Goodbye, City Life!

The debate over the idiocy of jungle life continues during the comic's witty banter (never before seen in a comic about Ka-Zar).  Kevin suggest that he and Shanna are "cowards" hiding from civilization, and Shanna responds verbally ("you're full of crapola") and physically (throwing "crapola" in his face).  Their dispute about the value of the jungle is always double-voiced, with sarcastic commentary both supporting and undermining the points being made (Shanna: "Oh, don't bother me, I"m just a mindless little savage lacking in civilized manners and social graces. / Psst!  I'm over here, stupid! / Careful now, you might get dirt on your loin cloth." ). When he meets Queen Leanne (who, despite the fact that she lives in long-lost hidden land, speaks a language Ka-zar knows, she dismisses him as an ignorant barbarian:

"They're stealing my cat!  My cat, you moron.  Don't just stand there! Do something!

"Like what?"

"Ohhh! Imbecile!"

"Fine. I'm an idiot, a moron, and an imbecile.  What's your name?

"You're speaking to Leanne, queen of Zarhan, you---you--"

"Try cretin. You haven't used that one."

Their "meet cute' is classic screwball comedy, but it highlights the jungle lord's intellect. Not only is he bantering with her, but he's showing off his vocabulary in a second language.

When Ka-Zar spars verbally with both Shanna and Leanne in the first issue,  he is highlighting the philosophical dilemma that underpins his mid-life crisis (nature vs. civilization) while demonstrating the relationship between his indecision about his life's direction to the overall problem of his motivation.  As a "jungle lord," Ka-Zar is an action hero, but, even more than the superheroes he occasionally meets over the course of his adventures, he is a fundamentally reactive character.  Things happen in front of him, or to him, and he responds. He accidentally discovers the comic's new lost-continent-within-a-lost-continent, Pangea, only because he is following the trail of Zabu, who has mysteriously disappeared.  Zabu, as we have already noted, has been led away by a primal mating instinct; Ka-Zar, being human, is not subject to the pheromones of a female in heat, but his actions and arguments in the first (and several subsequent) issues are usually in response to either Shanna or Leanne.

Shanna the She-Devil had been a Marvel character for nearly a decade at this point, and, though she had crossed paths with Ka-Zar before, their already-longstanding romantic relationship was something Jones and Anderson introduced as back-story.  Like Ka-Zar, Shanna O'Hara was a variation on a familiar archetype (most notably, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, who first appeared in 1938).  Yet despite the trappings of the genre they share, Shanna is more of a foil to Ka-Zar than merely his female counterpart. Created by Carole Seuling and George Tuska in 1972, Shanna is a veterinarian who spent her childhood in the Congo (Zaire) with her diamond miner father. Unlike Ka-Zar, she lives in the jungle by choice, but also unlike him, she is the product of multiple traumas (her father's accidental killing of her mother, the shooting of her beloved leopard Julani, whose pelt she would wear as her costume; the murder of her father at the hands of the mutant revolutionary Mandrill). In Rampaging Hulk 9 ("The Wrath of Raga-Shahi," June 1978, by Gerber and Tony DeZuniga), Shanna is a powerful but not entirely stable New Yorker who only feels alive when fighting her pet snake, and is also the reluctant patient of a psychoanalyst trying to help her sort out her feelings about civilization (by the end, Shanna decides to leave for the jungle once more).

By the time we see Shanna on the second page of "A New Dawn....A New World!" she has long since sorted out her feelings about nature and civilization; the Savage Land is where she wants to be:

I noticed how neurotic even the sanest of animals became when caged...

..and realized that the city--civilization itself--was a cage of sorts. I knew that if I'd hung around and become any more "civilized," I'd have gone nuts.

