Thrilling Comics #2 (1940)
by Richard E. Hughes & George Mandel
A month after Fantomah debuted, another character with a more legitimate claim to being the very first female superhero shows up in this Nedor Comics anthology.
Or protagonist is policewoman Peggy Allen, who puts on a costume to fight criminals because… honestly I’m not sure, she’s basically still doing her job.
She’s trying to uncover the mystery behind some murders at a hospital, but the man she’s trying to interrogate gets shot and SHE gets blamed for it.
Ah, the 1940s, where you could just throw around radioactive materials without a care in the world.
The Woman In Red is more successful at stopping the second assassination attempt.
Someone is trying to frame a doctor for stealing the radium, but The Woman In Red kidnaps him first.
Trying to investigate, she ALMOST falls to her death!
Uhm, ma’am, are you sure you picked the right guy to defend?
She ends up being chased from the criminals AND the police, but she has a convenient way out.
Honestly I’m having a hard time following the exact details of the plot.
The criminals unleash “a maniac” to fight The Woman In Red, and I appreciate the attention to detail: since she infiltrated the hospital pretending to be a nurse, she has her nurse clothes underneath her coat!
She’s smart enough to build her own Geiger counter, locating the stolen radium.
I don’t think I have ever seen a Golden Age comic using so much real science: some naphthionate derivatives DO glow under UV-light!
I totally knew this and didn’t have to research it for this review.
We even get a car chase, where the bad guy dies.
Well, when you put it like THAT, it wasn’t complicated!
Historical significance: 0/10
In-universe, she never went anywhere. Out of it, she’s a footnote.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Definitely not, considering they used plausible science!
Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
The plot is a bit confusing, and surprisingly complex for an 8 page story. But it does get a bit of everything: action, mystery, gunfights, car chases and police work!
I can see how The Woman In Red would sustain a regular series.
How close is this to the modern character? Which version?
The Woman In Red never made it to the cover, but she was a regular on Thrilling Comics until #46 published in 1945.
She also appeared in two issues of the anthology book America’s Best Comics.
By 1943 she changed her costumer to provide the bare minimum fanservice by showing off her legs, in the process making her more generic.
Having entered in the public domain, where do you think the first ever superheroine would show up again?
I’ve seen references to her showing up in Femforce, but I don’t see her. They’re probably confusing her with the similarly-colored but more scantily clad Miss Masque, who also originated on Nedor Comics and is in the public domain.
That’s the red-costume superhero showing up many times on Femforce, but to be fair she might have made later appearances there.
The only Femforce-adjacent appearance of the Woman In Red I could find is on the spinoff Fighting Yank… where she’s just tied up by a villain.
She doesn’t even use her costume there.
Or clothes, because Femforce.
For a proper reintroduction to the Woman In Red, we have to wait 2001 and the Alan Moore version of America’s Best Comics.
On the pages of Tom Strong #12, we meet a later version of the Woman In Red who eventually got superpowers.
That’s the same storyline that reintroduced Black Terror as a terrifyingly advanced AI, by the way.
This version of the Woman In Red is picked up by the Terra Obscura spinoff. She gets a complete redesign…
…without the mask as well, because thanks to that magic crystal she’s LITERALLY red.
By the end of the series, she still realizes her dream of being a singer. I’m guessing Alan Moore didn’t care for her being a policewoman.
In the second volume of Terra Obscura, she keeps being even more removed from her original incarnation.
The other significant version is from Dynamite Entertainment, in their Project Superpowers books starting from 2009.
In this version, the Woman In Red is back to her original incarnation. But she teamed up with the aforementioned Miss Masque, and with another public domain heroine: Lady Satan.
Together, they form the Scarlet Sisters.
The trio starred as recently as 2022 in its own special.
It’s refreshing to see that she’s STILL just a policewoman who puts on a costume.
She also met Vampirella once. That’s the kind of insanity that comes with being in the public domain.
As we already saw with Black Terror, she had her own movie adaptation with Avenging Force.
A movie so obscure I can’t even find the name of the actress who played her, and that you can’t convince me had more than 50 dollars as budget.
Has anyone ever seen more than the trailer for this thing?
What else was in Thrilling Comics #2?
The cover character is a forgettable pulp hero called Doctor Strange.
The previously mentioned Alan Moore version of America’s Best Comics will retcon him into being this reality’s equivalent to Tom Strong.
There’s the forgettable adventure serial Three Comrades, the forgettable maritime adventure Tom Niles, the forgettable comedy western Young Smiley West, the forgettable regular western Rio Kid, and the forgettable detective Tommy Dolan…
…and one of the most accurate Pinocchio adaptations I’ve ever seen.
Seriously, have you ever read the book? This is MILD compared to THAT.
I’m curious if you have any plans to cover Miss Fury? She was actually who I was expecting when you teased this feature last week. She did have her own series at Timely, but since she began as a newspaper strip and that’s primarily what she’s remembered for, she may fall outside the purview of this retrospective.
Not with a full-length review, but I have something special for next time that will cover her.