PEP COMICS "Madam Satan: Who She Is and How She Came to Be!"

Recently, Archie Comics introduced long-forgotten Golden Age villainess Madam Satan...

...into their dark, serious reboot of Sabrina: the Teen-Age Witch!

When the "Smalvillized" Archie TV series, Riverdale, became a hit, a Sabrina show was put into production with Michelle Gomez (The Mistress/Missy from Doctor Who) as Madam Satan!

Intended to be a companion show to Riverdale on the CW, there was literally no room in the schedule due to the plethora of DC Comics series currently crowding the network!

So, it's now appearing on NetFlix...where the entire season dropped this past Friday night!

Here's the character's never-reprinted premiere and origin story from MLJ's Pep Comics #16 (1941)!

Now, this is quite different from the story Madam Satan herself tells in the Season 1 finale, but it's worth knowing so you can see how much the character was altered in the revival.
Written by Pep Comics' Editor Abner Sundell,  and illustrated by longtime MLJ/Archie artist Harry Lucey who adapted his style to the Bob Montana/Dan deCarlo look that became the Archie "house style" and kept working for Archie until was forced to retire due to multiple sclerosis in 1976.

BTW, though she debuted in Pep Comics #16, Madam Satan actually cameoed on the cover of the previous issue...

...in a scene not in The Shield and Dusty tale on the inside!
Please Support Heroines!
Visit Amazon and Order...

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Book One

MERCILESS THE SORCERESS

Proving that Evil is an equal-opportunity employer...

...here's the first Black villainess in her premiere appearance in Fox's one-shot All Top Comics (1944).

In the early Golden Age, before superheroes and heroines domianated the market, publishers experimented with all types of strips to see what sold best.

Following the precident of pulp magazines, comics were filled with everything from detectives to pirates to spacemen.

One of the genres was the "villain" series where the bad guy/gal was the lead, and the hero (or heroes) were the secondary characters!

Fox Comics, in particular, pushed this concept with a villain/villainess strip in almost every one of their anthologies.

Since the Sorceress of Zoom strip proved fairly popular, Fox decided to try another "bad girl" strip, but made it different by a) setting it in the jungle, and b) making the villainess Black!

However, response to this story must not have been positive, since, when Merciless next appeared later that year in another one-shot anthology, All Your Comics, not only was the series now set in the Arctic (Yes, you read that right, the Arctic), the Sorceress was White...

...and would remain that way for the remainder of her brief run.

BTW, both the writers and artists of all her appearances are unknown.

Visit our

Sorceress of Zoom

Comic Collectibles Shop

CAPTAIN KIDD "Sorceress of the Briney Deep"

She's not exactly a "heroine"...

...but she certainly knew how to deal with cutthroats and brigands as this never-reprinted tale from Fox's Captain Kidd #25(1949) proves!

Anne Bonny was a real female pirate.

When pirates briefly became a "hot" genre in comics after superheroes and heroines died out at the end of the Golden Age, she made several appearances in both historical retellings like this or one of the few romance comics to feature a pirate-themed story, seen HERE!

Both writer and artist are unknown, but the pencils/layouts look like Sheldon Moldoff, the artist of Moon Girl!

(The inking looks like one of the several Matt Baker imitators who worked for the Iger Studios who supplied Fox's stories.)

BTW, this post was part of the RetroBlogs' tribute to the new pirate series, Black Sails, now airing on Starz!