South Sea Girl, The Non-Jungle Girl

Leader Enterprises, also known as Universal Phoenix Features, had a brief time as a comic book publisher starting in 1946. Since this was post WWII, most of their content was adventure and comedy titles. One anthology was Seven Seas Comics telling tales of pirates, sea voyages, and the compelling Tugboat Tessie, plus a character featured in each issue was South Sea Girl who was created by graphic novel progenitor Manning Lee Stokes and drawn by the groundbreaking black artist Matt Baker who most comics fans are familiar with his cheesecake style on characters like Phantom Lady and Tiger Girl. The title character of these tropical tales was Alani who was referred to as South Sea Girl because white tourists weren't very good at remembering the names of natives in the South Pacific. Taking place in the Vanishing Isles, Alani wasn't just some island princess who only knew how to do the hula, but was in fact the queen of her people and very knowledgeable of the outer world who had disguised herself as a modern woman following two criminals to her homeland who she learned were planning on using the islands as hidden headquarters for international bad guys. Alani teamed up with the studly blonde Captain Ted to help shoo the villains away, as well as collaborating for further adventures with a-bomb plots, wild animals, and a roaming beast man. South Sea Girl's adventures were limited, but she had her comics reprinted by several other publishers such as in Super Comics' Fantastic Adventures, another was in the pages of Ajax-Farrel's Voodoo which had one story with her still under the name Alani but in the same issue renamed her Misto which had an original page of artwork giving her a new origin as a New York citizen who used burning incense to talk to ancient spirits that tell her to go back to the Vanishing Isles which here was renamed the Diamond Isles. Voodoo continued to rebrand Alani several other times, once as Olane now living on the Banished Islands, another as Adana, and then as El'Nee, so you had five totally different characters that all looked alike and everyone one of them just happened to by rulers of a similar South Pacific tribe. Ajax-Farrel reloaded South Sea Girl in their limited series of Vooda where the title character who was an island queen is now a jungle princess, although for some reason she started out with raven hair, and then in the last issue they changed her natural dark hair color to light brown. South Sea Girl had about as many incarnations as your average time lord, but considering her original limited run, it's bizarre to see her getting cloned more times than Jango Fett.

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