Fantomah Is OPAF
Sometimes thought of as the first comics superheroine, Fantomah was beaten out by the Magician From Mars by a few months when she premiered in the second issue of Fiction House's Jungle Comics in 1940. Fantomah was created by Fletcher Hanks, although he used the pen name Barclay Flagg while making her, and she was not your common jungle girl stereotype, or at least in the beginning. One of Hanks' other creations was Stardust the Space Wizard who could pretty much do anything the plot needed for him to do. Fantomah was equally overpowered as she was referred to as "Mystery Woman Of The Jungle", and not in a female Tarzan kind of way but more of a modern-day living goddess which the opening narration for nearly every episode claimed she was the most remarkable woman ever known. Fantomah appears to be a hot blonde in a revealing black negligee which is unusual as far as jungle girl attire is usually just a roadkill bikini, but when she needs to get aggressive Fantomah turns her skin completely blue and her face as a horrifying skull making her look like Skeletor's prom date and would sometimes just appear as a flaming flying skull to strike fear in the hearts of bad guys. We're never given an origin for Fantomah, just that she is omniscient and is supposed to hang out at some observatory that is also never shown. Whenever there's a rumble in the jungle, Fantomah appears as a vengeful deity and uses her weird reality-warping powers to forever curse all evil-doers with no mercy. Sometimes she would maroon villains in space, others she would transmogrify into grotesque creatures sending them back to civilization as freaks, brushing off enemies with natural disasters, or conjuring an entire armada of flying lions to strike down an air squadron. Most of the bad guys were greedy treasure hunters or mad scientists transforming jungle animals into monsters, while others were a little more ambitious like Arco who was the double threat of a mummy plus a mad scientist who used ancient Egyptian technology to take over the jungle with his mummy army. Fantomah would regularly first appear in her ghoul form warning all invaders to not defy jungle law, but then the villains would ignore that anyway, and she would show up again to de-evolve them into primates or whatever suited her fancy. Eventually, Hanks left Fiction House and Fantomah's adventures were taken over by WB Hovious who drastically reduced her omnipotence and made her your average tree-swinging jungle girl and even gave her a white sidekick of Ken who probably considered himself very lucky to be traipsing around the jungle with a magical half-naked supermodel. Fantomah went through yet another change after learning she was the "Daughter Of The Pharaohs", so she dyed her hair red, started dressing more like a bootleg Cleopatra, and permanently became the rule of the lost city of Khefra where she spent the remainder of her run as protector of her subjects. Fletcher Hanks was a notorious drunk and this probably dripped down into his work as Fantomah's earlier tales were so fantastical, but her descent into being just another card-carrying jungle queen was a serious step down for a comics heroine who pre-dated Wonder Woman.

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