During the 1950s, DC heroes like Superman, Batman, Tomahawk and Blackhawk all had various cover-gimmick fake marriages, while remaining safely unattainable and aloof.
“Blackhawk, much like Batman, succumbed to an invasion of weird and alien menaces as the issues progressed through the end of the decade,” recalled comics historian Bill Schelly. “A bright spot for teen male readers was the introduction of Lady Blackhawk, perhaps harkening back to a much earlier adventure. Military Comics 20 (July 1943) presented a story about an unnamed woman who attempted to become the first female Blackhawk.”
Two other proto-Lady Blackhawks — Eve Rice and Sheila Hawke, a/k/a “She-Hawke”— appeared during the 1940s and early 1950s.
“In The Lady Blackhawk (Blackhawk 133, Feb. 1959), Zinda Blake trained to qualify for induction to the team, but discovered that the Blackhawk code restricted membership to men,” Schelly said. “Lady Blackhawk returned occasionally as an honorary member, looking fetching in her short skirt and bare legs.”
Like the Blackhawks, the Challengers of the Unknown had their own female quasi-member, June Robbins. In Challengers of the Unknown 17 (Jan. 1961), June came in particularly handy because only she could fight off a genie commanded by the evil magician Malvolio.
Ace Morgan finally figures out that it’s June’s opal ring that the genie fears. He knew that opals were believed to have protective powers and to ward off evil in some ancient cultures.
Bruce Kanin:
ReplyDeleteFirst came the young, male sidekicks to make sure the youngest readers noticed, then the ladies to make sure the older ones did. Made sense to me.
Johnny Williams:
ReplyDeleteDan, your essay made me think about the difference between the teams featured above by you and the following -
Cave Carson’s band of adventurers, the Sea Devils, Rip Hunter Time Master’s group, and Task Force X-The Suicide Squad
….which was that with ‘these’ teams the female member was already and always an ongoing and integral part of the primary existing team, and not a guess star who shows up from time to time.
Like the Legion and the JLA (super-powered heroes, not just adventurers admittedly) the ones that I listed were all progressive in the sense that they had at least one female character onboard as an actual, ongoing team member.
Me not being adverse to female heroes-heroines, during the Silver Age I secretly wished that Supergirl and Batgirl would have been allowed to ‘formally’ join the already existing ‘World’s Finest’ team, but then what of Robin?
Bob Bailey:
ReplyDeleteAnd notice the similarity to Batman #122 February 1959 to Blackhawk. Thanks Dan. I loved these house ads.
Steve Newton:
ReplyDeleteMy take on this is not that they remained "unattainable," but that DC was struggling with the conflicting necessities of not having the characters change and grow over time versus longer term readers wanting to see that kind of growth and not see them frozen in time. The imaginary stories, dream stories, and gimmick stories allowed writers to experiment with the illusion of growth while safely staying inside their static universe. Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz both learned this from their experiences working in pulp SF prior to 1942.
One of the things that distinguished Marvel through the mid-1960s was that characters like the Fantastic Four and Spider-man DID change and grow and age (even if sporadically and certainly not in real time). This was part of Marvel's huge edge through about 1968-69. By 1970, however, they were facing the old issue of not permitting your favored characters (who by then were on TV) to get older. So Stan invented "Marvel Time" to promote the illusion of growth, and eventually proliferated into "what if" stories just like DC had done in the 1950s and 1960s.
I replied:
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That, and the fact that American male popular culture heroes then simply did not marry — not just Superman and Batman, but Matt Dillon, Paladin, Captain Kirk, etc. To marry would have curtailed their idealized freedom. Even a character like Tarzan, previously married in novels and films, was "de-married" for his television show.
Bob Doncaster:
ReplyDeleteThose women completely ignored the large “No Girls Allowed” sign posted on the clubhouse,
I replied:
They were, after all, icky.
Michael Uslan:
ReplyDeleteIt took decades before we solved the mystery of which writer co-created Zinda, Lady Blackhawk. The answer... Jack Schiff.
George Blake:
ReplyDeleteZinda Blake was the most fetching of all DC heroines. She was beautiful, intelligent, resourceful and courageous.
Always a welcome addition to the stories.