YEAR 1940: THE BLACK QUEEN

The Black Queen, the first femme fatale in Will Eisner's celebrated SPIRIT comic, changes her modus operandi in her three appearances as much as did the Lee-Kirby HULK in its earliest incarnation.

She begins in 1940 as a "mouthpiece" to a noted criminal, getting him off for his latest murder through sheer legal legerdemain.  She commits no actual crime, but the Spirit confounds her and sends her client up the river.

In her second appearance she graduates to criminal boss, and tries to hold the city of New York for ransom.

Finally, the Queen goes off the deep end.  As shown above she dresses in something very like a superheroine costume-- probably the only time a SPIRIT villain did so-- and begins preying on victims by kissing them with her poisonous lipstick.  This was her most interesting incarnation, but one may fairly hypothesize that Eisner was tired of her.  At the episode's end she commits suicide to avoid the electric chair.

YEAR 1940: THE DRAGON LADY

Not counting the character's appearances in a 1937-43 film serial, where her voice was contributed by Agnes "Bewitched" Moorehead, the first live appearance of Milton Caniff's "Dragon Lady" was in a 1940 film serial, "Terry and the Pirates."

Unfortunately, though actress Shiela Darcy had the looks to pull off the glamorous role, the script and direction for the serial were thoroughly routine.  The Dragon Lady was not a wily Chinese bandit, but a stereotypical high priestess in a remote Oriental kingdom called "Mara."  The titular Terry and his friend Pat are seeking Terry's lost father when they get mixed up with a bandit gang seeking to plunder Mara.

The Dragon Lady barely has a reason to exist in the serial.  Her one action consists of giving the order to have one of the good guys executed, under the false impression he's there as a bandit.  Actress Joyce Bryant, playing the main heroine of the serial-- one given the name of another Caniff character, "Normandie Drake"-- has no more in common with her namesake than Shiela Darcy's version of the Dragon Lady.  But the Drake character gets into the thick of the action a bit more, for what that's worth.

YEAR 1940: INDIRA THE COBRA QUEEN

I could write about a number of reasonably well known characters for 1940, but for once I'll focus on a character almost no one knows: Indira the Cobra Queen, the villainess of Tarpe Mills' Golden Age series MANN OF INDIA.

Mills is best known for her successful 1941 comic strip heroine MISS FURY, but she served a comic-book apprenticeship in the extremely varied offerings of the anthology title HEROIC COMICS, which began in 1940, published by Eastern Color Printing.  Some of the entries look like rejected comic strips, but HEROIC also played host to a few moderately well known GA superheroes, like "Music Master" and "Hydroman."  Mills did two 4-page strips, both of which began in issue #1 and terminated in issue #12.  One, "the Purple Zombie," has no relevance here, but "Mann of India" is a different story.

As one might guess, the two figures in the illo above are the titular "Mann"-- an adventure-story writer named "Chickering Mann"-- and his foe Indira, who in this particular story are forced to make common cause against a third enemy.  In the first episode, Mann, during a jaunt in India, gets on Indira's bad side by writing an egregiously unresearched story about the "Queen of the Dacoits," asserting that she was hideously ugly.  Indira gets mad and has Mann abducted by her dacoits.  However, a local potentate named "Kalla Khan" comes after Indira with all guns blazing, attempting to kill her and take control of her dacoit allies.

Though Indira is nominally a villainess, she's pretty gutsy during her counter-campaign against Kalla Khan.  In a late episode, when Mann is about to be devoured by a tiger sicced on him by the evil ruler, Indira beheads the tiger by hurling a sword at it!  Unfortunately, though she falls for Mann in approved TERRY AND THE PIRATES fashion, Mann also picks up a helpless blonde white girl during their travels-- and you know how that goes.

I think Mills rather liked her creation, for although Mann leaves India with his blonde fiancee in tow, Indira is left free to continue her career of crime, which includes trying to kick the English out of India.  The last panel shows her managing to tearfully shut the unappreciative writer out of her heart and re-dedicating herself to murder and conquest.

At a total of 48 pages, this rock-'em, sock-'em Oriental adventure would make a pretty readable "graphic novel" if collected, though there's not much chance of that.   

YEAR 1940: THE CATWOMAN

Given that someone else already thought of doing the "nine lives" schtick with the nine (or more) costumes of the character's existence thus far, I'll attempt something more original: nine symbolically significant aspects of Catwoman's career.

