“Scantily clad jungle-dwellers became a fixture in pulp fiction, comics and B-movies: Darwa, in the 1919 film A Scream in the Night; the Jungle Girl in H Bedford-Jones’s Jungle Girl in 1934; and leopard-skin clad Sheena, created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger, from 1938. The women often fit the Tarzan template: lost British or American children, brought up by animals or a lost tribe, portrayed as a saviours of the “natives”. Jann of the Jungle, published by Marvel’s predecessor Atlas in 1956, is a trapeze artist who turns “enlightened” leader on her arrival in Africa; Rulah, Jungle Goddess – the star of Zoot Comics throughout the 1940s – crashes her plane in the jungle and is venerated by a tribe (after donning a giraffe-skin bikini when her clothes are conveniently destroyed).

Were the jungle queens just scantily clad women for readers and viewers to gawk at, with the added dark undertone of the white woman either dominating or at perpetual risk from “uncivilised” black African men, or could they be perceived as something like feminist icons?

American writer Gary Phillips, who co-edited the anthology Black Pulp says the trope is a “deep one to deconstruct”.
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“The idea of the jungle queen may have a rather troubling history, but that’s not stopped many contemporary attempts to give it new life. Marvel’s next big movie is Black Panther, a solo outing for a character created by Stan Lee (white) and Jack Kirby (white) back in 1966. Of course, under the mask, the Panther is T’challa, a black man and not a white woman. But the comic has, according to Phillips, helped to streamline the idea of the jungle queen, with some revisionism.

“We’ve had Shuri, T’Challa’s half-sister, don the mantle of the Black Panther in Marvel comics and become the Queen of the Wakandas,” he says. “We’ve had queer woman warriors in World of Wakanda and the genocidal horrors of King Leopold wrestled with in a Tarzan movie, for goodness’ sakes … so yeah, the creative stakes are different, given the socio-political real world context for these kind of stories.”