There Can Be Only One Golden Girl!

Spark Publications had a minimal run when it started out in 1945 that had some success continuing the adventures of The Green Lama, even though they had original characters like Golden Lad. Getting his own title, Tommy Preston can turn into the Superboy clone Golden Boy when he says "Heart of Gold" while holding an ancient Aztec artifact of the same name. The Heart of Gold itself is enchanted by the blood of a thousand martyred Aztecs, but why they chose a random white American boy to be shoved into the Shazam mold instead of someone of more Mexican heritage remains unexplained. An anomalous spinoff to this character was the hackneyed female counterpart to the male superhero, which you think would be named Golden Lass. The one known as Golden Girl had no relation to the iconic sitcom quartet that would appear decades later had only a tangential connection to Golden Lad as she was just his classmate. Peggy Shane went to the same school as Tommy who followed him home one day to see if he was connected to the superhero when he drops his golden heart leaving a piece of it behind. Peggy picks it up and of course says the magic word change her into Golden Girl now with super-strength, flight, and x-ray vision. She immediately breaks up a racket of criminals posing as cops who bomb a department store with a doll filled with dynamite. Golden Girl was advertised as being Golden Lad's new partner in Issue #5 of the comic, but this was also the series' final issue as the superhero market began to shrink after WWII, so we never got to see an actual superhero team-up between these two. The original Golden Girl didn't get much traction other than just being a gender-swap of the main character. They might as well have had Golden Lad with cartoonishly long eyelashes and a bow in his hair like Minnie Mouse.

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