Black Venus, Showgirl Turned Fighter Pilot

There were quite a few female aviators during the Golden Age, but one of the few to actually have their own semi-secret identity was Black Venus. Captain Midnight artist Charles Tomsey was the original creator of the pretty pilot who went through many redesigns in her short stint from Aviation Press' Contact Comics which ran for the first nine issues. Starting off in Burma in WWII, USO hostess Mary Roche dances with the pilots, but when its closing time she goes to her secret hangar and changes clothes to be the leg bearing Black Venus who sets off in her fighter plane to take down the nearby Japanese forces. Mary didn't wear a mask or anything in her alter ego but put a hot lady in a tight or revealing outfit and your average onlooker seems to block out their secret identity. Her second adventure had an even skimpier outfit more resembling a leather bar leader as she took down the cross-dressing Agent X. In her third story, Black Venus moved to Austrailia and began wearing the uniform most would be familiar with looking similar to Julie Nemar's Catwoman duds but replaced the cat ears with a black hood and goggles. When she wasn't sabotaging the Axis Powers, she was constantly losing boyfriends, two separate ones were oddly both named Bill Evans. When WWII drew to a close, Mary went back to America and uses her Black Venus persona to become a vigilante rounding up crooks with seriously bad karma, including some who ripped off the blind, and her American adventures were then drawn by Harvey Kurtzman. Black Venus had a second career decades later becoming part of Dynamite Entertainment's Project Superpowers where she along with other public domain heroes would cross paths with unlikely lethal ladies like Red Sonja and Vampirella. In a duel between Black Venus and the Red Baron, both aviators would probably be cursing the aeronautical endeavors of a certain red scarfed beagle.