YEAR 1968: MADAME MASQUE

Technically, the character who would later be known as "Madame Masque"-- or even just "Masque" in one incarnation-- was called both by her given name "Whitney Frost" and by her formal name as head of the criminal "Maggia," "the Big M." (No relation to "M-Appeal," I guess.)

Whitney Frost, later revealed to be the daughter of the Maggia's former leader Count Nefaria, debuted in TALES OF SUSPENSE #98, as a glamor-girl who began romancing SHIELD agent Jasper Sitwell. The romance was at least partly for show, for she was trying to get intel from Sitwell so that her gang could break into Stark Industries and rip off the inventor's store of super-weapons. (Today, no one would believe that a criminal gang would bother making such a blatant assault, since it would be so much easier to bribe employees into copying the tech-- which more or less became the subject of the "Armor Wars" arc in the IRON MAN title.)

Sitwell only pretended to be fooled by Whitney's blandishments in order to lure her into a trap. Like many sentimental Marvel females, she couldn't resist saving Sitwell's life despite him setting her up to take a fall. Then she escaped. Several issues later, after TALES OF SUSPENSE had morphed into IRON MAN, writer Archie Goodwin essentially ripped off the origin of Doctor Doom, having Whitney facially injured in a tragic accident that forced her to wear a mask to conceal her ruined beauty.

I know that I've said this before of other characters, but from what I've seen of Masque's later incarnations, she never seemed to catch fire outside of the original arc of Goodwin-scripted stories. Goodwin's scripts had a more hard-edged, noir-ish feel than those of Smilin' Stan or any of the many Marvel raconteurs who followed some if not all aspects of Stan's writing-style.  Madama Masque, who was a "tough girl" at least a year before Marvel's Black Widow showed any propensity at hand-to-hand fighting, just didn't fit the rather "soft," soap-operatic style of later IRON MAN writers, particularly Bill Mantlo, who tried to make her into Stark's regular girlfriend.

YEAR 1967: ANGELIQUE

In April 1967, the failing horror-soap opera DARK SHADOWS introduced the character for which the show would become best known: the tragic vampire Barnabas Collins. About six months later, the writers introduced the witchy woman who had created him: Angelique. She was usually tagged with the surname "Bouchard," though as this Wikipedia writeup details, neither name precisely signified her original identity.

Mythically, Angelique is interesting as an example of a "downstairs" striving to mingle with the "upstairs." Her early life as Angelique portrays her as having come to work as a servant to the Countess DuPres in the French Caribbean colony Martinique in the 17th century. Later she, as a member of the Countess' retinue, emigrates to Collinsport, Maine. There she enjoys an affair with wealthy Collins scion Barnabas, but Barnabas rejects her in favor of another upper-class representative: Josette, daughter of Angelique's mistress. This rejection of her love leads Angelique to curse Josette to experience a fatal accident, and to condemn Barnabas to the mordant existence of a vampire. When Barnabas revives during the 20th century and seeks to undo his curse, witchy Angelique shows up at the Collins door, determined to make her former paramour suffer.

Over the serials' remaining years Angelique displayed a variety of awesome supernatural powers, including a period when she herself became a vampire, as shown above. But the greatest mystery about her is: why did the writers make her a low-class servant from Martinique? Given that the Caribbean Islands signify a condition of racial admixture, is there a sense that Angelique, despite being a blonde Caucasian, is actually "coded" as having the "colorful" background often assigned to Martinique's Creole population?

Regardless of this possible reading, Angelique was one of the better developed DARK SHADOWS characters. Other actresses essayed the role in later versions of the show, but for this fan, Lara Parker remains the definitive incarnation.

YEAR 1966: GOLDEN SWALLOW

I confess that it's been quite a while since I screened King Hu's influential kung-fu drama COME DRINK WITH ME, and I don't remember being knocked out by its somewhat old-fashioned plot, though I accept the verdict of authorities who consider it a pivotal work in the history of commercial Hong Kong films in this genre.  But it deserves a mention here in that it's credited with being the first modern film to focus upon the adventures of a female kung-fu diva, one "Golden Swallow," played by Cheng Pei Pei (best known to contemporary viewers for her role in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON),

Given that I don't have that much new information to impart, I'll pass over the usual summation and simply link to an online essay that explores the film and its director in more depth than I can.

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YEAR 1966: POISON IVY

The appearance of Julie Newmar as Catwoman not only stimulated the character's return to comic books for the first time in ten-plus years, it also bestirred the comic book's creative personnel to come up with the first major Bat-villainess since Catwoman's creation in 1939.

Despite the misleading cover, in her first appearance Poison Ivy doesn't sow "trouble between the dynamic duo," except in the sense that Robin has to constantly rein in Batman when he gets an "itch" for Ivy. The Robert Kanigher story makes an amusing attempt at duplicating the TV show's camp attributes, since the story starts off with Bruce and Dick in a museum, observing huge comic-booky posters of three never-before-seen female costumed crooks.  Giant wanted posters as "camp?" Well, maybe. Anyway, Poison Ivy shows up, tells the assembled reporters (quite an active cadre of art-journalists in Gotham City) that she's a bigger and better crook than the other three no-talents, and then makes her escape. She then schemes to get the other three lady-crooks captured by Batman and Robin while trying to mesmerize the elder hero with her charms-- some of which admittedly include drugged lipstick.

