Halloween Heroines LADY LIBERATORS "Come On In...the Revolution's Fine!" Conclusion

When Last We Left Our Heroines (and Heroes)...

...no, this hasn't occurred...yet!

The Wasp receives a mysterious message that directs her to a meeting in Avengers Mansion...but not with the Avengers, but a new group of heroines led by a mysterious woman named Valkyrie!

The team heads for Rutland, where four Avengers; The Vision, Black Panther, Quicksilver, and Goliath II, have already arrived to protect a local scientist with a top-secret invention from a planned kidnapping!

Arriving just in time for the Rutland Halloween Parade (which the professor is participating in) the heroes encounter the Masters of Evil, who are now on the verge of victory...

For the record, the Enchantress did survive.
Bad girls (and guys) have a knack for that sort of thing!
Written by Roy Thomas, penciled by John Buscema, and inked by Tom Palmer, Marvel's Avengers #83 (1970s) introduced the Rutland Halloween Parade into comics lore where it remained for a couple of decades!
At least one comic would set a tale at the parade every Halloween until the mid-1990s!
It's reappeared occasionally since then...
BTW, The Lady Liberators returned almost a half-century later, but that's a story for another time...

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Halloween Heroines LADY LIBERATORS "Come On In...the Revolution's Fine!" Part 1

The very first time the Rutland Halloween Parade (which features comic book characters) appeared in comics...

...was this tale, which didn't even mention the parade itself on the cover...or the fact it takes place on Halloween!

Keep in mind this was 1970, and the Women's Liberation movement was on the rise!

Actually, this sort of lab accident is a lot more common in comics than in real life.

And unlike in real life, in comics it usually results in this...

(Take everything the Valkyrie says with a grain of salt...)

Real-life Parade organizer and comics uber-fan Tom Fagan usually dressed up as Batman for the parade, but since this isn't a DC comic, they put him in the garb of Marvel's "evil Batman", NightHawk of the Squadron Sinister (itself an evil version of the Justice League)!

If you're too young to understand the reference to "Mrs Peel" who was part of the other Avengers, read HERE.

She's a heroine we'll have to do a post or two on in the future!
One other thing, the big guy is not Henry Pym, The Wasp's husband and the original Ant-Man/Giant-Man/Goliath/YellowJacket (don't ask) or Scott Lang/Ant-Man II, but Clint Barton aka Hawkeye, who gave up archery for awhile to become Goliath II.
He went back to being Hawkeye a year later.

Things aren't going too well for the superheroes!

So where are the superHEROINES?

Be here

TOMORROW

as they make their decidedly-dramatic entrance!

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Halloween Heroine PHANTOM LADY "Army of the Walking Dead!"

For the Halloween season we offer...Matt Baker "good girl" art!  Zombies! Doctor Crime!

The splash page of the story is the inside cover of the comic, with only two colors, black and cyan.

Oh, did we mention ZOMBIES???

Enjoy...

"America comes first, even before Dad!"--Phantom Lady's Words to Live By!

Doctor Crime (not to be confused with The Crime Doctor), despite being the first supervillain the Fox incarnation of Phantom Lady fought, never returned.

When this Ruth Roche-scripted and Matt Baker-illustrated tale from Fox's Phantom Lady #15 (1947) was reprinted as the cover feature in IW/Super Comic's Great Action Comics #8 (1958), the splash page was left out, because the reprint publisher didn't have the cover and inside cover printing plates, only the interiors for this issue!

As a result, the editor retitled the story "The Zombie".

The new cover was a combination of two redrawn story panels and a badly-rendered (and mis-colored) Phantom Lady.

The cover art is by Carl (Golden Age Human Torch) Burgos.

Halloween Heroine GHOST WOMAN "and the Plague of Werewolves!"

She returned from the dead to save her husband from lycanthropes...

...in her one and only appearance from Star-Studded Comics #1 (1945)

If this series continued, we probably would have learned more about Ghost Woman's abilities and limitations, and her husband John would come to the realization that she was serving as his "guardian angel".
Unfortunately, publisher Cambridge House published only one issue each of three different anthologies featuring a number of interesting series, and then abruptly went out of business!

None of the strips packaged* by the Bernard Baily Studio were picked up by other publishers.

Personally, I'm surprised something similar to Ghost Woman hasn't come along since 1945!

Considering the ongoing popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Twilight Saga, a concept like Ghost Woman seems like a sure hit!

Trivia: Editor/art director Bernard Baily, was the co-creator (with writer Jerry [Superman] Siegel) of comics' most famous ghostly avenger, DC's The Spectre, who wore a similar hood to Ghost Woman!

Unlike Ghost Woman, The Spectre continues to fight evil from beyond the grave, even appearing recently in a direct-to-video anime, voiced by Gary Cole...

*It wasn't unusual for a publisher to hire an independent studio to write and illustrate the contents for a given title, or, if it was a small publisher, the entire line of books!