GOLDEN AGE
Dorothy Woolfolk
In the 1949 story "Superman Returns to Krypton" (Superman #61), he learns that he is vulnerable when exposed to green kryptonite. Kryptonite had been introduced previously in the Superman radio serial. Still, it wasn't until DC Comics editor Dorothy Woolfolk got...
Marie Severin
EC Comics was a powerhouse back in the 1940s-50s. Much of its catalog after 1950 consisted of dark stories of horror and science fiction. Its last title was published in 1956 due to increasing pressure from the Comic Code Authority and a growing suspicion that it was...
Ruth Roche
Long before Kamala Khan and Simon Baz, there was another Muslim superhero. The first, in fact. His name was Kismet, Man of Fate, and he appeared in Bomber Comics in 1944. His creator was quite a powerhouse in her own right - her name was Ruth Ann Roche. Roche had been...
Joye Hummel
In 1943 Joye Hummel was a psychology student at Katherine Gibbs School. It was well known that one of the professors, William Moulton Marston, had created the character of Wonder Woman. Only a couple of years old, the character was already well-known worldwide. The...
Tarpé Mills
One of the most popular female characters in comics at the start of World War II was Miss Fury. The character, a socialite named Maria Drake, who donned a skintight panther suit to fight crime, was so popular that her name appeared on the nose of three American bomber...
Jackie Ormes
Readers of the Pittsburgh Courier received an unexpected treat in the comics section on May 1, 1937. It was the first appearance of Torchy Brown in Dixie to Harlem, a fictional character who left Mississippi to perform in Harlem’s famed Cotton Club. Not content to...
Virginia Krausmann
When Dorothy Urfer ended her run on Annibelle in 1936, the Newspaper Enterprise Association needed another artist to continue their popular title. They turned to staff-artist Virginia Krausmann to carry the torch. Kraussmann did so successfully until its run finally...
Fran Hopper
Somewhere out there, you may stumble across Planet Comics #24 (1943). If you do, there's a story in there called "Norge Benson." That story was penciled and inked by Fran Deitrick. You'll also find the same artist responsible for stories in Rangers Comics ("Glory...
Lily Renée
Imagine being an artist and one day finding your life's adventures captured in a graphic novel almost seventy years later? That's precisely what happened to Lily Renée in 2011 when Graphic Universe published her biography in Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust...
Alice Kirkpatrick
It seemed a natural progression to move from work as an artist illustrating pulp magazines to comics. Still, Alice Kirkpatrick didn't know that at the time. In 1937 her time was spent working for Ace Magazines, signing her name "Kirk." Within the next decade, she...
Barbara Hall
After attending art school with aspirations of being a painter, Barbara Fiske Calhoun moved to New York in 1940. It was there that, unable to find much success as a painter, she happened to show her work to the editors of Harvey Comics. They immediately saw potential...
Ray Hermann
There weren’t many women working in comics in the early forties. Those who were often had to write under a male pseudonym as it was felt readers wouldn’t accept a comic either written or illustrated by a woman. In 1938 Audrey “Toni” Blum walked into Eisner &...