For the next Golden Age Wednesdays drawing I chose, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

I never knew she was the first female comic book character to have her own series, AND created by Will Eisner!

BACKGROUND:

Sheena originally appeared in a British tabloid called Wags, in 1937. The artist of the first few episodes was Mort Meskin (Vigilante, Black Terror). When the studio got the contract to package a monthly comic book for Fiction House, an American publisher of pulp magazines, they imported Sheena back to her country of origin — but her first few reprinted adventures were done in black and white.

Sheena was conceived as a female version of Tarzan, with overtones of H. Rider Haggard's "She Who Must Be Obeyed" (hence the name). She wasn't born in the jungle and raised by apes, like Tarzan, but arrived as a child with her father, explorer Cardwell Rivington. A native witch doctor named Koba unintentionally killed Rivington, and to help atone, raised Sheena as his own. She grew into the gorgeous jungle queen we all know her as, and chose a white hunter named Bob Reynolds (sort of a male Lois Lane, always needing to be rescued) as her mate.

Jumbo Comics #1, where Sheena made her American debut, was dated September, 1938 — just three months after Superman had, as yet unsuspected, founded a genre of his own. In 1942, she graduated to her own title, the first female comic book character to do so — and what's more, Fiction House published a pulp magazine devoted to her adventures, tho it lasted only one issue. Over the next several years, her success spawned a host of imitators, including Tiger Girl; Tegra the Jungle Queen; Rulah, Jungle Goddess; and Jann of the Jungle. The last Sheena comic Fiction House did was a 3-D version in 1953.