Welcome to my blog where I cover a variety of topics including comic books, pro wrestling and my life in general.
Todays Topic will focus on the 1930s superheroine Sheena and my personal Headcanon that the 2000s tv show was actually the character Fantomah.
Originally comic books only featured reprints of comic strips that appeared in the newspapers.
sheena was specifically created for the comic books and was the first female superhero to have her own book named after her. Sheena debuted in Joshua B. Power’s British magazine Wags #1 in January 1937 even beating Superman to the funny pages.
Sheena was one of the earliest Heroes created specifically for the comic book genre by Will Eisner(creator of The Spirit), Jerry Iger and Mort Meskin guys who are considered comic book royalty.
In a time when it was rare for any character to have a self-named book, Like modern characters who have great success, she appeared across multiple titles including jumbo comics, Sheena: Jungle Queen and even appearing in Ki-gor. She even had a line of pulps that inspired the 1950s TV show starring Irish McCalla. She was one of the first comic book characters to have a television adaptation and as far as I can tell the first superheroine to have her own live action show. Pre-dating wonder woman by over 20 years.
The premise of Sheena was that she was a young girl who was lost in the jungle being adopted by an African witch doctor
and growing up to become a Tarzan like an adventurer who befriends a big game hunter from America and they fight crime.
While clearly not the most original product It was marketing genius. The majority of comic book readers at the time were teenage boys. imagine the pitch “It’s like Tarzan but a half-naked woman instead of some 30 something British guy .”
Instant dollar signs. Sheena was and is so popular that she has been published/ adapted by almost every comic book company and even had an official crossover with Tarzan with painted covers by Alex Ross.
The first film adaptation came out in the 1980s starring Tanya Roberts who later went on to play in that 70s show. The movie was
clearly inspired by the film Greystoke from a few years earlier staring Christopher Lambert as Tarzan
This was one of the few comic book based films to come out at the time that even remotely had a budget
and it was faithful to the source material Two very rare things until 1989s Batman. The Sheena film even got the
honor to be adapted into an oversized Treasury edition comic book just like the film Greystoke.
The film was rated G despite having large amounts of nudity and violence but its basically a Disney ish adaptation of a pretty edgy franchise. This film even played on tv almost non stop in my area and often even showed some of the nudity on tv but these were simpler times .starting in the late 2000s I would see a re-emergence of the film being played on tv. This seems to have been to get us primed for the second Sheena adaptation.
Starting in the Mid-nineties With Hercules the legendary journeys there was a wave of b-movie inspired tv shows with a strong comic book like overtones. They had a show for every genre, there was an Ultraman show for sci-fi, Hercules, Beastmaster, and Xena : Warrior Princess occupied the sword and sandal /fantasy niche, and even a Tarzan show. The biggest influence in this wave of cheaply done pulp-inspired
tv shows were Hercules spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess the show had great success and spawned 100s of clones and imitators .
Sheena was actually a latecomer in all this and even had a few guest stars from Xena.
While the show seems as straightforward as the previous adaptations and even seemed to be a continuation of the film
Things were not as they appeared. sure it followed the original plot of a girl lost in the jungle, raised by natives becomes
a female Tarzan and befriends an American explorer (reworked in this version to be an ex – CIA agent turned local guide )
but Sheena now had not only the ability to talk to animals she could shapeshift into any animal whose soul she
peered into, pretty drastic change from a girl who just was really good at tracking and fighting, In the original
comic she wasn’t raised by animals or anything sometimes she could talk to animals but I always took it as a skill
though sometimes writers presented it as a power she definitely couldn’t turn into them .
The show added a new power unseen in previous Sheena adaptations ,she could
become a demon like mud demon panther woman with claws called the Dahak Some people say her claws were cloves but they would just
appear on her hands. I mean clearly they were created by the actress wearing gloves but it seemed to me that they were apart
of her, like wolverines claws .She also lacked her animal print bikini which was even present in the 1950s adaptation.
You might think a bored writer came up with this out of whole cloth trying to jazz up the character for modern audiences but I think they were simply adapting another character. It’s pretty clear that The writers were familiar with the Sheena
comics, It’s a pretty direct adaptation of what you would see in them and Sheena was often collected in reprints
with other jungle girls (what the genre is referred to )
I honestly think that in their research the writers decided that an obscure but incredibly
strange character was far more interesting than Sheena that character being Fantamah.
Fantamah was created by the same artist as Stardust a man called Fletcher Hanks this guys basically the Ed Wood of comics if Ed Wood was even on more drugs.
Fletcher Hanks specialized in Surreal hyper-violent stories
about god-like heroes who were incredibly bloodthirsty.
Fantamah was just like Sheena but could shapeshift into animals and could become a
demonic skull-faced woman when angered …Sound familiar? I don’t think it is a coincidence
TVs last incarnation of Sheena shared so many attributes with Fantomah in my personal Headcanon she was actually the comic book character Fantomah.
Fantomah was even published by the same publisher as Sheena Fiction house inc.
she appeared in jungle comics #2 February 1940 and while falling into the public domain has gained a sort of cult following for her sheer bizarreness, which doesn’t even seem bizarre once you realized it was re-done as a Tv show starring a former Baywatch actor.
So for me even though the show was called Sheena, I sense in my heart that this was Fantomah Trying to re-emerge into public consciousness . Perhaps the spirit of the of the Drahakna originally possessed Fantomah and moved into the body of Sheena.
Further reading :
chrisperguidi 