3 out of 5

Yeah, it’s about what I expected.  The swaggery lookin’ Jungle Dude on the cover (courtesy Darwyn Cooke) sportin’ a smirk and a bloody sword; some more classic comic hi-jinx in the vein of Waid’s Daredevil or recent Rocketeer run.

But like a lot of those “in the vein of” books (including many of Waid’s own), it doesn’t quite hit the mark.  I’ve been poking at Tobin’s work since digging Bandette, but his cheeky sensibilities – when in play – seem best suited to that fully cheeky world.  Here in Jungle Jim land, on an alien planet where our Lord of the Jungle is recruited to battle the dictator Ming, Tobin way overplays JJs self-centered charm (read: obnoxiousness) to counter the semi-serious war-torn setting.  The heightened pulp vibe works pretty well initially, Jim’s Jungle friends taking out an army one by one, then speeding through some rushed but acceptable setup of our other characters (I can appreciate that some stuff may have happened in King’s Field, or whatever the lead-in series was, so a speedy non-editorialed dialogue summary works), but once our lead makes his appearance, Paul takes it as a cue to jump into Bandette mode and, to me, it’s not a perfect match.  Still, despite this, the book is fun – or is good at convincing us it’s fun – and smoothly lays out the pieces for however many arcs to come to allow it to be a simple but quirky adventure book.

Sandy Jarrell’s art works in the same dashed-off but clean vibe as Bandette’s Colleen Coover, though he isn’t quite the master of framing and pacing that Coover is – or at least consistently so – and at moments the foreshortening or sizing is way off on a character, which ends up making something look really silly in an unintended way.  Glancing at Jarrell’s other work, JJ seems a bit sketchier, so I wonder if he’s trying a new style or if maybe there were some timing issues.  I do also have to call out Tobin’s annoying habit (also seen in Colder) of carrying a conversation on between panels when significant time has obviously passed between said panels.  This can be a technique for humor, or punctuation, but he seems to use it just as a spacing maneuver – we need a scene change here, but I don’t want to cram all of these words in the previous section, so… SOLVED.  But man, it bugs the duff out of me.  And as a last complaint, there was at least one instance of a word balloon attributed to what must’ve been the wrong character.  Either that or I wasn’t following Paul’s intentions.  But I’m leaning toward the former, in which case – Nate Cosby, editor, why must you do this to me when I love your writing so?

Anyhow, all of those little bips and boops aside, I stand by the fun-ness.  I think if you’re digging the classic comic revitalization of books like DD and you want to be cool by buying something not on Marvel or DC, Jungle Jim would probably be a good, easy-to-enjoy addition to your pulls.