HEROINE HEADCOUNT: RED SONJA

Red Sonja began as the Robert E. Howard one-shot character "Red Sonya of Rogatino," who was re-worked into an ongoing heroine by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith.

Though she was made a part of Conan's world, she's maintained a strong and independent visibility in the world of established franchises, if only thanks to the 1985 movie and the many outstanding renditions of the character by Frank Thorne, as seen here.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: THE QUEEN OF SWORDS

This "lady Zorro" enjoyed only one syndicated season of 22 episodes in 2000. Nice stuntwork and a good performance by Tessie Santiago, though no one was re-inventing the wheel here.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: PURDEY

I've already covered the other three femme-adventurers from the British AVENGERS franchise, Cathy Gale, Emma Peel, and Tara King. The last of this group, known only as Purdey, appeared in the 1976-7 series THE NEW AVENGERS, where she teamed up with old hand Steed and a new younger male agent.

Though competently acted, Purdey's character never came alive thanks to desultory scripting.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: ORACLE

Way back when I wrote this essay on the 1966 Batgirl, I said that her identity as the wheelchair-bound "Oracle" deserved a separate write-up.

Oracle was created by John Ostrander and Kim Yale as an enigmatic information broker, though it didn't take long for her identity as the crippled Barbara Gordon to be revealed. Though writer Chuck Dixon deserves credit for initiating the concept of making Oracle the center of the all-female team Birds of Prey, later writer Gail Simone gets the lion's share of approbation for making the Oracle version of Barbara Gordon more interesting than she'd ever been as Batgirl.

Of course, eventually the character went back to being Batgirl, with interesting if mixed results, but that's another story.

Incidentally, it looks like "O" will be one of the first letters I run out of. Apparently names like Olive and Odetta just aren't popular as heroine-names.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: NAMORA

At a time when DC had yet to give birth to Batwoman or Supergirl, Timely Comics introduced a female cousin for their popular male hero, Namor the Sub-Mariner. She first appeared as a guest star in the Sub-Mariner story for MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS #82 (1947), and made the majority of her appearance in her cousin's tales, though she had three issues of her own series in 1948.

Namora had largely the same powers of strength and ankle-winged flight as Namor, and disappeared during the Silver Age, until a retcon story accounted for her absence and introduced her daughter Namorita, who would later join the supergroup New Warriors.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: MARGUERITE KRUX

As noted here, the original Conan Doyle LOST WORLD practically sports a sign "no girls allowed." But starting with the 1925 silent film, cinematic adaptations have almost always included female characters on the expedition, the better to engage female audiences.

As far as I can tell, Marguerite Krux (Rachel Blakely) seems to be the first such female explorer who could fight as well as a guy.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: LAS LUCHADORAS

Mexican superhero wrestlers caught fire in the 1950s, particularly with the famed "El Santo," but the first "luchadoras" feature in film begins with 1963's DOCTOR OF DOOM. The film introduces Gloria Venus (Lorena Velasquez) and Golden Ruby (Elizabeth Campbell) as two tough lady wrestlers who have to destroy a mad scientist and his humanized ape. It's delirious fun, though the second in the series, WRESTLING WOMEN VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY is only so-so, despite crossing over with the "Aztec Mummy" series.

There were four more luchadoras films, none of which I've seen, though not with the same actresses, since Velasquez never returned to the role.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: KITTEN

Boy sidekicks were all over the comics-world in the Golden Age, but young girl partners were rarer than hen's teeth-- except for one particular chicken-chopper, Kitten.

The superhero Catman (sometimes Cat-Man) began as a solo act in 1940. About a year later, in CATMAN COMICS #5, the hero liberated Katie Conn, a ten-year-old circus-girl from a "bad uncle." and eventually made her his ward. When Katie learned of her mentor's secret identity, she donned a costume like his, called herself Kitten and began fighting crime with him.

The first origin is pretty much lifted from the first appearance of Robin, right down to giving the youngster an acrobatic background, but Kitten got a very weird revised origin in 1945, though the series was cancelled about a year later. Occasionally AC Comics revived these public domain characters for guest-spots.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: JAELITHE

Andre Norton's 1963 WITCH WORLD provides a female's take on the John Carter trope, wherein Earthman lands on a medieval-style world whose people have strange powers and/or weapons. But whereas Dejah Thoris was not a character equal to her paramour Carter, WITCH WORLD concerns both the Earthman Simon Tregarth and the witchy woman he meets on the titular planet.

