BY JENNIFER M. CONTINO There's a fantastic collection of Sheena classic comics coming out soon from Devil's Due. Film, television and current Sheena scribe Steven de Souza is one of the forces behind this trade. A longtime fan of the Queen of the Jungle, de Souza first read her original adventures when he was eight years old. Now he's creating new adventures, and introducing a whole new generation to this heroine. He sees Sheena as a lot more than a female Tarzan. He regards her as "utterly confident, completely fearless, a noble savage and a true egalitarian."
THE PULSE: I think when I first saw Sheena, I thought of her as a female Tarzan, but what, aside from her gender, truly does set her apart from the Lord of the Jungle?
STEVEN de SOUZA: Sheena was certainly conceived as a female Tarzan, but then again, Tarzan was conceived as an American Mowgli. What sets her apart from her fellow jungle foundlings is that, unlike them, Sheena wasn’t reared by animals, but adopted by an uncontacted tribe. So she is much more integrated in the human world… just not in the industrialized, Western human world.
THE PULSE: When did you first become aware of the character?
de SOUZA: My first experience with Sheena was in what I did not realize at the time was her last Golden Age appearance, the famous 3-D issue. Subsequently I scrounged, borrowed or traded for earlier issues, and the only thing that prevented a total withdrawal syndrome was the TV series followed a year later.
THE PULSE: I would guess a little boy seeing that bikini clad hero might take notice of a few things, but what, aside from her assets, stood out in your mind about Sheena?
de SOUZA: I marveled at her cold-blooded practicality. Although I was only seven I was a precocious and cynical reader and I was already skeptical of the general good guy code of behavior as seen on TV: Heroes who fought fair when their opponents cheated, Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger never shooting first (and then only shooting the gun out of their adversaries’ hands).
Well, long before Han shot first, so did Sheena!
THE PULSE: How have you updated or modernized the heroine for your Devil's Due series?
de SOUZA: The original book had a blind spot, and a deaf spot: It was deaf to its own tin ear on colonialism and racism, and it was blind to the heroine’s sexuality, at least within the covers: No one in the book noticed she was sexy, merely the reader. Placing her in a multi-cultural, post colonial landscape and giving Sheena a multi-racial heritage herself repositions both the character and the world she inhabits. And this time the other characters in the book are looking at her, not just us!
THE PULSE: What elements of Sheena do you feel are intrinsic to the character, no matter where or when the series is set?
de SOUZA: She’s utterly confident, completely fearless, a noble savage and a true egalitarian. And, I must say, all these traits could be found in some of the Golden Age stories.
THE PULSE: When you were thinking about how to reintroduce the character to new audiences, yet remain true to what existing fans of the Jungle Queen were expecting; how did you decide to strike the balance?
de SOUZA: I tried to keep everything that worked, but to make it work for a 21st century audience, rather than an audience weaned on Kipling’s or Edgar Rice Burroughs’ basically 19th century worldviews.
THE PULSE: A lot of people just think of a character like Sheena as eye candy. How tough is it when there are preconceived notions like that to make a character appear three-dimensional and more than just a pretty face?
de SOUZA: We played the early issues very, very real, in motivations, in psychology, even in politics and geography. With the “Sheena Universe” now in place, we’re moving the bar in a bigger, more pulp-like direction now with the special “Trail of the Mapinguari” and the next mini-series.
THE PULSE: You come to comics from outside the box having worked in television and film, among other ventures; how do you think writing for audiences like that gives you an advantage over a writer who has never really experienced working with the "mass market" in mind?
de SOUZA: You have to remember that in my formative years I was nothing but a comics reader, and my original life’s ambition was to write and draw comic books. I started in Hollywood in my 20’s working on shows that were perceived, and even described, as comic-book like: “The Six Million Dollar Man”, “The Bionic Woman”, “The Hardy Boys”… not to mention the all but forgotten shows that chased the same audience (does anyone remember “Lucan”? “Gemini Man”? ) Frankly, NBC and Universal asked me to be the producer and show runner specifically of the original “Knight Rider” because I had a comic book sensibility: My films “Commando” and “The Running Man” were even called comic books by the critics. I just had learned by then to filter it through the structure and format of a television script or motion picture screenplay instead of pages and panels.
THE PULSE: What made you, at this point in your career, even want to write comic books?
de SOUZA: I don’t know if I wanted so much to write a comic book as I wanted to do “Sheena”. In my opinion, it’s the only Golden Age character that hasn’t been done right since, well, the Golden Age. My buddy Paul Aratow gave me the opportunity to do Will Eisner’s “The Spirit” years ago, so now we made it a set.
