From Tarzan and Jane to Ki-Gor and Helene, and
from Zor and Dela to Kalar and Pamela, the several jungle couples from the pulp
and comics traditions are clear iterations of the biblical Genesis story of
Adam and Eve and the loss of earthly paradise. Or, more precisely, a record of
the effort to regain such a paradise. To build it in some lost corner of the
world and to protect it from all foreign threats that might bring about a new
fall. Sure, it has more than a passing resemblance to the luddite worldview, but it seems somehow deeply enticing,
as if touching something deep in the core of our humanity. It speaks to us
about innocence. The irretrievable loss of primal innocence.
It is thus telling that such a loss is
signified by the consciousness of one’s own nudity. The death of innocence
comes with a certain biased perception of nakedness and the body as being somehow
wrong. The fall from innocence brings
with it the death of freedom, as one needs to be shackled to common mores, subject to the diktat of the several
thought polices that segue one after the other throughout time. Oh, but deep in
the jungle, the thought police is at a disadvantage. It needs the force of
numbers of the mindless masses. There, under the shadows of the tallest
canopies, amidst the carnivorous id-beasts and threatened by the purest
instinctual sexuality, it succumbs. To regain paradise, one must regain freedom
– freedom of being.
Innocence is free from convention, free from
moral codes, free from political diktat. Shanna in the above panel is innocence
personified. She exposes her buttocks to us, the readers, indifferent to our
voyeuristic appetites. Brainless people would call it a fuck-me-pose. Well, fuck them, she seems to say. Shanna is
undoubtedly gorgeous, the pose erotic, the compositional identification with
saberteeth Zabu, savagely sexual. But everything about her speaks of innocence
and freedom. She can’t avoid our eyes, I’m sure she knows that, but she is free
from such considerations. Her beauty is her own. Her pose is that of a curious
child, intent on a fairytale, filled with wonder-lust, as if yet unaware of the
effect of her semi-nudity over any intruder, be it Spider-man or the reader.
Shanna and Ka-Zar belong there, in paradise. Spider-man is the interloper,
covered from head to toe as if to isolate himself from paradise. But his costume
is torn here and there, as if bespeaking the fight against nature… or simply
the first steps into embracing it, his body slowly emerging from the
civilization’s chrysalis as a new being.
