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The First Black Superheroine

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Sol Brodsky set up Skywald Publications after leaving Marvel Comics at the dawn of the Bronze Age. Brodsky teamed up with Israel Waldman who founded Super Comics which specialized in reprinting Golden Age comics during the Silver Age such as Phantom Lady and Blue Beetle. Skywald began with doing a troika of black and white horror comic magazines which is an idea they basically lifted Warren Publishing best known for Vampirella, however one other magazine they did featured the mystery man named Hell Rider. This anthology had the title character being a super-strong Vietnam veteran who fought crime as a vigilante, plus as a well-meaning biker gang called The Wild Bunch, and the costumed superhero known as The Butterfly. She was significant as she was the first black superheroine ever printed in comics years before Marvel first introduced Storm. Weirdly enough, Gary Friedrich who was one of the creators behind Bumblebee went on to work for Marvel in creating their character of Ghost Rider...
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The Great Superhero Team-Up Of 1942

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A few years after the Justice Society had already gotten together, Harvey Comics decided to pull their own Avengers Assemble moment in Fall of 1942 less than a year after America had entered WWII. In the pages of Issue 23 of their Speed Comics anthology, the Black Cat segment had the ferocious feline in the middle of an all-star crossover drawn by Argentinian artist Arturo Cazeneuve who was simultaneously working for Harvey as well as DC Comics. Based slightly on actual events, this particular story was inspired by the Bombardment of Ellwood and the Great LA Air Raid, except this time the hype is real in the fictional Harvey Universe. Hollywood's own heroine Black Cat who in reality is starlet Linda Turner has to defend her home turf from invading Japanese forces. Now, this was in the thick of WWII, and American's were fiercely ticked at Japan for Pearl Harbor, so they did refer to them as Japs and drew them with yellow skin and buck teeth as was common among most Asian stereot...
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Vibra Planet Space-O-Grams

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A pair of wireless space phones for one buck sounds like a pretty good deal for 1954, but Consumer Mart's ad that ran in the dawn of the Silver Age gave off the impression that you were getting some kind of high-tech next generation communication device. Hell, all anyone need to do in the 50s to make their product appear like it was scientifically advance was just to label it as space-something. The Secret Code Vibra Planet Space Walkie-Talkies which are not only "fun and thrills for all" and "thrills and fun galore", both of which were used in the same comic book advertisement as if there was any difference between the two terms. Not only that but you can get a free top-secret space-o-gram code as an exclusive bonus feature which is the exact same thing that anyone else receive if they were daft enough to fall for this. How this particular space phone worked is a mystery because it's not one of those pair of cups tied together with a single string to carry ...
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War Nurse: The Original Wonder Woman

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Aside from Black Cat, Harvey Comics had another scantily clad superheroine, War Nurse. Originally created by Jill Elgin and Howard Reed through Brookwood Publishing, Harvey bought out the publisher and added the character to their anthology of Speed Comics in May of 1941 months before DC Comics first premiered Wonder Woman. Pat Parker was a redhead British military nurse who had a trio of cases where she prevented Nazi invaders from conquering her home country. After her endeavors started getting the attention of newspapers, Pat decided to come up with an alter-ego as the superhero War Nurse, just prior to when Diana Prince began her own career as an army nurse. Parker dyed her hair brunette and put together a skimpy outfit with a white crop top, blue hotpants, red books, and a flossie cap mixed with a mask. As War Nurse, she went on to have a colorful crusade protecting Britain by crossdressing as German soldiers, rescuing children, and good ol' fashioned Nazi-punching, all while ...
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Marga The Furry Woman

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Most of the standard jungle girl characters were white woman who were raised in the jungle by either the natives or animals like wolves, but Marga the Panther Woman is a major exception to this rule as she was the result of a mad scientist's experiment. Marga was created by Emil Gershwin and was featured in Fox Features' Science Comics and Weird Comics. Set in what appears to be sometime in the future given the Futurama-like ships and buildings, the insane biologist Van Dorf escaped from an asylum and set up a laboratory in the African jungle to use the blood of panthers to create a race of super-people. Van Dorf had kidnapped a blonde nurse named Marga from the asylum and transfused some panther DNA into her which for some reason now made her a brunette all thanks to the Electrofusi Generator. Marga is not happy with her feline makeover, so she attacks him and leaves him to explode with his entire hideout. She soon realizes that she now has the nature of a panther with enhance...
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Who Wants To Date A Superheroine?

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No relation to the similarly named Marvel Comics character, Moon Girl was the only superhero created by EC Comics prior to them shifting to specializing in horror titles. Starting out as a feature in The Happy Houlihans, Moon Girl spun off into her own title and was basically EC's answer to Wonder Woman as she was a princess from an isolated nation of women in Uzbekistan who followed her super-strong boyfriend from a neighboring kingdom called the Prince to get a job as a teacher in America. Moon Girl has a special moonstone that gives her super-strength, speed, telepathy, and the power to control her crescent-shaped Moonship which she used to fight crime with the Prince acting as her partner/sidekick. In one of her weirder adventures written by DC Comics editor Dorothy Woolfolk and drawn by Bat-Mite creator Sheldon Moldoff, Moon Girl gets a caller all the way from the year 3000 who was a pudgy pointy-eared man that called himself Future Man. He travelled back in time just to escap...
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Reduce Those Spots

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During the late Golden Age, a series of ads appeared in various comic books from war, western, romance, funny animals, and teenage comedies for vending the amazing new weight loss product, the Spot Reducer. Created by Spot Reducer Co., this was basically one of the first mass produced electric massagers to come out, least until Japan invented the first massage chairs in the mid-50s. This is a scheme that has been circulating for decades where massagers are supposed to help lose weight, when in reality they only help increase blood circulation and somewhat tone some muscles, a scheme which has been used in everything from belts to a full-on gun duping lazy burns into thinking it's some kind of miracle device that magically burns fat away. Among its claims is that it was approved in a lab by non-scientific investors and it helps cures muscle aches when it only slightly suppresses the pain, but for what would be at least $150 by today's market then $9.99 is asking quite a bit for ...
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