Camp elements aside, I imagine Kanigher had already done a lot of stories about alluring devil-women in his war-books, so Poison Ivy wasn't a new idea, however alien her overt sexiness might be in the overall Batman series. And though the Infantino-designed villainess wears a leaf-covered leotard, in her first few stories she doesn't pattern her crimes on plants. If anything, Kanigher seems to have conceived of her as an incarnation of feminine glamor-devices, for in addition to drugged lipstick she uses weapons like exploding pieces of hair and the like.

Fans can thank Gerry Conway for transforming Ivy into a mistress of plants, in a two-part Wonder Woman story appearing in WORLD'S FINEST #251-52.  While it was a poorly written story, the idea caught on, and from then on Poison Ivy's nature and origin were rewritten to fit this concept-- which prompted continuity linkages to other DC vegetable-characters like Swamp Thing and Jason Woodrue.

Increasingly she's been made more, like Catwoman, more sympathetic, both in the humorous series HARLEY AND IVY and the more recent, semi-serious GOTHAM CITY SIRENS.

ADDENDA: Though I would not retract my statement that Gerry Conway is principally responsible for making Poison Ivy a "mistress of plants"-- which eventually led to her becoming a sort of plant-woman in her own right-- I have to fill in some blanks that led to this association.

Ivy's creator Kanigher wrote a total of four Poison Ivy tales: two for Batman feature-stories, and a two-part continuity in 1971 for ROSE AND THE THORN, a backup feature in LOIS LANE. The character then apparently went into limbo for the next three years, until she was revived by writer Len Wein in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #111 (1974), where she became a member of Libra's "Injustice Gang." Wein possibly realized that Kanigher's conception of Ivy wasn't powerful enough to hold her own in a standard superhero set-up, and it's in this issue that she starts using a gun that can accelerate the growth of plants, so that said plants can then attack or entangle heroes, as needed. Perhaps because Wein was working from the concept that Ivy was NOT any sort of scientist, Ivy tells Mirror Master that fellow gang-member Chronos, who was a scientist, helped Ivy design her plant-stimulating weapon. In the same issue, in a text-piece credited to Martin Pasko, Poison Ivy's "wanted poster" gives her the name "Pamela Isley" and says that she "uses knowledge of horticulture against the Batman," which I would regard as a bit of back-dating, since the Kanigher version did not actually plant-gimmicks as such, unless her hypnotic lipstick was supposed to be plant-derived. The text-piece also mentions her ability to creep up a wall like real ivy, which was definitely in Kanighter's first story, but the piece strangely credits her tendency to make men fall in love with her only to "psychological trickery."

The version of Ivy with her trusty plant-accelerator gun seems to last for the next few years, appearing in SUPER FRIENDS #1 (1976), before Gerry Conway's WORLD'S FINEST story portrays her as turning human beings into plant-creatures-- which may have spurred later authors to portray Ivy as making herself into a plant-like entity.

YEAR 1965: VARLA

As I said in my review of FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!, Russ Meyer's formidable film about three go-go dancers involved in murder resists easy summation. The same applies to the film's foremost star, Varla. In a technical sense, Varla, Billie and Rosie form an ensemble of eccentric characters, but Varla is the one that has become immortal in pop culture.

There had been, as this blog has detailed in depth, many female characters who demonstrated facility with the martial arts, though admittedly the cinematic medium doesn't have a very strong showing in this department. Varla, however, is something beyond characters like Nyoka the Jungle Girl. While Nyoka might occasionally best a male opponent, the factor of her lesser degree of strength always made her victories a little forced.

Varla, however, has something different: karate. It's important to remember that even in 1965, karate was a relatively new idea to Westerners. Though Meyer's film doesn't expatiate on the dynamics behind the martial art, it takes on a meaning in his film that it doesn't have in the spy-films: karate is an equalizer for the female.  

Varla only has two female-versus-male fights in PUSSYCAT. Today a martial female besting a grown man means nothing, but in 1965, it was a rare beast. Significantly, Varla never punches her male opponents, and only rarely kicks them. The karate chop is her signature move, and it serves her in the same way that a punch serves a male fighter. I don't know if Meyer was aware of the theory behind the karate discipline-- that in some traditions practitioners allegedly "hardened" their hands so that they would possess greater striking power. But I tend to think that this idea was in the public mind at the time, supported by dozens of exhibitions in which practitioners chopped through wood or stone objects with the edges of their hands.

Varla then is a contradiction in terms. Her mammoth mammaries, like those of her co-stars, code her as "soft," yet her hands, her legs and to some extent her handling of a car code her as "hard."

Varla is not a deep character, but the script is smarter about her than she is. Though her 'take-no-prisoners" attitude is admired, it's obvious that she's also a cheat and something of a hypocrite (she rails against the Old Man for having used his son for murder and procurement, when Varla herself has involved her followers in acts of murder and attempted robbery). It's unlikely that she could have been played adequately by anyone but Tura Satana, who possessed both real martial arts skills and experience as an exotic dancer. Varla isn't precisely the whole show in FASTER PUSSYCAT-- but she is the show-stopper.