A Kenya Boy retrospective
Here’s my words on the evolution of Sōji Yamakawa’s best known work not related to Isamu of the Wilderness. Behold the official instalments! Not many people know that they have inspired two bootleg translations, a couple of Taito video games and a bunch of live action knockoffs. They are in turn inspired mainly by Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel In Desert and Wilderness and Don Moore’s international smash hit Jungle Jim comic strip. The Kenya Boy franchise likely began with a proposed Kamishibai play by the Ishinomori school progenitor Sōji Yamakawa, which was so forced and so sleazy that it luckily got canned due to WW2 and various other factors. Thank goodness, it’s good news that the picture story strip came first instead. The hit picture story strip series was made from the 7th of October 1951 to the 4th of October 1955 on the ever infamous Sankei Shimbun newspaper. Children, teens and young adults were addictively reading the unfortunately disposable strips and their l...