Lorna the Jungle Girl #20
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeLorna the Jungle Girl #20 sits near the tail end of Atlas Comics' most sustained experiment with the jungle-girl genre — a run that began in 1953 and made Lorna one of the few female characters in what became the Marvel Universe to headline her own long-running title through that decade. The issue marks the first appearance of the Silent Claw, a villain whose gimmick — an ordinary man committing crimes behind a monstrous-sounding identity — typifies the grounded, human-scale antagonists that distinguished the Don Rico scripts from more fantastical fare. Structurally, the lead story also showcases the recurring narrative tension that gave the series its personality: Greg Knight's stubborn insistence that a woman has no place in the jungle, countered every issue by Lorna outperforming him entirely. While the character never crossed over into Marvel's Silver Age revival, the series as a whole was deemed worthy of two waves of reprinting — 1970s newsstand issues and later hardcover collections — affirming its place as a document of mid-century Atlas storytelling.
ComicBooks.com Value
Show all 9 grades ▾
This exact issue on ebay
Read it digitally
Sell my copy
Have this issue — or a whole collection? Get a fair offer from us, skip the marketplace fees and the hassle.
We Buy Collections ▸History
The series was created by writer Don Rico and artist Werner Roth, who launched Lorna in Jungle Queen #1 (July 1953) at Atlas Comics, Marvel's 1950s predecessor imprint operating under editor Stan Lee. Rico, a veteran Timely/Atlas hand who wrote every script in the run, was joined starting with issue #13 by penciler Jay Scott Pike, who carried interior art duties through the series' conclusion — including issue #20. The cover of #20 was produced separately, with Carl Burgos on layouts and Stan Goldberg on colors, consistent with Atlas's practice of using dedicated cover artists rather than the interior team. By 1956, when #20 shipped, the Comics Code Authority had already been in effect for roughly two years, and Pike himself has recounted being required to revise artwork — reducing figure-hugging costumes — to meet Code standards during this period of the series.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Release date: April 4, 1956; cover date: July 1956 — published by Atlas Comics (Marvel's 1950s predecessor).
- First and only appearance of the Silent Claw (Earth-616), the issue's antagonist — revealed to be a man named Jason who uses a clawed metal gauntlet to stage attacks, not a supernatural creature.
- Lead story titled 'The Silent Claw!' — written by Don Rico, penciled by Jay Scott Pike, inked by Christopher Rule.
- Cover art by Carl Burgos (layouts) and Stan Goldberg (colors); interior backup stories also feature John Romita Sr. and Syd Shores on art, confirming the dense multi-artist anthology format typical of Atlas issues.
- Recurring cast: Lorna, her companion chimp Mikki, and jungle guide/foil Greg Knight — whose dismissal of Lorna as out of place in the jungle is again defied by the lead story's resolution.
- Jay Scott Pike, the series' interior artist from #13 onward, was a Marine veteran and Art Students League alumnus who worked across Atlas war, horror, and jungle titles simultaneously, and co-created Jann of the Jungle (with Rico) in the same period.
- Don Rico wrote every Lorna script across the entire 26-issue combined run (Jungle Queen #1–5 and Jungle Girl #6–26) — an unusual degree of single-writer consistency for an Atlas anthology title.
- Selected Lorna stories were later reprinted in the 1970s Marvel title Jungle Action (#1–4, 6) and subsequently collected in the Marvel Masterworks: Atlas Era Jungle Adventure hardcover series.
Full credits
Reprints
Reprinted in Lorna the Jungle Girl #15
Reviews
Reader reviews
No reader reviews yet.