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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

GOLDEN AGE SHEENA: THE BEST OF THE QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE VOL. 2 (2009)

"Stay, hairy beast! Your body must taste the steel of Sheena's knife! And your blood will redden the sands of this strange land!"

-Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, as she gorily drives her hunting knife right up the hilt into the chest of a would-be animal adversary.

You read this goofy blog, so you undoubtedly know of my fascination with jungle/cave-girl types, a fascination that I'm only just coming around to being able to admit is a fetish. I also groove to strong female types — what my buddy Jared mockingly refers to as "girls who could beat me up," the "me" specifically applying to Yer Bunche — so when you put the two together in violent entertainment you automatically have my attention. This latest volume in what amounts to "Sheena's greatest hits" brings us jungle-gal fetishists more scantily-clad, politically-incorrect and ultra-violent 1940's action that was unfairly put to death with the advent of the the Comics Code.

The Sheena formula is simplicity itself and I went into it in detail when covering the first volume of this series a few months back, so check out that previous post for all the pertinent background info. All you need to know is that this second volume is chock full of all the violence, jungle and "lost world" adventure, "good girl art" and scenes of Sheena bathing in rivers (while semi-discretely covered by vines and tree limbs and such as found in the previous collection) and it's all good, dumb fun. The stories are virtually all the same, but when all you're looking for is a hot chick in a leopard skin kinda/sorta bikini kicking ass with as much "Fuck you" attitude as Tarzan on a bad day, you can't go wrong with this stuff. There was a reason why Sheena comics sold well for nearly seventeen years during the comics' Golden Age and it had nothing to do with literary merit; Sheena was all about appealing to red-blooded American males in the dreary days before PLAYBOY and other like publications (well, legal ones anyway) and as such it succeed with flying colors. So put your brain in a jar of formaldehyde for an hour or so and check out this lurid time-capsule of stuff that made your dad or grand-dad "feel funny down there."

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