Judy of the Jungle

As far as goes the genus of The Batshit Superhero, the Golden Age probably offers up more pure delight than any other era in comics. Anything was a go and as long as you could produce eight pages of it, publishers would pay you top ha'penny for whatever insane hunk of unreadable shit you could crib from even less coherent comics produced in greater numbers.

You may recall that I had found what I believed to be my favorite golden age comic book hero of all time, The Red Blazer (who is, disappointingly enough, decked out in shorts and a tunic) whose origin involves getting drugged, probably molested and locked in a spaceship by a scientist tom whom he is introduced while burying a body in the middle of the desert. Well, Judy of the Jungle is running, at the very least, a close second and a very likely first. This is because I enjoy disturbing subtext.





We join Judy already living in the jungle with her widowed father and decked out in what appears to be a monkey-fur evening gown with the skirt torn off. I leave it to your imagination to reckon how it got that way, but I know we can suffice it to say that Judy and her dad already have a complicated relationship. I mean, it's either a torn gown or a one-piece swimsuit she refuses to ever take off, but whatever the case it's not the worst thing that's going to happen in this book, so forget I even mentioned it.

Judy's father is bemoaning his hermitage, having abandoned the civilization of men in order to pursue his work as a naturalist and apparently to satisfy some pissy grudge he has with all humanity. I'm going to guess "They outlaw our love" tops his list of complaints. Fretting in true passive-aggressive manner that he's denied his daughter a life among her own kind ("abuse survivors", I'd say), he receives from his own darling flesh-and-blood a warm, familial kiss which would - from the looks of it - spur an erection in any living man so rapidly that the resulting friction against one's zipper might create a focused beam of concentrated light capable of burning through reinforced steel. It's a little saucy, is what I'm saying.

Maybe it's just me, maybe a curvaceous redhead gliding her full lips across yours as she caresses your cheek and presses her firm, young body against your chest is just one of those things that I take the wrong way. Tell you what, someone arrange for me to get felt up by Christina Hendricks, I'll tell you if it seems chaste. I'll be the first to admit I'm wrong...



Receiving what he almost certainly deserves, dad gets offed by trigger-happy German killers-for-hire vacationing in what I guess is probably the same Southern California locale where Richard Donner shot all of the Danger Island shorts on the Banana Splits show. Finding his near-lifeless body, Judy tries to save the old man's life by gently but thoroughly groping him, whereupon he delivers what is possibly - in the great and varied history of dying fathers passing onto their heroic children the words of wisdom which spur them onward in their tireless pursuit of justice and right - the greatest such motivational speech fo'ever:



"A burly German named Kurt ... and a crew of cutthroats! LIVE FOR REVENGE, Judy ... and remember ... TRUST NO MAN!"

Judy, darling, I've seen the kind of upbringing you've had, I agree.