Into The Wild Pink Yonder

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 gams. One area Flamingo did live up to his moniker was his funky airplane modeled after the wading bird he's named after. Keep in mind, this government agent was going on covert operations in a bright pink aircraft, so how he ever kept from getting shot down while flying the tackiest thing in the sky is a miracle. Flamingo first takes on a Japanese spy disguised as a fakir to con the locals of Calcutta into taking arms against white men, then he fights against more Japanese forces wearing huge gliding bat costumes to scare Americans into thinking they were being attacked by vampires, and finally prevents a Thug cult from getting supplies from the Japanese to lead their own revolt, so Flamingo really had it out for the land of the Rising Sun. Flamingo was only in the first three issues of Contact Comics, but hopefully his brief run didn't influence a generation of readers to go flying around in their own gawdy eyesore.