Up until 2013, I did not realize that I had missed the King Features Syndicate characters in my media consumption. As a child of the 80s, I have fond memories of watching Defenders of the Earth, and had some of the action figures and, of course, had seen Flash Gordon on cable countless times. But it was Dynamite’s “Kings Watch” miniseries by Jeff Parker and Marc Laming that really got me excited about the properties again.
Since then, Parker did a magnificent run on “Flash Gordon” alongside Evan “Doc” Shaner, and has now turned the reigns of these characters over to new creative teams, setting up this King Comics event that has launched with last week’s “Flash Gordon” and “The Phantom” debut issues. We will be taking a look at each week’s new issues, as well as chatting with some of the creative teams involved, starting now: this is “All The King’s Men!”
This week, we are chatting with the creative team behind “Jungle Jim,” Paul Tobin and Sandy Jarrell. Take it away, past version of Brian!
The reason I’m focusing my first character-centric piece on Jungle Jim is that, I think for most fans, he was the least known of the King characters. What were your experiences with the character before getting the assignment?
Paul Tobin: I’d read some of the comics in the past. Jim always seemed like a strong character. All the basics were there. I like that real effort was made to avoid making him a “jungle lord” type, and to give him some naïveté of the world he’d entered, typically the Asian jungles, which was a nice break from the incessant “jungles of Africa” theme entrenched in so many other books of the time. Anyway, I won’t claim to have been a Jungle Jim scholar, but I was familiar with books, and had seen a couple of the serial episodes, which were good campy fun.
Sandy Jarrell: No experience at all! I knew he was an Alex Raymond character, that’s it.
Sandy, was there a certain visual feel that you wanted for the book? What were some of your touchstones for the look of the series?
SJ: I like drawing foliage more than the next guy, so that worked out nicely. Touchstones? Joe Kubert’s “Tarzan” – not that you can tell from looking, but I tried. Kubert is the unmatched king of the jungle, and a stack of Tarzans was at my side throughout issue 1.
The character has had a ton of prior incarnations, across all forms of media – was there one, in particular, that appealed to you guys? Or, was this more of an opportunity to take a classic character and update him without needing to be beholden to anything or anyone?
PT: I really wanted to rip him free of much of what had gone before. Jim himself is a solid character, and I didn’t mess around too much, there… though I certainly buffed away some aspects and took others all the way up to eleven. My main thing was, not a lot of today’s readership was going to have any intricate knowledge of Jim, so I wanted to make sure everyone knew that that was fine, that nobody had to do any research or scour any online auctions to find the old comics and the secrets of Jim’s past. So, we created a whole new playground for him, and reinvented a couple characters, like Lille, so that we could create our own thing, and… more importantly… readers could have their own thing.
Is there a desire, when working with a property that is this old, to attempt to be too locked in to what the character has been or, conversely, to attempt to make it ‘too’ modern? How do you find the balance between tossing out the baby with the bathwater and putting the character on a pedestal?
PT: I think the essential thing, here, is always the essential thing when I’m writing: am I having fun? Am I being entertained? Because that translates into the readers being entertained. As a reader, I can always tell when a creative team isn’t engaged and invested in a project. So, sitting down, I always try to create characters that make me happy, whether that’s the charm of “Bandette,” or the horror in my “Colder” series with Juan Ferreyra, and certainly here in “Jungle Jim” with Sandy. Basically it’s the “kick out the jams and damn the torpedoes” school of writing.
This iteration of Jungle Jim seems vastly different than prior incarnations, starting with the location. Arboria has long been a location in the Flash Gordon mythos – Paul, why did you choose to set the book on an alien planet, rather than on Earth?
