The Lost Story Of The Lost City

The nexus of Golden Age weirdness that is Great Comics Publications was opportunistic enough to get the publishing rights to one of the earliest comic book adaptations of a motion picture. The Lost City was a sci-fi serial directed by Harry Revier who also created the controversial exploitation movie Child Bride. This 1935 serial took the idea of a secluded kingdom in the African jungle which adventurous engineer Bruce Gordon discovers as he is searching for the source for some natural disasters that he theorizes are caused by electricity. He and his comrades find the whole operation is run by the evil genius Zolok who used ancient technology inside a mountain in a bid for world domination. Zolok also kidnaps Dr. Manyus and his daughter to create an army of natives genetically altered into giants called walking dead men. The comics adaptation ran in Great Comics #3 and continued in Choice Comics #3 which were the final issues of each title, meaning the comics never completed the entire 12-episode serial. Great Comics Publications' 1942 version leaned more into the racism angle referring to Zolok's test subjects as "black monsters" even though they were just local Africans forcibly given a steroid push by the evil scientist. The comic artist Rudy Palais crafted some impressive visuals for the comic making Zolok's living dead men appear as something out of a mad scientist dream that would just stand like statues when not lumbering looking like Frankenstein. The ongoing narrative featured standard serial cliches like villain's lair deathtraps, jungle intrigue, and a giant six-armed menace that grabbed Zolok for our heroes to hand over to the authorities in the finale. The story was supposed to continue in the unproduced Great Comics #4, but the publisher closed for business before that could happen. The Lost City was not the worst attempt at adapting a film to illustrated format, but considering that the comic came out seven years after the original theatrical release, it could have reduced a portion of the white supremacy that was virulent in the 30's.

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