Jaelithe-- whose name sounds to my ears like a combo of two Biblical females, Jael and Lilith-- is a witch whose limited powers are largely explicable by then-contemporary ideas about psychic powers. She's no "sorceress supreme," but she does bring some power to stand alongside that of her more martial partner, though the two of them are only the stars of this book and its immediate sequel, WEB OF THE WITCH WORLD. They appear as support-characters in the third novel, THREE AGAINST THE WITCH WORLD, which concentrates on the couple's three grown kids, and to my knowledge Simon and Jaelithe never assume positions of narrative stardom again.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: INVISIBLE GIRL (1993)

The date should be enough to tell readers (if any) that I'm not talking about Sue Storm. The character is called "Invisible Girl" in at least one subtitled release of 1993's THE HEROIC TRIO. She's a kung-fu daredevil who possesses a cloak that grants her the power of invisibility. The performance of Michelle Yeoh reflects the character's complicated history with both the villain of the story and her sometime ally "Wonder Woman." (Wonder what those names became in the English-dubbed version.)

The character also appears in the dreary sequel EXECUTIONERS.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: HAWKGIRL (1940)

The first Hawkgirl presents something of a mixed bag. Although she has a prominent role in the origin of the Golden Age Hawkman, analyzed here, in subsequent issues she just became "the hero's girlfriend." In FLASH COMICS #24 she donned an imitation version of Hawkman's costume, complete with functional wings, and tried her hand at solving crimes, with a spectacular lack of positive results.  However, Hawkman must've given her some training in between issues, since Hawkgirl became a regular member of the team for the remainder of the feature's original run.

For me her main significance is that of providing a dry run for the better handled Silver Age Hawkgirl.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: GINGER MCALLISTER

Ginger McAllister (Cheri Caffaro) was slightly ahead of the spate of seventies "tough girls" like 1973's COFFY and 1974's POLICEWOMEN. GINGER, like its two sequels THE ABDUCTORS and GIRLS ARE FOR LOVING, spotlights Ginger's role as an undercover cop who can't seem to help running into cases with a sexy angle. Trashy, softcore fun.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: FOXTROT

The 2010 Canadian cartoon METAJETS proved an enjoyable cross between superheres and aviation aces. In the distant future, numerous terrorist threats (with code-names like "Black Cloud" and "Fly Girl") imperil civilization, so four expert pilots take on the costumed identities of the Metajets to battle evil. The group's sole female, tough girl Foxtrot, was also Maggie Strong, "army brat" daughter of the squadron's military commander.

Oddly, Google only has screencaps of the Metajets in their civilian, rather than costumed, IDs.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: ELECTRA WOMAN

Aside from noting that Deidre Hall played Electra Woman...

See previous essay.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: DYNA GIRL

There's no origin for the campy duo "Electra Woman and Dyna Girl," who are no more than distaff versions of the campy "Dynamic Duo" of the 1960s BATMAN teleseries. Unlike that series, this "Sid and Marty Krofft" production, appearing on the 1976 KROFFT SUPERSHOW, was strictly a one-joke comedy. The girls only defeated enemies with their "electra-coms," but they looked very good in the costumes. Judy Strangis played Dyna Girl.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: CAVE GIRL

One of the last artistically strong gasps of the jungle-girl subgenre in comics appeared as a backup in Magazine Enterprise's THUN'DA #2 (1952). Like most jungle girls, Cave Girl starts out as a little Caucasian kid. But whereas most such proto-heroines simply get dumped in some jungle by a fallen airplane or wrecked boat, the jungle-- in the form of an eagle-- actually comes and gets the foundling and inexplicably takes her to "the Dawn Lands," yet another "Lost World" with dinos and Amazons and anything else artist Bob Powell cared to put in it.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: BATWOMAN (1968)

And now, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, here's the 1968 "La Mujer Murcielago," a.k.a. Batwoman, reviewed here as the winsomely silly Bat-knockoff that it was.

Oddly, given that DC's 1956 Batwoman never starred or co-starred in her own series, this is the first Batwoman who qualifies for my "headcount" of central female combatives.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: AGNIESZKA

Given the current cinematic success of the film ALITA, I almost made that one my second "A," but decided instead to go with the somewhat less heralded character of Agnieszka, the starring sorceress of Naomi Novik's celebrated novel UPROOTED, reviewed here.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: ZATANNA

Zatanna first appeared as a guest-star in HAWKMAN #4 (1964), created by Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson as a feminine take on the Golden Age magician-hero Zatara, whose daughter she was. Like him, she perfected a technique of casting magical spells by speaking her commands backwards. I believe her first solo outing appeared in the 1970s, but she's had more luck in teams like Justice League than as a solo character.

That said, her four-issue miniseries by Grant Morrison and Sook is probably the best evocation of the lady magician's unique charm.

HEROINE HEADCOUNT: YELLOW HAIR

After co-starring in the 1981 wrestling-comedy ALL THE MARBLES, Laurene Landon enjoyed "solo starring" status in two 1980s adventure-flicks, the previously mentioned HUNDRA and YELLOW HAIR AND THE FORTRESS OF GOLD, which, as my review states, is easily the best of the Indiana Jones knockoffs, as well as featuring a pretty formidable take on the "white Indian girl" trope.