Real Heroes #5
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeReal Heroes #5 stands as one of the earliest known American comic book adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book characters, bringing Mowgli and his nemesis Shere Khan to the four-color page at precisely the cultural moment when Zoltan Korda's 1942 live-action film starring Sabu was reaching wide audiences. Published under the educational banner of Parents' Magazine Press, the issue placed these beloved literary figures alongside genuine wartime heroes, signaling that the medium's educators saw Kipling's fable of survival and identity as morally instructive for a generation of children in wartime America. As one of the few documented pre-Dell, pre-Disney comic renditions of these characters, it occupies a slender but real place in the lineage of Mowgli and Shere Khan's long migration from Victorian prose to sequential art.
Real Heroes #5 is an anthology featuring stories about historical figures who exemplified courage and justice. The issue includes "Sailor to the Rescue" featuring Coast Guard Commander Waesche, a tale of General Bacon's 1676 rebellion against tyranny whose spirit lives on in the Declaration of Independence signed 100 years later, and a story about the Lewis and Clark Expedition in which Clark and Montgomery face danger from Native Americans while traveling to Louisville. The final story depicts Billy Hull's boy delivering an important speech to townspeople about ending high tariffs on world trade, with the governor encouraging him toward public service and a career in law.
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Real Heroes was launched in 1941 by Parents' Magazine Press — the same publishing arm of The Parents' Institute behind True Comics — as part of a deliberate effort to offer children an educational alternative to superhero and adventure comics, built around biographical and literary storytelling in comics form. Issue #5, dated July 1942 and on-sale May 1, 1942, was edited by art editor Ralph Ellsworth and managing editor G. G. Telfer, the same editorial team steering the series through its wartime run. The series habitually mixed profiles of real military and historical figures with adaptations of classic literature, and the inclusion of a Jungle Book story in this issue almost certainly reflects the broad public awareness generated by the Korda film released that same year.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published by Parents' Magazine Press (a division of The Parents' Institute Inc.), cover-dated July 1942, with an on-sale date of May 1, 1942.
- Edited by Ralph Ellsworth (art editor) and G. G. Telfer (managing editor), the core creative team of the Real Heroes series during its early wartime run.
- Indexes Mowgli and Shere Khan as characters — placing this among the earliest American comic book adaptations of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book characters.
- The issue appeared contemporaneously with the 1942 live-action film Jungle Book directed by Zoltan Korda and starring Sabu Dastagir as Mowgli, suggesting the story was selected partly to capitalize on that film's cultural visibility.
- Mowgli originates from Kipling's 1894 short story collection The Jungle Book; Shere Khan, the lame Bengal tiger and Mowgli's primary antagonist, is his archenemy throughout those stories.
- Real Heroes was a sister title to True Comics, part of a Parents' Magazine Press educational comics line that ran from 1941 to the early 1950s, positioned explicitly as wholesome, fact- and literature-based alternatives to superhero comics.
- The series routinely mixed wartime biographical profiles (military figures, historical leaders) with literary adaptations — making this issue's Kipling content characteristic of the title's broader educational mission.
- No known reprints of this specific Mowgli/Shere Khan story from Real Heroes #5 have been documented in subsequent collected editions or reprint series.
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