(1) IN HER VERY FIRST ADVENTURE, INTREPID CRIMEFIGHTER BATMAN LETS "THE CAT" GET OUT OF "THE BAG"

Whereas the ordinary thugs and grifters of Batman's world were generally exposed as cowards and losers, the costumed criminals never suffered a lot of sanctimonious preachments.  Possibly this was because the audience knew that they were not naturalistic, and so could take vicarious pleasure in their acts of robbery and murder.  Catwoman (a.k.a. "The Cat") was probably the most liberating of these figures once the writers made it a cardinal rule that she always avoided taking human life during her robberies; thus her thefts became more like a game with no consequences for anyone but the insurance companies.  Of course Batman's motive for releasing this "shady lady" back in BATMAN #1 have more to do with wanting to "bump into her again sometime."  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

(2) CATWOMAN'S AMONG THE FIRST, IF NOT THE FIRST BAT-FOE, TO WEAR A REAL COSTUME

To be sure, the first costume the demi-villainess sported, back in BATMAN #1-- a big cat-mask over her head, while the rest of her wears either a gown or a foofy caped outfit-- is an awful costume.  But most of Batman's foes-- Joker, Penguin-- simply wore slightly outre versions of regular clothes.  Later, once Catwoman donned her classic purple-and-green togs, she also began biting Batman's style in other ways, using "cats" as fetishistically as he used "bats."  If Batman had a Batarang, she had a cat-o-nine-tails; if he had a Batmobile, she had a Kitty-Car, etc.  During BATMAN YEAR ONE Frank Miller posited that the early Batman's example inspired the Princess of Plunder to follow that example on behalf of crime, which was, all things considered, one of Miller's better insights into the Bat-cast.

(3) THE NAME "SELINA KYLE"

The name "Selina" is patently a derivation from the name of the Greek goddess of the moon.  There's no textual indication in the early adventures that the writers went out of the way to emphasize any "lunar" aspect of her nature or her adventures, so the symbolic meaning of the character's given name may merely be happy coincidence. In any case it fits, in that "cat" and "moon" tend to symbolize mysterioso qualities.  A Catwoman named "Sunny Kyle" just wouldn't have been the same.

(4) THE CLAWS

The above scene, with Catwoman clawing the hell out of a nine-year-old boy sidekick's shoulder, appears nowhere in the actual story.  By the 1940s the idea of women defending themselves by clawing at men with their long nails was a routine trope, but the cat-gimmick does make it seem less a last-ditch defense and more like an assertion of essentially feminine power.

(5) THE CAT-O-NINE-TAILS

Yes, whip it, whip it good-- ah, Catwoman and her whip.  Its presence inspired scenes like the DETECTIVE COMICS scene above: since it resembles nothing in the actual Catwoman story within, clearly it inspired some artist to new heights of, shall we say, "inspiration."  The presence of the whip also excited the wrath of Frederic Wertham.  Catwoman may not be the only costumed villain named in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, but she's the only villain from Batman's rogues gallery who's honored as being a corrupter of innocent youths.

(6) THE CAT DIDN'T COME BACK (UNTIL 12 YEARS LATER)

Between 1954, when "The Jungle Cat-Queen" appeared in DETECTIVE #211, and 1966, when the Catwoman appeared in (of all things) a LOIS LANE story, the Catwoman was effectively exiled from DC Comics.  To be sure, no DC employee has ever spoken of a freeze-out.  But given that Batman's editor Jack Schiff kept bringing back vintage Batman foes like Joker and Penguin during that period, I believe DC was skittish about the character thanks to the bad publicity they got from Dr. Wertham over her.  In 1963 DC evidently thought the cat-gimmick too good to waste, so writer Bill Finger created a feline-themed villain, the Cat-Man, who explicitly thought he could be a better cat-villain than Catwoman simply because he was a man.  In addition, this Cat-Man even tried to convince  Batman's female ally Batwoman to become a new "Catwoman," but she only went through with the whole megillah to twist the villain's tail, so to speak.

(7) PRINCESS OF BUZZKILL

Michael Fleischer was somewhat over-Freudian when he declared, in the BATMAN ENCYCLOPEDIA, that Catwoman was to Batman an image of his departed (and therefore "bad") mother.  However, early adventures do evince a sense that Robin's often threatened by Batman's feelings for the cat-crook, but not for the puerile reasons Frederic Wertham cited.  Rather, Robin's got a perfect life from a nine-year-old's perspective-- a good older guardian who lets him stay up late and fight criminals.  Catwoman is definitely a "bad mother" to him in that her erotic presence threatens to steal the Caped Crusader away from the manly art of crimefighting.

 (8) KAT-RATE

The one aspect of Batman that Catwoman didn't imitate for her first 20 years was that she couldn't fight; at best she occasionally managed to catch the hero off guard with some roughhouse maneuver. Apart from her skill with the whip she wasn't seen as a physical threat.  To be sure, though costumed heroines were often mistresses of judo and boxing, villainesses of the 1940s and 1950s rarely showed such traits, and Catwoman *was* the only memorable female villain of the Batman comic books until the middle 1960s, when Poison Ivy debuted.  However, once Catwoman's skills were mysteriously upgraded in the early 1970s, most of the other larcenous ladies followed suit in one way or another.  Still, it's a shame that Catwoman was relegated to being a "weak sister" during most of Batman's Silver Age, when heroines like Batwoman and the original Bat-Girl were shown tossing their enemies hither and yon.

(9) JULIE NEWMAR

Self-explanatory.