Excerpt from Myra North, Special Nurse by Ray Thompson and Charles Coll
160 pgs. full-color | $100 hardcover | Writer and Artist: Various; Editors: Trina Robbins, Peter Maresca
One of my favorite things about reviewing comics is discovering the great variety within the medium. The new Fantagraphics volume Dauntless Dames: High-Heeled Heroes of the Comics is a case in point—until reading it, I thought that until fairly recently, female characters in comics were romantic interests and sidekicks rather than characters with their own stories. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
It’s true that in the early decades of the comics, the active characters were male and women were mostly afterthoughts or served primarily as décor (hence the sexy lamp test, which deserves a place alongside the Bechdel Test). There were exceptions, of course, including Gene Carr’s Lady Bountiful, which featured a wealthy woman doing charitable work. More women characters began appearing in comics as women in real life began to join the workforce in large numbers after World War I, but there wasn’t a great variety in the jobs those characters held—like women in real life, they were mostly confined to a narrow set of choices including secretary, teacher, and entertainer.
The 1930s brought something new: comics featuring female lead characters in a variety of active roles previously reserved for men, like detective, spy, and soldier of fortune. These strips were designed to appeal to both men and women, so the artists didn’t skimp on their characters’ sexiness: these ladies were not only doing interesting things, they looked great while doing it. At the same time, some of these comics featured cut-out paper dolls of their lead characters, so there was clearly the assumption that little girls would also like comics with active female characters. This style of comic died out in the 1950s, their heroines banished just as real women were expected to leave their wartime jobs to be stay-at-home moms in perfect suburban homes, but a lot of interesting work had been created by then.
Dauntless Dames: High-Heeled Heroes of the Comics, edited by Trina Robbins and Peter Maresca, brings together comic strips featuring ten female characters who were more than just pretty faces, some of them reprinted here for the first time since their original appearance as newspaper strips. This volume also includes an introductory essay by the editors (fully illustrated, of course), and each of the comics featured is introduced by a brief essay (author identified by initials) placing the comic and its creator in context.
You can see the changes in how women were featured in comics in the character of Connie, created by Frank Godwin for the strip of the same name, which ran from 1929 to 1949. When we first meet Connie, she’s a society gal fretting about her love life and being driven about town in a roadster. Jump ahead a few years and she’s outwitting criminals (through cleverness rather than force, and without mussing her hair) and traveling in a time machine to the year 2936, when women rule the earth.
Myra North, Special Nurse, drawn by Ray Thompson (writer) and Charles Coll (artist) from 1936 to 1941, expands the scope of a woman working in a traditionally female profession by making her a traveling nurse who manages to get caught up in quite a few adventures, often accompanied by her boyfriend, detective Jack Lane. If you have a thing for sexy nurses (in traditional white costume and cap, of course), this may be the strip for you, but you’ll have to overlook some unfortunate stereotyping of nonwhite characters (which was common at the time and appears in other strips in this volume, although neither fact makes it OK).
Russell Keaton’s Flyin’ Jenny, which ran from 1938 to 1946, features a stunt pilot heroine who competes in a race across American and foils some evil saboteurs along the way. Brenda Starr, created by Dale Messick (a pseudonym for the female writer and artist Dalia Messick), ran from 1940 to 2017. Due to its longevity, it’s probably the best known of these strips and features a red-haired reporter who has all manner of adventures. Russell Stamm’s Invisible Scarlet O’Neil, which ran from 1940 to 1949, features a woman who can become invisible at will, thanks to getting too close to one of her scientist father’s experiments. She uses her powers for good, of course, from helping a street urchin to solving crimes.
Miss Fury, drawn by Tarpe Mills (a pseudonym for the female artist June Tarpé Mills), ran from 1941 to 1951. The title character, also known as the socialite Marla Drake, fights crime while dressed in a panther suit (the script was originally titled “Black Fury”) and juggling two suitors. Deathless Deer was created by two women, Neysa McMein and Alicia Patterson, and ran from 1942 to 1943. The heroine is an Egyptian princess who awakens from a 3000-year sleep to find herself in a museum in 20th-century America, and fights crime while working as a burlesque dancer. The title character in Miss Cairo Jones, which ran from 1945 to 1947, was originally meant to be a man, but creators Bob Oksner and Jerry Albert decided the market for male action heroes was overcrowded. So they flipped the script and created a hard-boiled female character who was both glamorous and deadly.
Jack Sparling’s Claire Voyant, which ran from 1943 to 1948, features an amnesiac nightclub entertainer who spies for the American war effort (although, sadly, she didn’t have the superpower her name implies). Torchy Brown, created by the African American female artist Jackie Ormes, ran in two series, from 1937-1938, and 1950-54. Segregation applied to the comics as well as real life in those days, so this strip featuring an African American entertainer only ran in race newspapers, with the result that Ormes was largely unknown to white audiences until recently. Her work is worth getting to know, not least because some of the storylines deal with issues like poverty and racism.
Dauntless Dames: High-Heeled Heroes of the Comics is an extra-large format (13.2” by 17”) hardcover that is best read by laying it flat on a table. The reproductions are excellent, with the color comics capturing the tone of Sunday newspaper supplements and the black-and-white strips reproduced clearly. This is a well-produced volume that, while a bit awkward to read, includes many examples of a genre of comics not well-known today, and places them in historical context with well-written essays. You can see a preview here. | Sarah Boslaugh
