First Sheena Cover by Lou Fine on Jumbo Comics #9, Up for Auction

Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: fiction house, lou fine, sheena

The historic Jumbo Comics series got one step closer to the iconic title it would become with format changes and a Lou Fine Sheena cover.

For the first eight issues of its run, Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics was essentially a tabloid-sized 10.5″ x 14.5″ and also had black and white interiors.  Even the covers of this early part of the run looked nothing like the iconic adventure series that Jumbo Comics would become. Although Sheena is the most famous character to be introduced to the American readership in the series, the character got little respect on the covers for the first few issues.  She was relegated to a small inset on a few covers for Jumbo Comics #1-8, with varying costume designs, while the central image of these covers was typically humor-based.  Jumbo Comics #9 shrinks to 8.25″ x 10.25″ (still wider than a standard Golden Age comic book) and changes to full color.  Finally, Jumbo Comics #10 becomes a standard-sized (and also full-color) Golden Age comic book.  Jumbo Comics #9 also dispenses with the multiple insets and humor themes of the earlier covers and gives us one full cover image, by Lou Fine, and with Sheena on it.  Arguably the first true Sheena cover, there’s a CGC VG/FN 5.0 Cream to off-white pages of the rare Jumbo Comics #9 (Fiction House, 1939) up for auction in the 2024 August 1 – 2 Rarities of the Golden Age Comics Showcase Auction #40259 at Heritage Auctions.

Sheena was created by Will Eisner, Jerry Iger, and Mort Meskin at the behest of a publisher called Editors Press Service.  Sheena debuted in a one-page feature in the UK weekly tabloid Wags #46, which according to GCD is dated January 14, 1938.  It is perhaps worth pointing out that nobody seems to know of the current existence of a copy of this issue, and that the early issues of Wags (there’s also an Australian version, which apparently differs from the UK version) are sparsely documented at best. According to historian Denis Gifford in the International Book of Comics, which seems to be the best reference on this matter, Editors Press Service split with its UK agent, who took the British rights to many of the syndicated reprints that Wags contained with him, causing Editors Press Service to seek out original material.  Editors Press Service’s founder turned to Jerry Iger, who he had apparently become acquainted with during the brief run of Wow What A Magazine in 1936.

Wags publisher Editors Press Service was founded by Joshua B. Powers in 1933.  In a tidbit that seems to have been sourced from the comics history book Men of Tomorrow and widely repeated since, apparently Jerry Iger was under the impression that Powers was a former U.S. government covert agent who had operated in South America.  Based on a few surrounding facts, this does not seem unlikely, though perhaps not “former.”  At its founding in 1933, Editors Press Service’s editor was Carlos Dávila, who seems to have come to this job directly from his previous gig of having assumed power as the Provisional President of Chile in the wake of the anarchy that existed in that country following the resignation of President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo.  In a 1977 article on the CIA’s worldwide propaganda network, the New York Times outed Editors Press Service as a CIA front for the dissemination of propaganda and Powers himself as a CIA officer.

All this aside, Eisner and Iger retained the rights to the material that ran in Wags during its run (Wags UK ended in 1938, the Australian version ended in 1940) and subsequently used it in Jumbo Comics for Fiction House.  GCD claims that the Sheena costume-change story in Jumbo Comics #10 first appeared in an unspecified issue of Wags Australia.  But since Sheena issues of Wags seemingly don’t hit the public market, ever (Heritage has never sold any, for example), the Jumbo Comics versions remain hugely important to collectors.

Before Jumbo Comics #9, Sheena was shown wearing a relatively nondescript fur or plain animal skin dress.  On the cover of this issue, she’s shown wearing leopard skin but the design isn’t quite what she would soon become.  Then in Jumbo Comics #10, the storyline ends with a lion attacking Sheena and ruining her dress.  When a leopard suddenly attacks as well, Sheena’s companion Bob shoots it, and Sheena decides to use its skin to make a new outfit.  Given that these Sheena stories had been done months in advance for their debut in Wags, it seems likely that Jumbo Comics #9 cover artist Lou Fine had already gotten the memo on the new outfit by the time he created that issue’s cover.  Fine’s cover for Jumbo Comics #10 is a science fiction classic for Jumbo’s Weird Stories feature.

An important early Fiction House comic and arguably the first true Sheena cover, there’s a CGC VG/FN 5.0 Cream to off-white pages of the rare Jumbo Comics #9 (Fiction House, 1939) up for auction in the 2024 August 1 – 2 Rarities of the Golden Age Comics Showcase Auction #40259 at Heritage Auctions.

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