Jungle Stories

 

Jungle Stories ran quarterly for 59 issues from 1938 until 1954, with each issue carrying a short novel featuring Tarzan knock-off Ki-Gor, with the rest of each issue filled out with unrelated jungle tales by a variety of pulp writers.  One of the 'exotic' pulps, which also included such things as South Seas Adventures, Jungle Stories tapped into the appetite for bizarre African jungle adventures sparked by Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan series.  The Ki-Gor stories which led every issue were written under a house name, with their quality varying significantly according to the actual author.  The best of them are very highly rated by pulp fans, who put some of them on a par with the genuine Tarzan stories.  In their day, they were hugely popular.  As can be seen from the cover above (the Winter 1943-44 issue - the cover painting was later re-used for the Winter 1953 issue, with different stories), like the Tarzan stories they imitated, the Ki-Gor series frequently included fantasy elements, in this case dinosaurs and a lost world.  

Just as Tarzan had Jane, Ki-Gor had Helene, who frequently sported a leopard-skin bikini on the covers.  She was also frequently pictured being tied up and/or menaced by various wild creatures, from dinosaurs to lions and, inevitably, gorillas.  When not being bound and menaced, she was being abducted by the usual cast of villainous white hunters, witch doctors and, yes, gorillas.  Just for variety, it is occasionally Ki-Gor who is tied up, with a whip or spear wielding Helene coming to his rescue.  Ki-Gor also had native allies, including Massai chief Tembu george and pygmy N'Geeso.  As with the Tarzan stories, the Africa these stories depicted had next to nothing to do with the real continent, something which must have become ever more apparent in the post-war period.  This growing public awareness of the reality of modern Africa undoubtedly contributed to the eventual demise of Jungle Stories and Ki-Gor, (the Africa inhabited by Tarzan in his fifties and sixties films is notably less exotic than that of the original novels).  But they had a good run, lasting virtually to the end of pulp magazines.