The success of Frank Cho's Shanna the She-Devil miniseries made a sequel inevitable. Unfortunately for Marvel Comics -- and its readers -- Cho either wasn't available for or interested in doing another one at this time. And this Shanna, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and drawn by Khari Evans, is a pale pretender to the loincloth.

Sure, you've got dinosaurs, Nazi cavemen, pirates, drug-dealers and coconut bombs, not to mention Shanna running around the place in a set of skins so skimpy even Paris Hilton might blush. (On second thought, no.) But the level of action and violence is, if you'll pardon the pun, overkill.

Yeah, Shanna is kick-ass strong, but even so it's hard to believe she can snap the neck of a sabertoothed tiger when its neck is about four times thicker than her body, then rip a two-foot-long tooth out of another tiger's mouth (one-handed, no less!) and stab it right through the brainpan without pausing for breath. Or that she can wade into a herd of several dozen velociraptors unarmed and punch and kick her way to freedom.

C'mon, Marvel, we expect more realism in our dinosaur/Nazi island fantasy books.

Even more disappointing is Shanna's appearance. Cho drew a cavegirl who, while she had a certain appeal to slavering adolescents and aging reviewers alike, at least looked somewhat believably real. We could at least imagine her walking upright without being pulled to the ground by her own center of gravity. But Evans apparently thinks Pamela Anderson is waifishly thin and in need of a few good meals, because this Shanna has boobs bigger than her head that are, so far as I can tell, hollow and injected with helium.

C'mon, Marvel, we expect more realism in our scantily clad and bodacious cavegirl fantasy books.

There's a reason why books like this don't usually do very well in the long run. Cho's Shanna was a welcome exception to the rule. This one, however, needs to evolve.