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In Reality Z-25 31-H, Gwen Davis, nicknamed Gwenny in her high-school years and better known as Gwenna, was the wife of Kaza. The two acted as the protectors of the Naked Jungle in Buranda. Her friend Gana nicknamed her “Little Sister Uchi”.
Description
Physical appearance
Gwenna's appearance varied between accounts, but she was at any rate a beautiful, white woman with long, wavy hair. She was nearly a head shorter than Kaza or Gana. In the account depicting her battle against Nerlana, she was depicted with black hair (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) similar to her counterpart in Jo-Jo the Congo King's universe (COMIC: Jo-Jo Congo King) as well as blue eyes, and she wore no visible jewelry. (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) Later accounts, however, depicted her eyes as green, and her hair in shades of brown, brownish-red, (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man) or outright red, (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man, The Danger, The Diamond, and the Dowager, etc.) including in depictions of events predating the battle against Nerlana. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man) Gwenna also wore a yellow flower in her hair, a one-banded golden bracelet on her right wrist, a three-banded one on her left, small white earrings, and a necklace with three white beads. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man, The Danger, The Diamond, and the Dowager, etc.) She also had an ankle-bracelet on her left ankle. (COMIC: A Matter of Image) She had a few freckles on her face and a number on her shoulders and upper back. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man)
Personality
Gwenna was a generous, heroic individual. She was easy to get along with, and although she was committed to her nudist lifestyle, was entirely willing to wear clothes around other people for their own comfort. Though soon coming into her own as a fierce fighter always ready to jump into action, (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) she was much meeker and less prone to violence when she first arrived in the Jungle. (COMIC: Jungle Romance)
Powers & abilities
Though not visibly that muscular, she was physically accomplished, able to ride a zebra and to successfully tackle and disarm a man with a knife, albeit with the element of surprise; (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) she was significantly stronger than her old friend Deena. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man) She could also wield a spear. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man, The Danger, the Diamond, and the Dowager, etc.)
She additionally owned a Themiscyran Throwing Necklace made of kirbium, given to her by Jung-La. A metal crescent, it was easy to throw and returned to her hand even after hitting opponents. (COMIC: Situation on Earth-N)
In miscellaneous other abilities, she also had significant computer skills, being able to tap into the League of Champions' satellite's imagery. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man)
Biography
Early life
Gwenna was originally known as Gwen Davis, (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) sometimes nicknamed “Gwenny”. She grew up in Pinedale and attended high school with two close friends, “Junior” Hancock and Deena. As the two girls grew, they became rivals for Junior's heart, though not to the extent of spoiling their earlier friendship; eventually, during the summer after their graduation, Junior proposed to Deena rather than Gwenna. Finding herself more grief-stricken than she'd expected, Gwenna not only left them but the city altogether, deciding to go out of town for college. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man)
She became a “bored socialite”, kept busy by such pastimes as attending the fashion week in Paris. Feeling dissatisfied, she returned to her studies, signing up for an anthropology course “on a whim”. When her professor heard rumours of a “real-life ape-man” and mounted an expedition, she decided to join, (COMIC: A Matter of Image) thereafter finding a new life in the Naked Jungle as the “mate” of Kaza, who had already been “Jungle Lord” for some time by the time she joined him. (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) In doing so she broke off her engagement with Dirk, a venal individual who only had eyes for her father's company and the wealth it could bring him. A short time after she began to live as Kaza's wife, Davis and Dirk arrived and tried to force her to leave him and go through with the marriage to Dirk, but this evidently did not come to pass. (COMIC: Jungle Romance)
Early adventures with Kaza
By a “few years” (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man) before 2010, (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress) Ro-Man's alien invasion force happened to land in the Naked Jungle. Since they knew better than anyone, Gwenna and Kaza ended up participating in the effort to fight off Ro-Man's attempted invasion of the planet, alongside such superheroes as Dynamo, Samson, Flame Girl, Blue Beetle and Zanzibar the Magician. Ultimately, however, it was Stardust the Super-Wizard's intervention which was instrumental in turning the battle around and repelling the invaders. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man)
Against the Serpent Cult
In 2010, Gwenna and Kaza received an email from the Commissioner warning them that the Serpent Cult, which Kaza had defeated ten years prior, before Gwenna married him, had been revived by the Serpent Priest's daughter Nerlana. While Kaza headed directly to the Temple of the Serpent God, Gwenna rode Zeb to the kraal near Buranda Pass to meet up with the Commissioner. There, she saved him and his new assistant Wimberly (who was rather startled by her state of undress) from an assassin sent by Nerlana.
After the assassin let slip that Kaza was headed into a trap at the Temple, the three drove in the Commissioner's car to the Natari village, where Gwenna, reunited with her friend Gana, they learned that the Serpent Cult had already announced to the villagers that they would sacrifice Kaza to the Serpent Lord that very evening. Recruiting Gana's finest warriors, they surrounded the Temple, but the situation ended up being resolved with minimal bloodshed when the Serpent Lord was revealed to be a very real, but non-supernatural, giant snake whom Wimberly shot at reflexively, breaking Nerlana's telepathic control on it and causing it to eat her instead of Kaza. (COMIC: The Serpent Sorceress)
Return of Ro-Man
Some time later, Gwenna and Kaza were invited by the Commissioner and Wimberly to the Adventurers Club for what was supposed to be a quiet night — dressing up for the occasion. There, they ran into Gwenna's old friends Fred “Junior” Hancock and Deena. While Gwenna was happy to see them, Kaza was somewhat distraught with these living reminders of Gwenna's prior life, beginning to worry that he had torn her away from her rightful home by getting her to live in the Naked Jungle with him.
