AMAZON ART #1

The cover to JUMBO COMICS #9 (1939), the first of the series to be totally focused upon Sheena, who remains the first "superstar-amazon" in the medium of comic books.

YEAR 1955: SHEENA

Though Fiction House, the comics company that published Sheena, closed in 1953, the company's most famous character survived the demise of the company that midwifed her, when SHEENA, QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE, debuted as a syndicated television show in 1955.  The jungle queen was played for 26 episodes by buxom Irish McCalla.

Like the similar RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE (1952-54), SHEENA was an attempt to translate the thrills of jungle-themed B-movies to the small screen.  Unfortunately, such shows were shot quickly and on a miniscule budget, which tended to cut down on the thrill level.  I have not yet seen all the existing SHEENA episodes, but most of them are pretty talky and give McCalla's Sheena few chances to show off her feminine formidability.

Nevertheless, McCalla's image was arguably the most striking image of female heroism produced for 1950s television.  And even today, that image achieved some dubious comics-related immortality, when a clip from the TV show appeared in the documentary CRUMB, illustrating one of young R. Crumb's earliest fantasy-crushes.

YEAR 1937 : SHEENA

In THE PREHISTORY OF THE FEMME FORMIDABLE IN POP CULTURE, I wrote:

Wilma’s prose advent marks a turning point in the development of the pop-cultural archetype of the femme formidable: the “fighting femme formidable.” I don’t suppose that Wilma was the first of her kind, but she seems to be the first to have garnered some measure of lasting fame...

Wilma Deering was the first woman who was portrayed as consistently kickass, though usually she fought with a gun rather than fists and feet.  However, the first kickass female with her own series who PRIMARILY depended on her physical skills was certainly Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.  She debuted in 1937, about a year before the appearance of Superman, in the first issue of the British tabloid WAGS.  The character's debut story was then reprinted in the first issue of the American comic book JUMBO COMICS, about three or four months after Superman showed his cape in ACTION COMICS #1.  Her general history is aptly covered in this online essay.

The character's genesis has been credited (though this has been disputed) to the comics-team who packaged the material for WAGS and for many American comics thereafter: Will Eisner and J.M. Iger.  Thematically, Eisner does seem like a likely creator, since his SPIRIT series hosts dozens of tantalizing femmes formidables.  However, most of his own works emphasize male characters as the stars, so it may be that his influence in launching the strip was largely as a facillitator.  The basic concept of the series seems to owe something not just to Tarzan but to the 1931 film TRADER HORN, which featued a white woman raised to be the queen of a black African tribe.

Many have claimed that the main reason for Sheena's popularity was her extreme hotness as she ran around the jungle beating up unruly natives. There's no way this can be proven or disproven, but the Sheena stories were also better drawn and written, in terms of pulp virtues, than an awful lot of product in that period.  Thanks to her media-adaptations, the first female "superhero" remains reasonably well known long after her comic book's demise.

FROM SHEENA TO XENA

Well, I have enough material to keep taking shots at THE BEAT from now till eternity, but Her Majesty (note the initials) isn't likely to respond either way. And the joke's played out now anyway.

What I would want hypothetical readers to take away from this blog is not just that I Gene Phillips was irritated at something THE BEAT said, but this:

FEMALE CHARACTERS IN COMICS ARE NOT WITHOUT 'AGENCY'

Critics of same can carp all they like about how most of the women featured are astoundingly hot (in contrast, one presumes, to women's depiction in other media). or how There Just Aren't Enough Female Creators In Popular Media.

But when you talk "agency," it's obvious that female genre-characters are given far more in fiction than real women have in the real world.

Whether the real-world status is due to society, biology, or some combination thereof is up for debate.

But the demonstrable pervasiveness of the Amazon Archetype is a significant datum that I plan to explore here on a regular basis.