Lynx, Daughter of the Diabolical Doctor Dome, seemed to really get into the destruction of her foe Plastic Man, showing no tendency to get frail-hearted at the prospect of his death.
Ramoina Fradon passed this week, but because she was not primarily an "action-artist," her depiction of femmes formidables was "hit-and-miss" (and not in the sense of a lot of misses doing a lot of hitting). Her most notable contributions are as follows,
FANTASTIC FOUR #133 (with the Thing contending against the Amazonian Thundra).
BRAVE AND BOLD, featuring a cyber-cat-fight between the robot heroine Tina and a "bad robot," Agantha.
And from the pages of FREEDOM FIGHTERS, here's two forties icons, Wonder Woman and Phantom Lady, going to town.
Argentinian artist Jose Delbo passed this week. He had a long-standing assignment on DC's WONDER WOMAN, where I never thought he was a great fit. One of his better Amazon executions was a teamup of Wonder Woman with Etrigan the Demon.
However, his more lively Western art for Charlton's BILLY THE KID probably kept that title afloat for longer than its scripts merited. Here the Kid facing off with a Mexican lady bandit, The Black Widow.
Charlton/DC artist Dick Giordano was particularly good at drawing pretty women, but I think his depiction of a "scarlet woman" (my word), name of Roja, on the cover of SARGE STEEL #7 is his best work. Of course it's a good drawing because of the combination of Roja's attire-ensemble, her silver-white hair and her wasp-waisted figure. But the combination of the seductive body pose and the predatory expression really sell Roja as a formidable femme fatale. (Sadly, Roja only made one other STEEL appearance and then got killed, rather than mounting numerous assaults on the metal-handed hero.)
Jungle goddess Rulah comes to grips with evil Mava in the altogether.
Spider Widow clobbering crooks out of costume.
Then Phantom Lady comes to the rescue of the Widow's boyfriend The Raven.
The heroines team up, but Phantom Lady gets the best scenes.
Spider Widow's last Quality battle.
I'm amazed that in my short survey of a couple of Quality Comics titles, I've seen so MANY femmes formidables in unexpected places. Bonnie Baxter was just "the pretty girl" in an undistinguished strip about a crimefighting leader of a swing band, "Swing Sisson." But here too Quality let Bonnie go to town on a bad girl named Yvonne, after Yvonne threatens to strangle Boyfriend Swing with a whip.
This time Doll Man merely witnesses (and abets) a case of marital abuse, which is funny because it's a woman, the goofy-named "Veree Highe," who subjects her shrimpy husband to assorted indignities.
LALA PALOOZA was a one-page strip which ran in FEATURE COMICS for years. For most of its history the gags focused on Lala's brother Vincent, who mooched off her and caused various types of trouble. This sometimes culminated in various thrashings.
Even before making the tradition to sidekick Doll Girl, Martha Roberts was a bit of a tuffie.
Such is my term for any battle between two hot undersea babes, whether they possess fish-tails (Letifos) or not (Aquagirl).
The brief battle of Aquagirl and the redubbed Aqualad I don't have any particular term for.
Here's TIGER GIRL doing a standard Tarzan swing.
And here she is fighting a weird tribe of identical-seeming, Black Amazons with white hair, who-- have absolutely no backstory.
