Creator Russell Stamm, who was previously an assistant on the Dick Tracy strip, introduced Invisible Scarlet O’Neil to the readers of the Chicago Daily Times on June 3, 1940.
She might be regarded as a female counterpart to the popular radio superhero the Shadow, who’d been turning invisible to fight crime since 1938. Her newspaper strip combined underwear modelish “good-girl art” with super powers — contrasting visibility with invisibility, you might say.
This attractive, red-headed daughter of a scientist gained the power of invisibility through accidental exposure to a “weird-looking ray” invented by daddy, and learned to control her ability by touching a nerve in her wrist.
Scarlet’s first escapades expressed a certain maternal quality as she rescued orphans and handicapped children, but she moved on to battle the spies and saboteurs that were meat and potatoes to wartime superheroes.
Whimsical adventures took her to prehistoric times, confronted her with an invisibility epidemic and, cleverly and tellingly, left her doubting her own reality during a bout with amnesia.
The character’s healthy run branched out to comic books and Big Little Books.
Unfortunately, she was truly invisible by the time the strip ended in 1956, having been supplanted by a male hero, Stainless Steel, for whom the strip was renamed.
Like her Rosie the Riveter sisters, Scarlet found that the reward of wartime public service was an invitation to step back into the background when the men came marching home.
Invisible Scarlet O’Neil and Marvel Comics’ Invisible Girl could literally vanish, while Marvel’s the Wasp, DC’s Shrinking Violet and Quality Comics’ Doll Girl boasted the ability to shrink from sight.
In attempting to create supermen, male comics writers offered us garish figures who streak across the sky, battering down all obstacles with irresistible force. But, when asked to create superwomen, the writers tended to endow them with extraordinary levels of metaphoric insubstantiality and insignificance.
Joseph Lenius wrote:
ReplyDeleteThat's also a GA and 1950s feature that has decent art -- not a hallmark of the times! 🙂
Johnny Williams wrote:
ReplyDeleteI loved the concept of her touching a nerve in her wrist to activate her powers. I don't know why, but that really appealed to me. It's so Golden Age comics, via the pulps, in a way.
She reminded me of a character that I would have created.
I find it somewhat surprising that she's not better known given her run, but then not really. For the longest time an attitude of 'they're only girls' predominated in our society and culture across the board.
Joseph Lenius wrote:
ReplyDeleteGood ol' Stan and Jack (or Jack and Stan, if you prefer), really had to look far and wide for a prototype for Sue Storm, huh? 😃 And for Reed Richards, right? 😃 And for Johnny Storm, ya think? 😃 And for Ben Grimm, for sure? 😃
Paul Zuckerman wrote:
ReplyDeleteJoseph -one of my main criticisms (among many) when I first read FF was that most of the team was unoriginal. Of course, at age nine, my comic book history was full of gaps, so I felt that Mr. Fantastic was a rip-off of Elastic Lad and the Elongated Man. (It was four years before I found out about Plastic Man.) As for being original, wasn't Invisible Kid already there, and Jimmy Olsen had done that as well! (I wasn't yet aware of H. G. Wells' classic.) I didn't know about the 1940s Human Torch yet so Johnny seemed original to me, but the Thing didn't impress me either!
When people fight over who came up with the concept of the FF, it sort of amuses me because it was not all that original!
Joseph Lenius wrote:
ReplyDeletePaul, exactly what you said, bro! My thoughts too. Granted, Kirby and Lee took comics in a new direction with FF, but the powers of the cast were "borrowed" big time.
Paul Zuckerman wrote:
ReplyDeleteWell, I think the approach they took is why Marvel took off, not the characters themselves. It's like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other such characters.
But because it was the approach and not the character so much, is why it is so annoying the constant deprecation of Stan Lee because it is obvious that he was the guiding light that made the Marvels different from what came before.
Edward Lee Love wrote:
ReplyDeleteI would say your last paragraph was truer of the Silver-Age than the Golden. Invisible Scarlet O'Neil was the only invisible female amongst almost a dozen men of the same power during the 1940s. The 1940s, either women were created to be solo stars and tended to have the powers and abilities to outshine any man in the strip or were partners to male stars and generally duplicated their partners' powers (Doll Man and Doll Girl, Bulletman and Bulletgirl, Rocketman and Rocketgirl). It was the 1960s where the female characters were mostly given more passive powers that allowed them to simply stand in the background or disappear altogether and very few, if any, created to carry a story by themselves.
