Monday, December 19, 2022

Heroine Holidays BLACK CAT "A Day with Linda Turner: Christmas Party"

Not the Marvel anti-heroine, but a Golden Age actress/stuntwoman turned heroine...
...sharing Yuletide festivities with fellow (real life) movie and radio celebrities!
(See if you can name them all!)
Illustrated by Lee Elias (with Bob Powell doing the celeb caricatures), this gentle tale from Harvey's Black Cat #21 (1950) features Groucho Marx, Jack Benny & Rochester, and Bing Crosby along with Linda (Black Cat) Turner and her somewhat dense boyfriend Rick Horne!
When the story was reprinted (in black and white) in Recollections' Original Black Cat #8 (1992), it finally got the cover...

...which it didn't in the original!
BTW, the cover was by Harvey Comics' Editor/Art Director Ken Selig, who had been working for Harvey since just after the original publication of the story in 1950!

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

NAMORA "Lost City of Yucatan!"


Note: this may be NSFW, due to racial stereotypes common to the 1940s!
The new movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever shows Namora (and her cousin, King Namor, as descendants of Mayans!
This wasn't always the case in the Marvel Multiverse...
Penciled (and likely inked and written) by Sub-Mariner creator Bill Everett, this tale from Timely's Namora #1 (1948) portrays the Mayans as easily-manipulated, superstitious savages, a sadly not-uncommon event in pop culture of the era.
Oddly, when Marvel digitally-remastered the story...
...they gave the Mayans Batman-gray skin (25% Yellow/25% Magenta/25% Cyan)!
Note: I used scans of the actual comic book, not the remastered versions.
Considering it's just as easy to digitally give the natives either suntanned or brown skin (even sticking to the 64-color combination palette used in Golden Age comics), why go this route?
Trivia: Namora first appeared in a Sub-Mariner tale in Timely's Marvel Mystery Comics #82 (1947), created by Bill Everett, who didn't draw her premiere story...but may have written it.
Bob Powell did the cover, and penciller Ken Bald and inker Syd Shores illustrated the story.
Besides guest-starring in Namor's strip, she was given a book of her own, which ran three issues.
When Subby was revived in the 1950s, she was part of the revival, as shown HERE!
Though the Sub-Mariner and other supporting characters like Lady Dorma and Prince Byrrah returned in the Silver Age, Namora didn't appear again until the Bronze Age in Marvel's Sub-Mariner #50 (1972) when Namor discovered a crystal casket with her poisoned, preserved corpse along with a never-revealed "daughter" (who was later retconned to be her clone), Namorita!
Namora's "corpse" was later retconned to be merely in suspended animation (not poisoned, BTW) and was revived by the heroic Agents of Atlas.
She's still active in present-day Marvel comics.
Please Support Hero Histories
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Timely's Greatest
Golden-Age Sub-Mariner
by Bill Everett
Post-War Years

...which features this tale, and the entire Namora comic's run!
(Note: the Young Men Comics and other 1950s tales were actually post-Golden Age, and were technically Atlas Comics stories, as shown in the Marvel Masterworks: Atlas-Era Heroes reprints of those same stories!)

Friday, October 21, 2022

Halloween Heroine PHANTOM LADY "Monster in the Pool!"

Sexy women and werewolves...
...long before Twilight or True Bloodthe Phantom Lady put her scantly-clad body between lycanthropes and an innocent human race!

The art for this tale from Fox's Phantom Lady #16 is by the inimitable Matt Baker, and the story is probably by Ruth Roche.
Supernatural elements would crop up in several more Phantom Lady stories.

Friday, July 8, 2022

Jane Foster IS Thor...I mean Thordis...in WHAT IF? "...Jane Foster Had Found the Hammer of Thor?" Conclusion

...well, I'll let The Watcher bring the reader up to speed...

Writer Don Glut did a pretty good Stan Lee-style pastiche while penciler Rick Hoberg and inker Dave Hunt gave the story a Silver Age "look".
For the record, What If? later returned to the Thor/Don Blake & Jane Foster relationship with a story continuing from this point...
...resulting in a much more tragic tale...
...with multiple major character deaths!
But, that's a story for another time!

Thursday, July 7, 2022

Jane Foster IS Thor...I mean Thordis...in WHAT IF? "...Jane Foster Had Found the Hammer of Thor?" Part 2

We Have Already Seen...
...in an alternate universe, Jane Foster: RN, accompanied Dr Don Blake on his Scandinavian vacation.

When the Stone Men from Saturn (who weren't really from Saturn in any universe, BTW) arrived, she, not he, was the one to find Mjolnir, Thor's hammer!
After driving the aliens off, the heroine now known as Thordis performed the same deeds as the Thor of our universe, including encountering Thor's vengeful half-brother Loki...
To Be Concluded...
...with the most astonishing ending of all time...
TOMORROW!
Misseth it not, True Believer!

As you can see, alternate history is now diverging extensively from the Marvel Universe as Odin helps reintroduce Sif (whom Thor last met when she was a child) to the Thunder God (still trapped in Don Blake's mortal form) before Jane Foster had her memory wiped of Don Blake/Thor, resulting in a romantic triangle that didn't previously exist!
You can read how all that happened HERE!