JUNGLE GALLERY

 

Despite her Polynesian-looking attire, zombie queen Tiana does her corpse-calling in a Brazilian jungle, courtesy of OUT OF THE NIGHT #13.

SOCK-A-BILLY

 Magnolia, the one flower in the dungheap family "The MacSleezys," appeared in all four issues of Charlton's HILLBILLY COMICS (1955), and she showed off her sock-a-billy skills in two stories.                       

                                          

FOXY PHANTOM PT. 3

 

And with this post I conclude my "study," with the finding that all of the Fox Phantom Ladies are completely G-rated for sex and violence, just using a little more leg and boob action for the heroine than one saw in most Golden Age heroine-features. However, now that I've surveyed all the issues, I see that many of them included short stories about famous (or made-up) criminals and their doomed careers. That, more than the slightly lascivious Matt Baker art, is probably what put the PHANTOM LADY comic in the Wertham crosshairs, since nothing infuriated the good German doctor more than the idea that American youths were being converted to an ethic of criminality.      

FOXY PHANTOM PT. 2

 

Of these four pages, only the last merits a little comment. In this weird tale, Phantom Lady investigates a country estate because a handful of women have been violently slain in the area. The estate is occupied by a man named Pfyffe, his sister Calla, and their midget retainer. The results of the investigation: the sister is a killer werewolf guilty of the murders, but Pfyffe is about to expose her publicly. The midget, who's in love with Calla, seeks to protect her by dressing up in the costume of a reptilian monster and clawing anyone who gets into Pfyffe's swimming pool (!) The phony monster eventually succeeds in killing Pfyffe but as Phantom Lady witnesses, the midget's reward is to be strangled to death by Calla with her purely-human-girl strength. And this isn't even one of the stories picked on by Frederic Wertham.      

FOXY PHANTOM PT. 1

The negative attention given to Fox Features' PHANTOM LADY and her artist Matt Baker have become the stuff of legends, but how much licentiousness, bondage and violence actually appeared in those comics? I've already looked at all of PL's appearances in her other Fox-berth in ALL TOP COMICS, so we'll see if she was more impressive when she was a headliner (with "headlights," of course).      

THAT REDHEAD FROM HYRKANIA

 Redhead Sonja sports her uncontroversial blue outfit while decking a bad guy.                                                                                                     

HEAD HIM UP, RAWHIDE

 A "getting her kicks" pun would be bad here, even for me.