THE PULSE: You've worked on a lot of comics related films, how was working on adapting a comic to a film, different than creating your own source materials?
de SOUZA: You’re right, I have come to a lot of comic or cartoon adaptations which carried with them a good deal of canon, storylines, or characters: “Judge Dredd” and “The Flintstones” for films, “The Spirit” and “Cadillacs and Dinosaurs” for TV, “Tales from the Crypt” for HBO… and, certainly, it’s arguable that properties like “Street Fighter” and “Tomb Raider”, though video games, share sensibilities with comics. What made those challenging (and, in some cases, disappointing) is they came burdened with years (if not decades) of content, story arcs, reboots and retcons, all of which had various champions at the studios or networks… so settling on what story to tell, and which characters to depict was a never ending battle, even internally: The “Flintstones” sequel, for example, which I had nothing to do with, was in fact the Great Gazoo storyline Hanna –Barbera wanted me to do for the first film: The character was wrong when they added it to the original series to mine the “I Dream of Jeannie”/”My Favorite Martian” currents of the day. And., literally, the right hand and the left hand did not know what they were doing with
“Judge Dredd” – the director was hell-bent on making the roughest “R” rated movie of all time on closed sets in England, while back in Hollywood the studio made a toy deal and a hamburger deal, both predicated on a PG movie! When the film got an “R” (it almost got an NC-17), the toy line was DOA because the networks will not air promotions for toys connected to R-rated films, period, and of course the hamburger deal was entirely about the free action figure… and since both toys and fast food campaigns were days away from starting when the “R” boom fell, the meals weren’t happy - and neither were the toy and burger company lawyers.
With “Sheena” I didn’t have a company or a rights holder with an endless laundry list of supporting characters, villains, stories or arcs that “had to be” – so instead of paring away – or making compromises with different camps – I could selectively build up a new canon, not struggle through an old one.
THE PULSE: What have you enjoyed the most about getting the chance to work with Sheena at this point in time?
de SOUZA: It’s as close as you can get to a pristine Golden Age character. Everybody has heard of it and the previous attempts to adapt it were either limited by budget (the 50’s TV show) or by a juvenile, dated approach. For such a famous character, it’s fresh ground.
THE PULSE: Why was it important to you personally that a Golden Age of Sheena: The Best of the Queen of the Jungle collection happen?
de SOUZA: There’s only been a handful of reprints over the years, rarely in color, and – with the exception of the 3-D do-over in the 80’s with Dave Steven’s famous cover – never even restored or remastered.
Now that Sheena’s come back, we wanted her new fans to see where she’d been.
THE PULSE: What were the challenges of picking what was truly the best to include here? Was there a lot of differences between her stories or were there a lot of ones with the same general idea and just a few nuances?
de SOUZA: There were some great breakout stories, but there were also a number of things that were overworked: Certainly, Sheena was regularly breaking up slave-trading rings, but maybe they were just a little too often hot-drawn-by-Matt-Baker female slaves. And there were a lot of Sheena meets the fill-in-the-blank men: The Leopard Men, the Gorilla Men, the Bat-Men, the Snake Men.
THE PULSE: Which of the stories included is your personal favorite?
de SOUZA: My favorite is definitely the one I provided footnotes for, where Sheena’s loyal villagers are in a race with the villains…. a race to get their tobacco to market! The happy ending is when they all light up!
THE PULSE: What's coming up in the monthly Sheena series?
de SOUZA: The next three issues will follow up on the shocking last panel of the “Trail of the Mapinguari” special that will be at your comic book dealer in a matter of days!
THE PULSE: What's happening with some of your other projects like The Ghost Who Walks? I know a lot of comic fans are eager to see that film happen.
de SOUZA: That has been announced and pushed back so many times in the six years since I worked on it I have no idea what’s going on. All I can tell you is I tried to do what I’ve done with “Sheena”, make a Golden Age character work for today without discarding what made it unique in the first place. The last I heard, it had been re-written by a succession of people to give the Phantom (and I quote) “Batman” like gadgets and “Matrix” like martial arts wire-fighting.
Not that I don’t like martial arts or wire-work… I expect a good deal of both in “Return of the Ninja”, a picture we will shoot later this year with the original Ninja, Sho Kashugi. In June, my suspense anthology “Unknown Sender” will premiere on the Internet at target=_blank>www.Strike.TV , a new domain with original programming from some of Hollywood’s top filmmakers, on both sides of the camera. And this Christmas look for my animated TV special, “Gotta Catch Santa”, which is basically a Rankin-Bass holiday special fallen into in the wrong hands, with William Shatner as a tough, Hemingway-esque Claus. (And, BTW, based on a comic book!)
THE PULSE: What conventions will you be at this year?
de SOUZA: I will be in San Diego, under the Devil’s Due “Sheena” banner, and if things go as planned with a flesh-n’-blood Sheena at my elbow.
The ongoing Sheena series is in stores monthly. The collection should be in stores this summer.
Posts: 20891 | From: PA | Registered: Aug 2002
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I remember Lucan and Gemini Man (David McCallum).
I'm sure Jen does, too.
"The Spirit" TV adaptation had Sam "Flash Gordon" Jones and Nana "Deep Space Nine" Visitor.
I believe there was a syndicated "Sheena" TV series with Gena Lee Nolin of "Baywatch" too.
Posts: 3435 | From: San Bruno | Registered: Aug 2002
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Looking forward to the collection of classic Sheena. Always loved the Jungle Girl genre. Recently did my own take on it in my "Simone & Ajax" comics on ComicMix.com.
-------------------- Fun, new, full-color tales of "The Adventures of Simone & Ajax" every other Thursday at www.ComicMix.com!. Watch www.pepoy.com for news. Posts: 6 | Registered: Jul 2005
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