Sheena Queen of the Jungle #4

Written by: Marguerite Bennett and Christina Trujillo

Art by: Maria Sanapo & Mario Torrisi

Color by: Ceci De La Cruz

Published by: Dynamite

When dealing with a character that was born from pulp fiction, it it sometimes difficult bringing them into the modern day landscape without them veering too much into camp. Unfortunately, with the fourth issue of Sheena Queen of the Jungle, the campiness of the series has overtaken the storytelling aspects.

When we last left Sheena and her new companion Cano (the modern day man trope), they were beset by a group of “face-stealers” - monsters that have the ability to modify their faces to mimic the people they are about to kill. Only through some quick thinking on the part of Sheena are they able to escape these murderous creatures.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that the comic lost me a little bit. Unlike other properties from the pulp era that have been published as of late, Bennett and Trujillo have veered completely into the “jungle woman”, “bad outsider” tropes with the second half of this issue. So much so, there really isn’t much of quality in the back half of this comic. The plot becomes entirely too predictable, the dialogue goes off the deep end and all this isn’t helped by the art.

Unlike previous issues where Moritat was on art duties, this issue, the task is given to Sanapo and Torrisi. When you have two artists on a book, the key is to have two artists that have similar enough styles that they blend well enough together. Saying that, this isn’t the case in this issue. Characters go from being clean and well inked in one panel, to a complete one eighty in the next. The change is pretty jarring as you are reading. And this isn’t even limited to just the character of Sheena, it goes for all the “human” characters in the comic.

All in all, this was a pretty disappointing fourth issue from a series that showed so much promise at first. Hopefully issue 5 will rebound.