October 1983: A Champion by Chance

A kind of latter-day Fly Girl, AC Comics’ heroine Nancy Arazello was appealing and unassuming, feeling her way toward independence both as a woman and as a superhero. 

She only became a superhero, in fact, because she’d accidentally interrupted her boyfriend when he was beseeching the dark insect god Zzara for power. 

“During the 1940s, student of the occult John Howard Gallagher performed a mystic ritual which gave him super powers,” noted Jeff Rovin in his Encyclopedia of Superheroes. “Engineer Kenneth Francis Burton Jr. spends years learning all he can about Gallagher, who had died in 1957 — and eventually learns the secret of the incantation. But while he was performing the ceremony at his factory, his fiancée Nancy walks in and receives the full force of the unleashed supernatural powers. Thereafter, simply by willing it, she becomes the Dragonfly, able to fly and possessing great strength and invulnerability.”

In fact, she could reach speeds of Mach 4 and move objects with telekinesis. She came with a built-in enemy, a boyfriend who seethed with envy over the powers he thought were rightfully his.

As T.M. Maple observed, “(Writer/artist) Rik Levins did seem to have a good time with the story, interjecting some of the more mundane, nevertheless interesting and amusing, problems that a superhero might run into.”

The character could be seen as a more mature homage to Fly Girl, with the 1950s’ male superhero who preceded her analogous to the Fly, and perhaps Charlton’s mystically powered Blue Beetle.

Nancy also had something in common with the Greatest American Hero as a goodhearted, accidentally super-powered person who was somewhat out of her depth.

Introduced in Americomics 4 (Oct. 1983), Dragonfly went on to star in eight issues of her own title.

I’ve always thought Dragonfly was among those well-done “might-have-beens,” a character who had some of the freshness Spider-Man originally possessed, and who deserved better than she got.