These ruminations were cut short when the Club was attacked by Ro-Man, who had returned to Earth in a one-person craft, intending to take revenge on Kaza for his earlier defeat. Mistaking Deena for Gwenna, he kidnapped her after briefly knocking out Kaza. After waking, Kaza insisted on following him at once while Gwenna was left to try and contact their more powerful allies from the League of Champions and the like. Only Dynamo answered the call, and belatedly at that, due to the others all being tied up “off-world”; however, using the League's satellite imagery, Gwenna was able to locate Ro-Man's flying saucer, to which she journeyed with Fred. There, they met Dynamo, who informed them that since the invasion, the superheroes had realised that Ro-Man had actually been an energy being possessing an innocent alien's body the whole time. It turned out that Kaza had learned the same thing on his end of things, as Ro-Man had surrendered his ape body and transferred himself into Deena's body, still under the impression that she was Kaza's mate and intending to take a particularly cruel revenge on him by killing him with his lover's own hands. However, he had failed to account for Deena's lack of physical strength compared to Gwenna.
After trouncing the possessed Deena, Gwenna goaded Ro-Man into living her body; as they'd planned, Dynamo then used his own energy powers to disrupt Ro-Man's gaseous form before he could possess Gwenna, trapping him inside his own discarded helmet. In the aftermath, Gwenna assured Kaza that despite the dangers, she wouldn't trade her adventurous life for the world, and seeing how ordinary Deena had turned out had only reinforced that view. (COMIC: Ruthless Ro-Man)
Defeating the Sky Witch
Over the following six months, Gwenna had no cause to dress up again. (COMIC: A Matter of Image)
Some time after the Ro-Man affair, Gwenna was returning from “the trading post” to a village when she found it under attack from the witch Taho, riding a giant, flying reptile. Realising that she needed to lure her down from the skies to defeat her, she used a satchel full of Kooba Fruit Pies, which the gluttonous witch immediately tried to get her hands on. As she swooped down, Gwenna tackled her off the pterosaur and tied her up while the animal itself feasted on the snacks instead of her. (COMIC: The Fury of the Sky Witch!)
When she realised that it was “fashion week” in Paris, Gwenna was prompted to muse about how differently her life had turned out from what it had been just a few years ago, but found once again that she didn't regret a thing. (COMIC: A Matter of Image)
Return of the Skull
Some time later, Catherine Maxwell, alias Nula, sent word that she was returning to the Naked Jungle. The Commissioner welcomed her at the air strip with Wimberly, and Kaza and Gwenna also made a surprise appearance, amused to meet their predecessor as hero of the Burandan jungle and to learn about the Commissioner's adventurous past. Everyone went back to Kaza and Gwenna's treehouse for tea, where Nula revealed that she had come to Buranda to return Solomon's Diamond to the Koranzi, and not simply to see old friends again. The following night, the village was set aflame by three airships commanded by terrorist the Skull; Kaza and Gwenna, who had been having a hard time going to sleep due to Kaza's anxieties about the Diamond, which he had felt possessed some supernatural power, went out on their balcony as they heard the airships flying over, but were then held at gunpoint by the Skull himself. He took them prisoners, claiming that they would bear witness to his “great triumph”. (COMIC: The Danger, the Diamond, and the Dowager) While he had Kaza placed in the hold of the tank he was using to travel through the jungle, he took Gwenna in his cabin with him, allowing him to gloat to her at length about his plan. He revealed to her that the Diamond was actually the Philosopher's Stone, the key to wondrous powers of immortality and the creation of gold; after awakening its power, he hoped to use it to allow his cult to take over the world and effect the white-supremacist “social reordering” of which he dreamed.
However, soon after he finished explaining all this, also letting slip that his current hideout was the “old Kaitaran Temple”, Kaza managed to get the drop on his guards and knock them out. Hearing the commotion, Gwenna took the Skull by surprise with a kick to the jaw and knocked him out. As the tank veered out of control and into a tree, the jungle-dwellers hopped to safety and made their own way to the Temple, where the Skull's agents Professor Morag and Mitchell had just taken their prisoners who had survived the fire, including Nula, Smedley, Wimberley and Kiana. (COMIC: Nula! Naked and Alone!)
Later events
At some point after leaving the Odds, Jenny Everywhere visited the Naked Jungle and met Kaza and Gwenna. She somehow managed to install a flat-screen TV in their jungle home. (COMIC: Whatever Happened to Jenny Everywhere?!)
Behind the scenes
Origins
Gwenna originated as an obscure public-domain character in the adventures of Jo-Jo, Jungle King. She appeared as Jo-Jo's love interest in the first story in the character's debut issue, where she was depicted as the Queen of the Bonangi. Notably, although she was coloured as white, nothing in the script indicated this. In the next story, Gwenna was replaced with the identically-drawn Geesha — likewise coloured as white, but outright depicted in the script as the daughter of a black man.
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Jay Epps paired a rebooted form of Gwenna with an unrelated public-domain “jungle king” character, Kaza, for his webcomic Kaza's Mate, Gwenna. Epps's Gwenna was officially Caucasian, being given a new backstory explaining her presence in the jungle, and eliminating the “queen” element. In her first outing, Epps's Gwenna shared her Golden Age counterpart's black hair. In the next story, Ruthless Ro-Man, this was changed to a dark, reddish brown and finally to outright red hair, which she retained throughout the rest of the webcomic.
External links
- Gwenna character profile on the Kaza's Mate, Gwenna website (NSFW)
- Gwenna RPG stat card on DeviantArt (NSFW)
- Gwenna on the Comic Fury Wiki
| Incarnations of Gwenna |
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| Reality Z-25 31-H • Earth-N • Jo-Jo Congo King |