As with today's comic, I'm just not feeling up to writing much today for this graphic novel. But it's an interesting piece, so I'll make a bit of effort.
Salimba is a pretty cool pulp-fiction jungle girl comic, made up of three different stories about the title character. Over the course of the book she moves from simply a jungle girl to being something far more eternal and mythic. Also, in the last story, there's these weird worm boys who look like giant uncircumcised penises with faces. Which, I think, is actually what they're meant to be.
There's some problematic essentializing going on in the story, it being set in an undisclosed jungle location where everyone is of African descent. This is always going to be difficult with jungle-based works though, at least up until a certain point where writers and artists became (or, more pessimistically, become) more sensitive to cultural stereotyping. But, as I note, Salimba moves out of stereotype and into myth, which is not a long journey in many ways, so there's definitely something there worth exploring. And the cleaving to the tenets of pulp-y writing is really handled quite nicely.
Okay. Sorry. That's all I've got.
Onward!
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