To Edward Lee Love: Of course, to be nothing but a knock-off of a male character — which is what most Golden Age superheroines were — is just another kind of passivity. Even Wonder Woman was intended to be a Superman knock-off, though she ended up being something more. And what was Black Cat but a female Batman?
ReplyDeleteEdward Lee Love wrote:
ReplyDeleteI think you have to look at their portrayal within the stories. Wonder Woman was better than Steve Trevor. The Black Cat was a better detective and fighter than her detective boyfriend. Your pilot heroines Black Venus, Black Angel, and the patriotic heroine Miss Victory were better fighters and pilots than the enlisted male pilots. We don't think about it as much today, but this was somewhat subversive at the time when there were women pilots but they weren't allowed in combat. The idea that the stories portrayed women to be equal and even superior than the men in the same field normally reserved for the men is exceptional. Especially as this didn't really carry through with other media. Such as our serials. In Tigerwoman, Linda Stirling had to be rescued as much as not. Sheena would eat her for breakfast. There were not even a handful of great pulp heroines that could hold their own against the Shadow, Doc Savage, etc.
Melody Ivins wrote:
ReplyDeleteIt must be difficult for people who grew up in the 80s or after to know how infinitely constricting and absolute gender roles used to be. Yes, even superheroines had to be dainty and diminished versions of their male counterparts, as well as pretty and emotional. They were often daughters or sweethearts of the heroic guys.
I had never heard of Invisible Scarlet O’Neil. Thanks for making the introduction, Dan.
ReplyDeleteLisa Childress wrote:
Dan, it seems to me that superheroes take human abilities and qualities and magnify them, strength to super-strength, etc. Women superheroes reflected and magnified attributes that were considered at that time to be particular to women, thus the secondary roles and attributes like invisibility and shrinking; it was how men saw women at the time, ancillary to men. As you state, Rosie the Riveter was pushed back into the nursery and kitchen after she was no longer needed. And this is true of all cultures. Mulan dressed as a man and avenged her father, but as soon as she accomplished that, she willingly (?) went back to her female duties. And of course we know what happened to St. Joan of Arc.
Melody Ivins wrote:
ReplyDeleteLisa Childress, I am just now re-reading one of my favorite books about La Pucelle, Joan, Jeanette, The Maid of Orleans. She was magnificent! A country girl who talked with saints, she was determined to save France, and inspired and directed great armies.
One of the most heartbreaking parts of her imprisonment is that her jailors demanded she wear traditional women's clothing. When she did, her jailors raped her, and then called her a whore for allowing them to rape her. She was chained at the time.
Dear younger friends, one way to grasp the straight-jacket of gender roles through the 1950s and into the 60s is Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." It seems hopelessly antiquated now, but it was revolutionary when it appeared in 1963. Just give it a look, if you will.
And gay rights, racial justice, protection of children from abusive fathers before the mid-1970s? Nope, nope, and nope. Not even on the public radar.
Please just keep these matters in mind when you read early comics, and what Dan wisely calls the funhouse mirror of popular culture. Minstrel shows, ladies' magazines crammed with recipes, etiquette, terrible advice, weepy stories, and fashion; decades of teen pop music, Saturday morning cartoons and the Sunday funnies -- it's all right there in front of us.
Especially when it acquires super powers and some damned good writers and artists. 🙂
Bob Doncaster wrote:
ReplyDeleteSounds like she had a finger on the pulse of her powers
Rick Diehl wrote:
ReplyDeleteMy mother loved Invisible Scarlet O'Neil.
Robert S. Childers wrote:
ReplyDeleteThe Dark Horse series Ghost featured a heroine who, as the title would indicate, gave every appearance of being an earthbound spirit (she could become invisible, walk through solid matter, etc). The character genuinely thought she had died (she had suffered a traumatic experience after which there was a significant gap in her memory, and when she woke up she was "ghostly") but I speculated that the arc of the series would eventually have her discover that she wasn't dead, only super-powered (the world she lived in had super-powered folks, so it wasn't a stretch). I learned later that the book's original artist and character designer Adam Hughes'd had the same idea, but if the writers and editors ever considered it, they never touched upon it, to my knowledge. The idea might not have occurred to me had I not already heard of Invisible Scarlett O'Neal, who in one storyline lost her memory and doubted her reality.