Paragon Presents #2

History

Paragon Publications was founded by Bill Black in 1969, and Paragon Presents launched as one of the company's first comic titles in 1970 alongside White Savage. Because virtually all writing, penciling, inking, and editing during this era was handled by Black alone, the company could only produce about three issues per year total across all titles — making each individual issue a concentrated expression of his creative vision. Issue #2, subtitled 'Dark Continent,' was produced entirely by Black except for Dan Adkins's Sheena pinup and centerfold contributions, and it came at a moment when Black was simultaneously developing Captain Paragon (a character born directly from his legally shelved attempt to revive the original Captain Marvel) and constructing the jungle-adventure corner of his emerging shared universe.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of Tara (Tara Fremont), the jungle she-cat, who would later become a major member of the Femforce super-team; the 1974 Paragon series Tara on the Dark Continent explicitly references this issue as Tara's debut adventure.
• First appearance of Janis Lawson, a supporting character who recurs throughout the Tara mythos and ultimately concludes the 'Beast-Men' storyline as a designated caretaker of the Dark Continent alongside Charles Lambert.
• All story content — script, pencils, and inks — credited solely to Bill Black, reflecting the one-man-band production reality of early Paragon Publications, where Black handled nearly all creative duties on the entire line.
• The Captain Paragon serial depicts the hero in an LSD-induced irrational state after a 15-year supernatural trance inflicted by the villain the Shroud during a Korean War mission; he is found by Nicola (Nicole) Latimer and placed under medical observation by her father Dr. Richard Latimer.
• The alien character Mara/Proxima appears in the Captain Paragon story, transferring power she has taken from Paragon to herself and escaping in an alien spacecraft — an early piece of the cosmic mythology that would underpin AC's later universe.
• The Shade (Roger Brant) appears in two separate story segments: one in which industrialist T.C. Fremont offers Brant a design job, and a second in which the Shade uses his ability to enter a villain's subconscious to defeat Randall Crowley and save Tara and Janis.
• The issue includes a multi-page editorial on Sheena's comics history (covering her 1930s–1950s appearances), illustrated by Dan Adkins, Bill Black, and R.H. Webb, along with photographs of Irish McCalla from the 1950s Sheena TV series — a signature blend of new fiction and Golden Age scholarship.
• The back cover is Bill Black's hand-drawn recreation of Dick Ayers's cover to The Ghost Rider (Magazine Enterprises, 1950 series) #8 (August 1952), an early example of the reverent Golden Age homage work that would become an AC hallmark. The Tara story material was later re-used as the basis for stories in Jungle Girl Retro Comics #4 (1997), and the Tara story itself was reprinted in Tara on the Dark Continent #2 (1979).

Cast · 21 characters

Full credits

Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers