YEAR 1945: FIREHAIR

1945, the last year of WWII, was not a particularly strong year for femmes formidables: the jnext significant "boom years" would commence in the next year with both comics-heroines and the femmes fatales of cinema's films noirs.

I confess that I've only read a handful of Firehair stories, but my overall impression is that she was nothing but a transparent attempt to create a western version of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.  Just as Sheena is a white woman raised by Black African tribesmen, Firehair is raised by Native American tribesmen.  The main difference is that while Sheena was raised from childhood,  Firehair is a normal adult woman of the late 1800s when she undergoes her cultural transformation. Thanks to a wagon-train attack by a raiding-party made up of phony Indians, she loses her memory of her old identity as a civilized white woman.  A tribe raises her as one of their own and gives her the name Firehair, but she doesn't act at all like the squaws of the tribe, displaying greater fighting-skills-- fighting, riding, weapons-play-- than any of her red brothers.  Later in the series Firehair regains her memory but decides to stick with the tribe rather than return to the white man's world.  And why not?  She wasn't technically the ruler of her tribe, but she was implicitly the "big dog" in their ranks, whereas she'd only be another woman in white society.

Whereas Fiction House's Sheena stories are fairly witty for their genre, Firehair's tend to be rather routine, though as is usual for Fiction House, the art is at least lively.

YEAR 1945: BREATHLESS MAHONEY

Thanks to the 1990 Warren Beatty film, Breathless Mahoney is probably the best known of DICK TRACY's femmes formidables.  Unfortunately, in the original comic strip she's something of a small-timer, like the strip's first noteworthy villainess Larceny Lu.

Breathless starts out as being derivative of another TRACY villain, as she's the stepdaughter of a extortionist named Shaky.  After Shaky dies Breathless finds his body and eventually discovers his hidden cache of money.  In a testimony to the perils of being brought up wrong, Breathless and her mother contend over their right to the money; Breathless wins but her mother shoots and wounds her daughter.  During her flight from the law she kills one unfortunate individual and knocks out Dick Tracy with drugged coffee. Her most notable accomplishment, however, is not any particular crime but the fact that through her the reader first encounters the most long-lived comedy relief character in the TRACY strip: the pestiferous-looking hillbilly B.O. Plenty. 

Strangely, at this time Chester Gould did not have any intention of positioning B.O. as an ongoing character.  When Breathless and B.O. fall out over the coveted money, B.O. strangles her, and though she doesn't die it's not for his lack of trying.  Shortly later B.O. himself is hijacked by crooks who torture him until he gives up the dough, and then send him on a one-way trip to the city-sewers.  He and Breathless survive, however, and  B.O. later becomes ensconced as a regular character.  Breathless, dying in a hospital,  briefly tries to implicate B.O. in her crimes just at the time he's scheduled to marry his love Gravel Gertie, but the hard-luck dame gives in at the last minute, exonerates the hillbilly and kicks the bucket.