I noticed in the "celebrity birthdays" column today that Johnny Sheffield turns 74 today. I, of course, remember him from many Saturday afternoons in the Palace Theater. First, he was Boy in the Tarzan movies, and then he was Bomba the Jungle Boy. And then he pretty much disappeared completely.
When I was a kid, I read as many of the Bomba books as I could get my hands on. I'm sure they were wretched stuff, but I loved them. (I've always had pretty low taste in literature. Movies, too, I guess.) I couldn't find all the books in the public library, so I even managed to buy a couple. But I never managed to complete the series.
2 comments:
What a coincidence! I just wrote a short article on Bomba books for my magazine Pulp. There's only one of the books translated - Bomba, The Jungle Boy in a Strange Land (1931) - and it was put out as paperback with a cover by none other than Bertil Hegland, the premiere Swedish paperback illustrator. I even read the book - it was amusing and not as bad as I had thought. A reader said that there was also a comic version, but I don't recall that.
We had a fair number of Bomba books when I was working in the bookstore. Didn't sell as well as Burroughs but we did have customers for them.
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