To no surprise, Song of Kong isn't as good as the original. But it's far better than it has any right to be -- the idea of a sequel wasn't even on the table when King Kong was first released and they managed to still complete the entire picture with some amazing special effects fast enough to get it released the very same year!
OK, but what does this have to do with comics?
Well, to help promote Song of Kong, they produced a comic strip to run in newspapers. (They had actually done the same with King Kong ealier in the year, but I want to focus on the sequel.) The story is, obviously, an abridged version of Ruth Rose's film script. The original artwork was handled by Glen Cravath, who had been a movie poster artist for several years at that point. The strip ran for six weeks, but it's unclear what markets it may have hit. As far as I can tell, none of the original survives. (Allan Holtz's American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide doesn't even list it.)
However, it was translated and adapted in Spain to promote the movie there. Artist Tomás Porto reworked Cravath's originals, supplementing and expanding several sequences with his own art, making the entire thing over twice as long! This Spanish version does a better job representing the movie and argueably makes a more emotional ending, leaving the ape's saddened face visible as the water rises up instead of just his hand as is shown in the movie.
Porto had a fairly long career as a cartoonist after this, while Cravath only continued for about five or ten years, mostly working on Frank Buck (probably ghost-) written strips.
In any event, we do have Porto's Spanish-language version of the Son of Kong strip and I thought I'd run that here today...
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