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Valkyrie, The Braless Wonder

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Valkyrie was pretty much the Bad Girl before Bad Girls were even a thing. The Bad Girl was a type of anti-heroine in comics that famously rampaged across the market during the 90, even though Valkyrie helped get that engine started in the late-80s thanks to Eclipse Comics' efforts to bring her back into the spotlight. Her trait which gained the most attention was that she almost never wore a supportive undergarment for her voluptuous chest which was given greater detail thanks to pin-up artists like Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens. Premiering in 1943, Valkyrie was fetchingly designed by Fred Kida for Air Fighter Comics by Hillman Periodicals as an adversary for Airboy who was a young pilot that fought for the Allied forces in WWII in his custom bat-winged plane called Birdie. Originally named Lisellotte von Schellendorf, Valkyrie earned her moniker leading an elite team of all-female German pilots known as the Airmaidens. In their first encounter, Valkyrie captures Airboy and tries ...
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Have A Crashing New Year!

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Ogden Whitney created the lollipop-sucking superhero Fat Fury, so we already know his sense of humor was slightly bent. He was perfect to do the artwork for the strange Silver Age anthology of Forbidden Worlds. Issue 60 has the time-bending tale of The Old And The New starting off in May 1953 as Dick and Millie Voyce get lost in a snowstorm on their way home through New England. They find a house where a roaring soiree is going on and everyone is celebrating New Year's 1957, but they make it out of there just before a plane crashes into it. The Voyces try to prove the accident to a neighbor but all they find at the crash site is an old abandoned house, so they decide to just keep the paranormal encounter to themselves. Cut ahead New Year's Eve 1956 and they get invited to a party at a familiar looking place just as another blizzard hits them. Realizing that they are living a rerun of their prior experience, Dick and Millie trick the party goers to head out into the freezing sno...
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This Ain't Your Daddy's Frosty

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Frank Frazetta's first work published by a major company was in the one-shot Tally-Ho Comics from Baily Publishing Co. in 1944. Along with artist John Giunta who also worked on The Deacon, their combined efforts went into one of the most off the wall characters of the Golden Age, the Snowman. He started out as an idol worshipped by Eskimos in the Arctic, although for some reason the Inuit gave their creation the typical hand-me-down clothes that your average suburban snowman would wear. One day, a crew from the inviting Desolation Island made up of the worst outcasts of humanity marooned the evilest one of them all on the shores near Snowman's village. The villain is referred to as Fang, and although described as being a human, he had green skin and a hugely exposed skull for a head, plus he had the added bonus of being able to summon up any kind of creature he wanted. Fang conjured up a sea serpent to drown his former shipmates, and then an army of primates to attack the Eskim...
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Into The Wild Pink Yonder

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Aviation Press only had a single comic series that lasted for a year starting in 1944 titled Contact Comics. With WWII still going on, fighter pilots were sensationalized in over-the-top tales of derring-do, and Contact regularly had characters with bold codenames like Golden Eagle and Black Venus, but the one that takes the cake is the flamboyant Flamingo drawn by John Giunta. At a time when comic heroes were naming themselves after ferocious birds of prey, Colonel Moore Williams was slapped with the brand of Flamingo. Officially, Col. Williams was an agent of the American military that was given the identity of Flamingo in order to carry out missions that can be free of any red tape to avoid any pesky international knots. Flamingo had a fully decked out superhero getup, however no part of his uniform had the traditional pink of the bird he's named after and instead was gold with a red cape, gloves, domino mask, and crimson briefs possibly to distract villains with his well-toned ...
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Charles Atlas Makes You Into A Man!

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Probably the single longest running ad campaign in comic books was spearheaded by the one and only Mr. Charles Atlas. Angelo Siciliano was a scrawny Italian who moved to America and in the 1920s developed one of most spectacular exercise programs of all time that is still making money to this very day. After changing his name to Charles Atlas, former-wimp Angelo promoted the ever-living heck out of his revolutionary muscle building system he branded "Dynamic Tension" and reduced the population of 97-pound weaklings to near extinction, or at least that was Chuck's original intention. Being the former circus strongman that he was, Charles was regularly photographed in Tarzan shorts as the self-proclaimed World's Most Perfectly Developed Man. The Atlas ads were for a free illustrated book titled Everlasting Health And Strength that you could send away for, although the ad at first doesn't mention anything about how Atlas makes any profit from this. Many other fitness...
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Have A Witchy Thanksgiving

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Farrell Publications had several imprints when it was in swing during the mid-Golden Age, one of which was Four Star Comic Corp., but like many of the Farrell's titles they would reprint stories from former publishers. The one we're looking at now is titled Doing The Turkey Trot which was featured in Issue 5 of their horror anthology of Midnight, although it was originally printed in the first issue of Farrell's Phantom Lady comic which mainly repurposed some of the buxom brunette's earlier adventures and have the given title of The Silly Sorceress. This comedic horror was rewritten slightly to fit a Thanksgiving theme since Blood Freak was still a few decades off. If you wanted a "funny" look at the Salem witch trials, then this comic's sense of humor might work for you. In it, pinhead pilgrim Pinwheel hunts for a turkey but gets chased off by the indigenous locals who have a bone to pick with those greedy colonists, and the fact that the comic has the na...
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Miss Victory Realizes She's In A Comic

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Seen as being the original patriotic superheroine, Miss Victory was drawn by Blue Beetle and Cat-Man artist Charles "Chas" Quinlan in 1941. The character was Joan Wayne, no relation to a certain Batman, who was a government stenographer when she smelled trouble during wartime would put on her red-white-and-blue outfit with the occasionally chest-exposing top as the masked maiden Miss Victory. There's never been a definitive example of if she had any genuine superpowers, but her knack for to surviving deadly situations has left many to believe she was at least partially invulnerable with varying levels of enhanced strength. One of her adventures had Joan working for the Secretary of Commerce checking up on some hometown pals who were in Washington as defense workers. Joan goes to her friend Maggie Duckett that had been kidnapped by Nazi spies who sent their agent Fritz to sabotage a munitions plant as Mr. Duckett. Joan changes into her heroic persona to stop the Nazis who ...
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