She had super strength and the ability to repel bullets, a mother who was a queen, a plane she controlled by thought, a secret identity that was a pun that winked at her real identity, a heroic but ineffectual and overconfident boyfriend and a tendency to exclaim appeals for strength to arcane sources.
And she wasn’t Wonder Woman.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Superman and Batman must have been blushing from the first. And with a postwar wave of women populating comics, EC Comics’ Moon Girl paid DC Comics’ Wonder Woman that compliment.
“The story opened in the remote kingdom of Samarkand, where the princess, identified only as ‘Princess of the Moon’ or ‘The Moon Girl,’ learned of her legacy — a magic moonstone that made her invincible in battle (which she was already pretty close to being even without it), and an ancestral history of not being made happy by being able to defeat any suitor,” comics historian Don Markstein noted.
“This was complicated by the fact that, like the later Marvel Comics version of Red Sonja, she’d already made it clear she could never marry a man who wasn’t better on the battlefield than herself.
“Sure enough, when Prince Mengu, from a nearby kingdom, came a-courting, she beat him up and sent him on his way, but was sorry about it afterward. She traveled the world looking for him, and finally tracked him down in America, where he was coaching student athletes under the name Lionel Manning. She adopted a pseudonym of her own, Clare Lune, and got a teaching job at the same school.”
As World War II ended, American women became less visible in the factories and more visible on comic book covers, while superheroes faded. Moon Girl tracked the changing postwar fashions in comics exactly. The title that began as Moon Girl in winter 1947 had, by September 1949, morphed into A Moon … A Girl … Romance.
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