Just try
spanking some good-looking blonde stranger and then claiming, "Oh, I'm so sorry - I thought you were my wife. No hard
feelings" and see where it gets you.
We hate to be so suspicious, but it seems to us the writer contrived the clothes-changing incident merely to a) show us
two young women taking their clothes off, and b) arrange for an extra spanking, since it goes without saying that Ann's turn
to go OTK is still to come - and if we knew who he was, we'd give him an award!
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The complete page 10.
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More complications: Betty's father fires a shot at Kaanga, which seems like an overreaction to seeing him spank her,
not to mention dangerous considering how close he is to Betty. Kaanga then falls off a cliff into a river and is about to
go over the falls when his old buddy N'Geeso conveniently shows up in the nick of time with a rope and pulls him to safety.
We don't know what N'Geeso was doing there - maybe he just came to see all the spanking. It must occur to the thoughtful
reader that some day N'Geeso's going to get a day job, and then Kaanga's going to be in real trouble.
And speaking of trouble, Ann has stumbled onto Cass (the bad guy) and his gang, who are dressed up like gorillas. But
before Cass can kill her, she's carried off by - real gorillas! Kaanga arrives on the scene - how he made it back up
the cliff is a mystery - and throws the lead gorilla back over the same cliff! Cass is conveniently gored to death
by a buffalo, and it looks like a happy ending all around.
Of course, there's still the matter of that missed spanking. Fortunately, Kaanga has not forgotten: "Now then, young
woman, a little matter long overdue!" And so we're treated to the second spanking of the day. Like the first, it's
not really emphasized visually, being given a rather small panel. As we said before, it looks like the writer was
into spanking, but not the artist.
There was never a plot like this in any of Fiction House's titles before this, nor would there be anything like it afterwards.
Somebody saw to that, which is our next topic.
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The story was reprinted twice, in Jungle Comics #147 (March 1952) and Kaanga #11 (Spring 1952). It's
exceedingly strange that two separate reprints would appear so close together, but of greater import is that the
story was altered to remove both spankings. This took a considerable amount of effort, as we can see by comparing three
pages from the original to the reprint. Massive changes were made to the story, beginning on the first page:
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Jungle Comics #89 page 1
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Jungle Comics #147 page 1
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In the second version, Ann hasn't run away, so there's no need to have Kaanga explaining about his wrist band. Also,
he blames his sabotaged canoe on a "jungle prowler" instead of Ann. Why someone would go prowling through an area
infested with bugs and snakes just to make some jungle nut's canoe do an imitation of the Titanic is not explained.
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Jungle Comics #89 page 2
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Jungle Comics #147 page 2
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By the time we reach the fifth page, the panels have been jiggered around so much that the narrative flow has been changed
completely, but you can see the first spanking has been removed: in one panel, Kaanga is grasphing Betty about the waist;
in the next he's dodging a bullet (literally) with no spanking in between. It would take too much effort to document all
the changes here, but at the bottom we've provided links to all the pages from both issues so anyone interested can compare
them at his leisure.
As we mentioned, the writer is unknown. The name that often appears on a Fiction House splash page is merely a shop
pseudonym; there is no such person as "Frank Riddell", the name that appears here. The Grand Comics Data Base credits
the art to John Celardo, but they don't similarly credit either reprint, and we're not convinced it's actually Celardo.
We couldn't find enough known samples of Celardo's work to reach a definite conclusion, and because it's the writer we're
more interested in here (since he's the probable spanko), we didn't pursue it any further.
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Jungle Comics #89 page 5
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Jungle Comics #147 page 5
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We do want to look at the two "naked" panels again, for scholarly reasons, of course.
Although the dialogue has been changed and the panel re-colored, nothing was blacked out the second time around. The
re-coloring did avoid the flesh tones used in the original, and perhaps it was thought to be less suggestive that way,
but it appears whoever ordered the changes was more concerned with disciplinary spankings than nudity. Why? The Comics
Code did not go into effect until two years later, in 1954. Still, comics were under increasing fire by 1952, and
Fredric Wertham had written some articles during the period (1947 - 1952) between the original story and the reprinted
versions - whether they mentioned spanking specifically as did his later book, Seduction of the Innocent, we can't say.
[For more on Wertham vs. spanking, see Frontier Romances
#1].
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#89. Plenty of flesh tones - and flesh!
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#147. No suggestive flesh tones.
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It must have been thought they could get away with toned-down nudity, but that two gratuitous spankings might arouse
comment (among other things). This is the second time we've encountered "spanking censorship" in a reprinted comic
(the first was in Candy #62). It's interesting to see that
the criticism of comics as harmful to children had this effect on the depiction of spanking, something we hadn't
realized until this year because we knew of so many spanking panels that appeared after 1954.
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Here are the links to the complete stories:
Jungle Comics #89 Page 01
Jungle Comics #89 Page 02
Jungle Comics #89 Page 03
Jungle Comics #89 Page 04
Jungle Comics #89 Page 05
Jungle Comics #89 Page 06
Jungle Comics #89 Page 07
Jungle Comics #89 Page 08
Jungle Comics #89 Page 09
Jungle Comics #89 Page 10
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Jungle Comics #147 Page 01
Jungle Comics #147 Page 02
Jungle Comics #147 Page 03
Jungle Comics #147 Page 04
Jungle Comics #147 Page 05
Jungle Comics #147 Page 06
Jungle Comics #147 Page 07
Jungle Comics #147 Page 08
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