Safari-goers and beastmasters never know when they’ll meet a monkey with a mad-on! Watch your step as you bungle into the jungle, where the apes are...
BORN TO BE WILD! snorted commands of their middle-aged editors hot to ape ave you ever seen a jungle movie that didn’t depict the Hollywood’s lucrative jungle craze, tapped the gorilla on the gorilla as really, really angry? That’s fang-snarling, shoulder (from a safe distance, of chest-pounding angry. course) and knighted him the poster No, Gorillas in the Mist doesn’t child for cantankerous critters. Sure, count. you’d find the occasional savage-lordFrom the 1930s and through the vs.-lion cover, and the suggestive early ’50s, movie houses played lots jungle-queen-vs.-anaconda cover, but of cheaply produced jungle serials the ones that most grabbed readers’ and pictures. You know the type: attentions featured grumpy gorillas They open with a bunch of snooty (or other ornery apes). This wasn’t the Europeans in pith helmets on holiday exclusive terrain jungle or “adventure” in the jungle, or a gang of ne’er-doseries—once in a while, some of wells out to purloin some weathered comics’ earliest caped crusaders found artifact. These interlopers inevitably themselves mask-to-face with a stumble across an enraged bull ape maddened monkey! that’s jackhammering his pecs and How can I put this delicately…? frothing like a busted washing Oh, forget that, here it is, straight up: machine, grunting something that, in Many of these artists could not draw his language, can only mean “Git off apes. Some of them drew the dumpymy property!” Or “I’m taking the guy-in-a-baggy-gorilla-suit gorilla. blonde, sissy-britches, just you try Some evoked racial or sexual stereoand stop me!” Hollywood knew that types, many blatant. Some pulled off a grumpy gorilla was always good passable swipes from nature photos. for a scare… or a laugh, if you But in their defense, the entire comiclooked close enough to see the book art form was in its infancy then. zipper in the gorilla suit. And as Arthur Adams says, “…in life, Why the rage, Congo king? you’re not really required to know Look at it this way: How would you how to draw a gorilla.” feel if a chattering tour group Not that it mattered to the tromped through your back yard? average readers of the Great Territorial squabbles have led countA gorilla beat out neo-star Superman for the spotlight on Depression and World War II, the era less countries to war, so really, these Leo O’Mealia’s cover to Action Comics #6 (Nov. 1938). we now call comics’ Golden Age. apes are entitled to a little bluster. © 2007 DC Comics. They were unpretentious, usually poor Many of the moviegoers kids looking for a quick and affordable escape from their reality watching those jungle serials and pictures were young men (and of hardships. Few could discern between a hack and a master. occasionally, women—you go, Tarpe Mills!) who made serialized Toss a snarling beast on that funnybook cover, and Junior would pictures of their own in the flourishing field of comic books. And toss down his hard-earned dime—that’s the law of the jungle. those impressionable writers and artists, marching in step to the
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Born To Be Wild!
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