But wait – there’s more!

 

Yes – more Jungle Girls and Cavewomen, enough for a shallow dip into my usual twenty special mentions to my top ten, albeit taking the trope from comics to other media and beyond!

 

(1) WIKIPEDIA & TV TROPES

 

The basic starting point to see just how prolific jungle girls are – particularly in books, comics, film and TV – “Jungle Girl” in Wikipedia and “Jungle Princess” in TV Tropes. All of my top ten are featured in one or other of those articles – as well as many of my special mentions, although a number of special mentions are my own references apart from these articles…

 

(2) JANE PORTER – TARZAN

 

She may not have started off as one but certainly ends up as or close to one as Tarzan’s partner – and one of the main influences for the trope.

 

(3) 1 MILLION YEARS B.C.

 

Giving us the iconic image of Raquel Welch as cavewoman in fur bikini.

 

(4) FANTASY ART (FRAZETTA)

 

Jungle girls and cavewoman – or female figures very like or influenced by them – are a staple of fantasy art, particularly by one of my favorite fantasy artists, Frank Frazetta

 

(5) FERAL GIRL

 

The female version of a wider trope in its own right – the feral child, typically that raised by wild animals (but can include other scenarios such as isolation from human contact). In my eyes, this trope overlaps with that of the jungle girl or cavewoman – particularly for what I anticipate the reality would be for someone like Tarzan raised by apes – although it obviously makes for a somewhat….wilder and less photogenic version.

 

(6) AYESHA & LA

 

Not really jungle girls but arguably jungle princesses and an influence on the jungle girl trope – the bad girl African queens that are antagonists in H. Rider Haggard’s “She” and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan books respectively.

 

(7) ANN DARROW – KING KONG

 

The beauty to King Kong’s beast – perhaps not quite the archetypal jungle girl but overlapping with it

 

(8) SAVAGE LAND

 

The weird tropical prehistoric lost land within Antarctica (!) in Marvel Comics – home to jungle girl Shanna the She-Devil but seemingly also a place to transform other characters into jungle girls, such as the Savage Land versions of the X-women in art by J. Scott Campbell and others.

 

(9) NOVA – PLANET OF THE APES

 

Well, one thing you can’t complain about the Planet of the Apes is that it seemingly turned the female part of the human population into hot (and apparently mute) scantily clad jungle girls or cavewomen, at least if Linda Harrison’s Nova is anything to go by.

 

You maniacs, indeed

 

(10) LEELA – DR WHO

 

One of Dr Who’s hottest companions – jungle girl in all but name.

 

But wait – there’s even more! That’s right – the second round of my special mentions or eleventh to twentieth special mentions. As usual, this is where I splash out with some wilder entries – we’re getting to the bottom of the jungle girl iceberg here, people!

 

 

(11) SHAMANA – FLESH (2000 AD)

 

The feral girl type of jungle girl (or cavewoman).

 

Flesh was a fun story in the 2000 AD anthology comic – home of the Judge Dredd comic. The titular flesh is dinosaur meat, harvested by time-travelling humans from a meat-starved future – I think it may have originated as one of Tharg’s Future Shocks – one-off single episode stories with a twist – in which the twist was that time-travelling humans “farming” dinosaurs for meat were revealed as the reason for their extinction. Such a premise was too good to leave to one episode, hence it became a recurring series. One part of that series involved Shamana, who by something of a freak incident, was raised by a carnivorous dinosaur as one of her own litter – ultimately to lead the dinosaurs in an Animal Farm style revolution against the human slaughterhouse herders

 

(12) LIBBY IN THE LOST WORLD – PENTHOUSE COMIX

 

Jungle girl by Penthouse Comix. Yes – the same Penthouse as for the magazine, competitor to Playboy. They did comics too (along with Playboy) – which were (surprisingly?) good.

 

I will stand by the cartoons and comics in Playboy and Penthouse as worthy of special mention for comics in general, featuring some real comic talent (in both senses of comics and comedy).

 

Yes, yes – there was obviously also a focus on erotic illustration or narrative. I’ll leave my personal favorites – O Wicked Wanda or Sweet Chastity for special mention elsewhere.

 

Anyway, Libby was stranded by a plane crash in a prehistoric lost world, becoming a jungle girl or cavewoman – and apparently spending most of her time in states of undress.

 

(13) JULIE WINTERS – THE MAXX

 

The Maxx is a comic with an interesting premise. While the titular character is a homeless man in the real world, in an alternate reality known as the Outback he is the powerful protector of the Jungle-Queen, who exists in the real world as Julie Winters, a freelance social worker who often bails Maxx out of jail.

 

(14) EVOLET – 10,000 BC

 

Well, I suppose 10,000 BC was marginally more accurate to prehistory than One Million Years BC – emphasis on the marginally, given its cavepeople with model looks and alien Atlanteans using mammoths (and slaves) to build pyramids.

 

Anyway, blue-eyed Evolet was the ‘cavewoman’ from it. And yes – the blue eyes were a plot point.

 

(15) JUNGLE PRINCESS – ADVENTURE TIME

 

This animated series had a plethora of princesses so of course it had a Jungle Princess

 

(16) MYTHOLOGY – EVE

 

The original Jungle Girl!

 

No, seriously.

 

There’s probably a few primal girls from mythology that would qualify as the contemporary jungle girl character but perhaps none more so than Eve – with Eden as her jungle and its beasts at her beck and call. Certainly her visual representations tend to evoke the contemporary comics art of jungle girls, albeit usually more naked (or leafy).

 

(17) WORLD – PREHISTORY & ANTHROPOLOGY

 

I feel that among all the fictional (or mythic) jungle girls and cavewomen there needs to be special mention for the actual jungle girls – female members of the various tribes or societies that lived in the tropical jungles or rainforests of the world, albeit usually less blonde or with less pinup appearance than the jungle girls of comics – and of course the actual ‘cavewomen’ of our ancestors

 

(18) CELEBRITY COSPLAY – JOSEPHINE BAKER & KATY PERRY

 

There’s probably any number of celebrities who ‘cosplay’ as jungle girls, at least for Halloween but also for performances – dancer Josephine Baker was famed for her routine of this nature, while more recently Katy Perry did it for one of her videos

 

(19) SF – ALIEN JUNGLE PRINCESS

 

It’s not just a fantasy trope – SF has featured alien jungle princesses, both human females who become jungle girls on alien worlds but also alien females who are effectively also jungle princesses. Hello, Neytiri from Avatar!

 

(20) EROTICA – JUNGLE GIRL & CAVEWOMAN

 

I like to reserve my twentieth special mention for a kink entry – and one can’t help but feel the whole trope ultimately originates in the erotic appeal of a girl in a cheetah or fur bikini.

 

And I do have to confess my own titillation from cheetah print…