Shanna the She-Devil #1.

The other day, I was in the jungle, punching an elephant in the face, when Krotagg the Jungle Lord said to me, "Steve, why're you punching my friend the elephant in the face?"

And I said, "Because he was being nosey."

Then he said, "And why're you punching my friend the tapir in the face?"

And I said, "Because he was being lippy."

Then he said, "And why're you punching my friend the tree?"

And I said, "A tree is your friend?"

He said, "It gets very lonely in the jungle. Many's the time I've had a conversation on, 'What's the point of it all?' with a Venus flytrap."

"And what did it tell you?"

"It just said, 'Gluggle.'" And then he said, "But again I must repeat myself. Why're you punching that tree?"

I said, "Because it wouldn't leaf me alone."

With empathy for nature like that, you'd think I'd be the perfect man to review issue #1 of Shanna the She-Devil.

And you'd be completely wrong. Because, having recently re-read it, I can't think of a single thing to say about it at all, other than that it's rubbish.

Basically Shanna O'Hara is a total Jonah. Her mum gets shot, her dad disappears, most of the big cats in the zoo she works for get shot by vandals, and the one remaining cat gets shot by a zoo-keeper.

After all this, she goes to live in the jungle, with two leopards, so she can bash-up poachers.

In the course of issue #1, she then bashes-up a poacher.

It'd be great to say it's a rip-roaring adventure but it's like being hit over the head by a Green Party manifesto wrapped around a baseball bat, as we get a stream of lectures on the evils of greed, the evils of guns, the evils of men and the evils of anything else writers Carole Seuling and Steve Gerber can cram into just twenty pages.

Throughout it all, Shanna displays a level of arrogance that suggests she might be mentally ill, and nothing at all memorable happens.

Instead of ushering in the great new age of feminist ecological comics that it was no doubt hoped it would do, it feels more like it's ushering in the era of Atlas Comics, as it feels just like the sort of thing they'd have inflicted on us a couple of years later. To read it is to quickly understand why it only lasted five issues.

On the art front, George Tuska is in his giving-everyone-weird-eyes-and-teeth-mode but it's otherwise pleasant to look at, without ever looking outstanding.

At the end of the tale, her never-before-mentioned love-interest shows up to let us know she's not a lesbian and that's it, it's all over.

Anyway, that's the review done.

Did I ever tell you about the day I was in the Amazon, punching a jungle haddock in the face?