{"id":4209,"date":"2024-11-18T08:43:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-18T12:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=4209"},"modified":"2026-09-27T18:30:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T21:30:20","slug":"minor-super-villain-663-the-jungle-demon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/?p=4209","title":{"rendered":"MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 663: THE JUNGLE DEMON"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Jungle Comics 006, 1940) <\/p>\n

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The Jungle Demon starts out as an unnamed boy lost in the jungle and true to the old trope he is found and nurtured by a beast – we’ve seen it many times before. The beast in this case is a mind-bogglingly large constrictor snake, which is fun. Boy grows to man and he and the snake (charmingly named “Powerhouse”) are at peace with the people and animals of the jungle until one day the still-unnamed young man chows down on what turns out to be some AD&D Alignment-flipping berries and Nice Boy becomes the Jungle Demon.<\/p>\n

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My memory had filled in some details and I was thinking of this fellow as one of the big Fantomah villains but in fact although he talks a big game about conquering the Jungle, mostly he just steals jewels and defrauds his workers. <\/p>\n

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Fantomah steps in a couple of times throughout the story to warn the Jungle Demon away from pursuing his darker impulses (pulling down a city to build a palace, enslaving people with dark majicks, etc) but he just can’t help but be evil and eventually she is forced to feed him an antidote salad to reverse the effects of the berries (and<\/i> she exiles him and his snake to an isolated plateau, which seems a bit mean). I hadn’t really thought about it before but this tendency of Fantomah’s to watch the unfolding action but not really step in until she does so decisively at the moment of crisis is the equivalent to Stardust the Super Wizard’s very long commute: a way for there to be a story with an effectively omnipotent protagonist in which anything actually happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Jungle Comics 006, 1940)  The Jungle Demon starts out as an unnamed boy lost in the jungle and true to the old trope he is found and nurtured by a beast – we’ve seen it many times before. The beast in this case is a mind-bogglingly large constrictor snake, which is fun. Boy grows to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,46,98,99,556,2164,131,23,29,7,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-5","category-conquest","category-fantomah","category-fiction-house","category-jekyll-hyde","category-jungle-demon","category-magic","category-minor-super-villain","category-reformed","category-the","category-thief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4210,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4209\/revisions\/4210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theskeletoncurse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}