Shanna has her own philosophical point to make, though always within the context of the comic's romantic relationships.  It's fortunate that Shanna is given such engaging and intelligent dialogue; in the hands of a lesser writer, she would be reduced to nothing but tropes.  First, because she occupies the familiar role of the emotionally mature woman waiting patiently (and not so patiently) for her overgrown adolescent male partner to grow up. An even bigger danger is her obvious allegorical function:  by the time the issue draws to a close, the reader cannot help but notice that Ka-Zar's vacillation between "savagery" and civilization is handily embodied by his two female love interests.

Leanne is introduced as the polar opposite of Shanna.  Where we first see Shanna trying to rescue a baby dinosaur, Leanne herself has to be rescued by Ka-Zar. Shanna rejected "civilization," while Leanne extolls the beauty of the "ivory metropolis" she rules.  Shanna gets Ka-Zar to have spontaneous sex with her on the jungle ground, while Leanne spurns his advances as they hide in a treetop ("If I ever am unfaithful to my fiance, it won't be by hanging in the trees like an ape!").  Shanna's defense of the Savage Land only encourages Ka-Zar's longing for civilization, while Leanne's reservedness prompts him to remark that those in the Savage Land have a saying, "Live for today--there may not be a tomorrow." In the end, Leanne breaks off her budding romance with Ka-Zar by reminding him of her political duties and of the restrictions of civilized life, prompting Ka-Zar to recommit to "savagery": "I guess that's where we're different. I'd let the whole bloody jungle go up in flames if it tried to dictate my actions."

The first year's worth of Ka-Zar the Savage is a showcase for Jones' and Anderson's powerful storytelling, as well as for their deft exploration of the two main characters.  One particular standout is "The Ties That Bind" (Issue 5, August 1981, by Jones, Anderson, and Garzon), in which Ka-Zar tells Shanna about the senseless death of his best friend, Tongah (a supporting character in the previous Ka-Zar series); Kevin's powerlessness to save his friend after a rabies bite while knowing that "civilization" could have saved him, is essentially the secret origin of Ka-Zar's dissatisfaction with living in a state of nature.  But the romance plot, which had served so well as a vehicle for exploring the protagonist's philosophical dilemma, leans even more heavily on the screwball comedy after the first issue while adding on multiple layers of cheap melodrama.  In the second issue ("To Air Is Human!" May 1981, by Jones, Anderson, and Garzon), Shanna catches up with Ka-Zar, and both of them encounter Leanne. Shanna overhears Leanne talk about their feelings for each other even as she confesses that she is about to elope with still another man. In the last pages, Ka-Zar is forced to sort out his feelings when he is confronted with the mother of all cliches:  Shanna and Leanne are each dangling from a cliff, and Ka-Zar can only save one of them.

By this point, the choice no longer seems to hold any implications beyond Ka-Zar's personal feelings.  Leanne now acts selfish and cold, as opposed to Shanna, who continues to be a well-rounded, complex character.  Shanna is the one he saves, but this is hardly the end of their romantic woes.  Shanna is convinced that Ka-Zar thinks he made the wrong choice.  But just in case the reader might have any doubts, Jones and Anderson continue to stack the deck.  Leanne survives, but is paralyzed, and tries to take over Shanna's body. The love triangle that held such potential in the first issue gives way to one-dimensional characterization divorced from any of the larger questions that it initially helped explore.

Ka-Zar the Savage sputtered on for nearly three years, under multiple editors demanding multiple changes of direction.  Jones continued to turn in clever scripts, but Anderson's departure hit the series hard.  After Jones' tenure came to an end,  the remaining seven issues written by Mike Carlin brought the comic to a forgettable close. The overall unevenness of Ka-Zar the Savage is probably why it is so rarely discussed in comics criticism, overshadowed by the decade's more solid and lasting achievements (such as Watchmen). In this regard, though published in the 1980s, Ka-Zar the Savage is a very Seventies Marvel book:  it had moments of brilliance interspersed with filler, and never had the chance to become a coherent, sustained narrative that might be enjoyed by less hardcore readers.

Next: The Brief Return of War Comics