Rima, the Jungle Girl

Rima
Rima the Jungle Girl #6 (March 1975). Art by Nestor Redondo.
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	Historical: 1904 Modern: 1974
Created by	W. H. Hudson

Rima, also known as Rima the Jungle Girl, is the fictional heroine of W. H. Hudson's 1904 novel Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. In it, Rima, a primitive girl of the shrinking rain forest of South America, meets Abel, a political fugitive. A movie of Green Mansions was made in 1959 with Audrey Hepburn as Rima. In 1974, the character, Rima, was adapted into a comic book character and featured in the monthly series Rima the Jungle Girl, published by DC Comics. Though Rima the Jungle Girl ceased publication in 1975, the comic book version of Rima appeared in several episodes of Hanna-Barbera's popular Saturday morning cartoon series, The All-New Superfriends Hour, between 1977 and 1980.

Like her literary cousins Tarzan and Mowgli, Rima sprang from an Edwardian adventure novel; in her case, Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest, by W. H. Hudson, published in 1904. Hudson was an Argentine-British naturalist who wrote many classic books about the ecology of South America. Hudson based Rima on a South American legend about a lost tribe of white people who lived in the mountains. The book has a religious tone and Rima's speech is poetic. It is a romantic adventure set in the South American jungle in which a political fugitive named Abel meets Rima, a girl living in the forest. Its theme is the loss of wilderness and the return-to-nature dream, and how unpleasant it would be for a savage to meet modern man.

Actor and director Mel Ferrer adapted Green Mansions into a 1959 film for MGM Studios, with Audrey Hepburn as Rima. The adaptation deviated far from the novel.

Rima starred in a seven-issue comic book series, DC Comics' Rima the Jungle Girl (May 1974 - May 1975), adapted by an uncredited writer and with artwork by penciler-inker Nestor Redondo and covers by Joe Kubert. DC writer-editor Robert Kanigher is the credited writer from issue #5 on. Debuting in March 2010, she now appears in a new DC Comics limited series First Wave, written by Eisner Award winning writer Brian Azzarello. Rima is portrayed as a South American native with piercings and tattoos; she doesn't speak, but instead communicates in bird-like whistles. Although the DC character is a fully grown and powerful woman with ash blonde hair, the novel's Rima was 17, small (4' 6"), demure, and dark-haired. Natives avoided her forest, calling her "the Daughter of the Didi" (an evil spirit). Rima's only defense was a reputation for magic earned through the display of strange talents such as talking to birds, befriending animals, and plucking poison darts from the air. Although in the original book Rima was burned alive by Indians, in the comics she escaped the fire to have further adventures.