The Comic Book Jungle

When I was a kid, in the 1960s, I didn't care much for DC and Marvel comics. Whenever I picked up an issue, it turned out to be the middle of a story that would go on for months, with installments in three or four different titles.

Gold Key Comics were a godsend, with stories that concluded in one issue. They offered Disney's Donald Duck traveling to Tibet or the Amazon, Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig as Indiana Jones-style adventure archaeologists, and even more jungle beefcake than DC and Marvel.  (I also liked Harveys and Archies, but not Charlton).

1. Tarzan.  This was the Edgar Rice Burroughs version, articulate, wealthy, and retired from vine-swinging on a jungle plantation – and, when the television series began in 1966, illustrated by pin-up quality pictures of Ron Ely. Jane was usually absent; instead, Tarzan spends most of his time bonding with various noble Africans and extremely chummy white explorers. The testosterone-laced atmosphere is embued with a surprising degree of tenderness: In “Message in the Snows,” Tarzan and two explorers named George and Alec are captured by giant Autralopitheci. George is wounded. Cradling him lovingly in his arms, Alec cries “Oh, please don’t die! Not now – not yet!”

2. The back-of-the-comic, The Jungle Twins, which spun off into its own title in 1972, introduced the identical cousins, both with amazing physiques and a dislike for clothing. On an extended visit with Uncle Tarzan, they adopt a golden lion and use it to rescue a girl from a savage human sacrifice. She asks suggestively“How can I ever thank you?,” but they skip the kiss. “Don’t thank us! Thank. . .the golden lion.”

3. Korak, Son of Tarzan: not the Boy of the MGM movies, a curly-haired muscleman in leopard-skin Speedos.  He is not interested in girls, though he has a heterosexist back story, and spends a lot of time orchestrating heterosexual romances for others. For instance, in “Valley of the Monsters,” he saves an attractive young urban African named Muhammed Isolo (“graduate of Oxford University”) and helps him “go native,” strip to a loincloth and marry a native girl.

4. His back-of-the-comic feature, Brothers of the Spear, also spun off into its own title in 1972. They are the white Dan-El and the black Natonga, co-rulers of the lost kingdom of Aba-Zulu. They happen to have wives, but their administrative duties and marriages never take front-stage to the joy of stripping down to a loincloth and spending some quality time in the bush. 

5. Turok Son of Stone had the most interesting premise of the lot: two Stone Age Indians, the young Turok and the middle-aged Andar, are trapped in a lost world full of dinosaurs and savages. Both have magnificent physiques, of course, and they spend their stories trying to get home and rescuing each other from monsters, with no girl in sight..

Hours of beefcake and bonding for 12 cents apiece-- well in the early 1970s, 20 cents, then 30, 40, and 50 in quick succession, until the company finally folded in 1982.

Gay Byways of Disney Comics

They say that the golden age of comic books was during the 1930s and 1940s, when hundreds of superheroes filled the skies, but I think it was from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, when my friends and I scoured the racks at Schneider's Drug Store, ignoring the DC and Marvel titles in search of Gold Key.

From Adam-12 to Dark Shadows: was there any tv series that didn't get the Gold Key treatment?

All of the Warner Brothers characters: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam.  

Child-friendly adventure series: Magnus Robot Fighter, Space Family Robinson, Korak Son of Tarzan.  

Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, and many other Disney titles, exploring obscure gay byways of the Disney universe:


1. The Beagle Boys  (1964): six masked petty thieves in orange turtleneck sweaters, with serial numbers instead of names, who lust after Uncle Scrooge's money bin in many comics, spun off into their own series, reduced to a trio, with relationship unspecified (are they a gang?  brothers? lovers?).  They are raising the Beagle Brats, a trio of preteen nephews.

Thus they cannily avoid any need to mention wives, girlfriends, or heterosexual desire of any sort, reveling in a world of men.

2. Huey, Dewey, and Louie Junior Woodchucks (1967).  Donald's nephews belong to a Boy Scout-like organization with an endless bureaucracy and a handbook containing infinite knowledge ("Using the Junior Woodchuck Handbook, we've just translated this ancient Parthian inscription."). 

Here they are off on their own, sometimes with Donald or Uncle Scrooge hanging around, sometimes not. Occasionally girls appear, as members of the rival club The Little Chickadees, but only as competitors, never as objects of preteen crushes.  This is a man's world.

3. Moby Duck (1967).  A whaler who talks like a pirate seems like an odd addition to the Disney universe, but it allowed for many adventures, as Moby is paired with Donald, Uncle Scrooge, or even Gyro Gearloose to transport precious cargo or search for treasure. 

Sometimes he has a first mate named Dimwitty.  Two men living together on that tiny ship?  What was a gay kid in the 1970s to imagine?

4. Super Goof (1965).  Goofy, the dopey sidekick in Mickey Mouse comics, becomes a wacky superhero upon eating a magic goober (peanut).  Plus he's a single dad, raising his genius nephew, the mortar board-wearing Gilbert. (A word of advice: never marry a relative of a Disney character.  The moment you have kids, you're doomed.) 

Plus sometimes Gilbert eats the magic goobers, too.  Generation gap antics ensue, with neither Goofy nor Gilbert crushing on girls.

See also: The Comic Book Jungle