PT: It’s something I discussed with Handsome Editor Nate Cosby, how to make Jungle Jim a part of an overall mythos, so that the King characters lived in a unified universe. And, one of the things we discussed is that Jungle Jim needs a jungle, but does he need an Earth jungle? Because the universe is a grand place and there’s lots of jungles. In fact, there was this whole big forest planet that “Flash Gordon” writer Jeff Parker was bringing to life in tandem with artist Even Shaner. Why couldn’t Jim be there? We did want to keep Jim as an Earthman, though. The whys and wherefores of that will come to light in upcoming issues. Part of my decision on that part was that I very much wanted to keep Jim as actually being the Jungle Jim from prior incarnations… not just a guy with the same name.
The characters in the book range from aliens to beast men to humans (or, at the least, humanoids). Was there a conscious decision made to make the book more diverse than just ‘humans hang out in the jungle,’ or is that just an after effect of the story you are telling?
PT: A little of both. Even a cursory glance through my scripts will find notes to keep characters diverse in as many ways as possible. I always heave a sigh when I pick open a comic (or any other type of media) and see… for instance… a Times Square crowd scene where 99% of the characters are white men and women between the ages of 18 and 35. That’s not the way the world really is, and why not reflect the truth of the wonderful diversity we share? It’s even more interesting to look at! And, placing it on Arboria, we have an even greater range to play with, especially with the addition of the beast men. And, we wanted to stress the beast men, and how Ming made them in his “Forge,” since the existence of the Forge is an integral part of our storyline.
Sandy, when working on an alien world, with such diverse species, are you able to really cut loose and be freer in your approach, or are you still doing things like searching for reference or making sure your work matches, tonally, Arboria’s appearance in the prior iterations of “Flash Gordon?”
SJ: Boy, did I use reference. Animal pics, Shaner’s “Flash Gordon” issues as well as his Jim design. I expect that by issue 4 there’ll be more of me “cutting loose”.
The first issue was, more or less, world building and myth sharing about Jim, until his last page reveal somewhat undercuts the mythological creature and replaces him with a dude ashamed of being pantless. Was there concern about taking one quarter of his story and dedicating it to something that is somewhat disconnected from the ‘main’ story?
PT: Yeah. Definitely. But I ultimately decided that I wanted to do some world-building, story-building, character-building, with the mythos of Jungle Jim being just as important as his truth. If Jim was around for the first issue, it would have been impossible to speak much about his mystery, his legend, and so on. But, yeah… as you say… when we finally reveal him, we cut him down to size by taking his pants. That’s just how Sandy and I play. We’re stone cold.
Sandy – what freedom did the first issue’s character, rather than plot, driven nature, give you artistically?
SJ: The freedom to cram 3-5 characters into nearly every panel! Mostly I had to concern myself with facial expressions, because that’s where most of the story was. And that’s another of my favorite things to do. I’m an acting and foliage guy.
I found it so refreshing how casually Kugor and Lille’s relationship is established, not to mention the matter-of-fact pronouncement of Kugor’s homosexuality. Paul, was it important to you to ground such fantastical characters into such, for lack of better word, human terms, like addiction and sexuality?
PT: Absolutely. I always want my characters to ring true as individuals, and that means hitting at the core of who these people are, not just some simplistic “they fight for justice!” or “enemy of evil!” or some trope like that, but what they might order at a café, or who might catch their eye, or what they’ll do for a friend, and what they won’t do for a friend. Because of that, I often think in terms of, “if this person actually existed, would you feel like you truly knew them, or just knew their name?”
Finally – for someone who has never heard of Jungle Jim, who didn’t read the Parker/Shaner “Flash Gordon,” and who, perhaps, have never read a Dynamite comic – what does this book offer? Sell them on giving the book a shot.
PT: Gut level adventure and drama is what we’re going here, with a dash of the rogue from Jungle Jim. I wanted to see how a group of disparate characters could band together against not only the greater overall tyranny of Ming, but an intensely personal aspect of it, in the scheduled execution of Lille’s brother. Basically, a pulp adventure romp, but removed from all the tired tropes of that genre. If you like the early Indiana Jones movies, or the Flashman novels, or watching deadly drama and witty humor French-kiss each other, this series is for you.
SJ: A pantsless hero.
