I don’t remember how old I was when I learned the meaning of the word aviatrix, but as a kid I was aware of the existence of female pilots from an early age. In the comic books published by Fiction House from 1940-1953-54 there was a variety of distaff characters — aviatrixes, spies, nurses and miscellaneous adventuresses in Wings, Fight, and Rangers; Jumbo and Jungle featured jungle-goddess heroines like Sheena and Fantomah, Mystery Woman of the Jungle; and Planet had Gale Allen and the Girl Squadron (extramundane aviatrixes!), Mysta of the Moon, and Futura.
In the wartime issues of Wings, Fight, and Rangers, World War II was not just fought by men.
The battlefields in every theater of the war were overrun by the aforementioned aviatrixes, spies, nurses, and miscellaneous adventuresses, all of them eager to get a piece of the action and pitch in to defeat the Nazis and Japanese. I don’t know whether the publishers’ motive was to broaden the readership to include girls or to provide a psychosexual charge for the mostly post-pubescent boy readers — perhaps a little of each. In any case, there was a potent mix of war and sex. The aviatrixes and female spies were tough, resourceful, and self-reliant like their male hero counterparts, but the nurses were invariably portrayed as damsels in distress and were always rescued just in time by Captain Wings, Clipper Kirk, or Captain Fight. Bondage cover art was common. Women in low-cut dresses (always strategically torn) were shown in horrific situations — tied to the propeller of an airplane that was about to be started by a leering Japanese pilot orlashed to the conning tower of a submarine that was about to dive.
In World War II comics the Japanese were always caricatured to resemble rats or serpents, commonplace stereotypes of the time fueled by racist hatred engendered by Pearl Harbor. Against all precedent, however, the Japanese women in the Fiction House comics, most of them pilots and spies, were drawn to be just as tall and long-legged, good-looking and sexy as the Caucasian women, albeit enlisted in a wicked cause and fated to die for the Emperor just like their less well-proportioned brethren. The color artist rendered these women in the precise color of butter, a nice contrast with their shoulder-length Hollywood-style black hair glistening with blue highlights. I suspect that there must have been a few hyper-patriotic readers who objected to these alluring Japanese women, preferring to see them resemble, like their men, rats and snakes, but it’s good to know that even in those hate-filled times racism could take a back seat to a healthy form of sexism.
The apparent prototype for the Japanese villainesses ubiquitously featured in the Fiction House comics was the Dragon Lady of Milton Caniff’s newspaper comic strip, “Terry and the Pirates.”
“Terry and the Pirates” first appeared in 1934, and the Dragon Lady was introduced as his adversary soon after, the leader of the titular Pirates. In the introduction to Nostalgia Press’s Terry and the Pirates, Volume 3, the Dragon Lady is described as “a mercenary pirate leader become a guerilla fighter, whose motivations span patriotism, revenge, lust for power, and monetary concern, and whose activities permit an oddly balanced alliance and adversary competition with Terry.” The term dragon lady has become part of the American lexicon as a generic name to describe any Asian villainess.
In the two 1945 issues of Wings that I have, both Clipper Kirk stories have him rescuing beautiful blondes, one tied to the conning tower of a submarine, the other tied to the deck of an aircraft carrier (talk about a sure-fire scenario!). In the stories about the spy Jane Martin she is undercover in Iran in one of them, impersonating a geisha girl in another (a bit of yellow makeup does the trick). Other stories have women crash landing and parachuting out of planes. And a sexy Japanese spy being killed by a strafing P-51 Mustang as she attempts to burn Captain Wings alive with a flame thrower.
Almost completely forgotten today, sadly, is Jenny Dare, who was the first aviatrix to have her own newspaper comic strip, “Flyin’ Jenny,” which ran from 1939 to 1946 and mixed aviation art with sexy glamour-girl art in the story of a dedicated female test pilot career woman. Unfortunately, the strip crashed in 1946 with the death of its creator, Russell Keaton.
Three of the more offbeat comic-book aviatrixes of the 1940s deserve special attention. One was Mary Marvel, who didn’t need a plane to fly. Like her older brother, Captain Marvel, she was naturally airborne, and she looked better than a P-51 in her short red dress, white cape with yellow piping, and yellow boots. The second was Wonder Woman, who had an invisible airplane that she could summon with her mental powers, although in later years she was given the ability of unassisted flight like Mary Marvel. And there was Bulletgirl, Bulletman’s girlfriend and partner in crime fighting, a heavy-caliber heroine whose Gravity Regulator Helmet allowed her to fly and deflect bullets.
During World War II there were several boys’-book series that featured young male pilots as protagonists — the Red Randall, Dave Dawson, and Yankee Flyer novels, many of which I read in the ’50s. My favorite was a one-shot novel, Barry Blake of the Flying Fortress, issued by the Whitman Publishing Company, which was unique in that it brought out war novels of adventure for both boys and girls. In addition to Barry Blake there was Norma Kent of the WAACS, Sally Scott of the WAVES, and Sparky Ames and Mary Mason of the Ferry Command. These heroines were altogether the equal of the male heroes. Sally Scott, for example, sailed on convoys to England and back, fought U-boats, and parachuted out of a destroyed plane.
The extent to which the war effort was pervasive is symbolized by two popular coloring books of the time, one titled I Like to Play Aviator, with a cover showing two little boy pilots being admired by a little girl, the other titled Aviator Coloring Book, whose cover shows two infant girls in pilot suits in a P-39 fighter steel pedal toy, which looks about to become airborne, their dog chasing alongside it and barking.
In real life the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) didn’t fly combat missions during World War II, but the wish-fulfillment dream world of comic books was another matter. And Hollywood indulged in some of these revisionist fantasies as well. In A Guy Named Joe Irene Dunne plays the pilot girlfriend of Army fighter pilot Van Johnson, and when he accepts a dangerous solo bombing mission with the odds against survival she gets in his plane and flies the mission in his place. It’s a nighttime mission and Dunne makes a spectacular bomb run amid sweeping searchlights and anti-aircraft fire, destroys the target, then has a leisurely flight home, having demonstrated effectively that marriage will definitely not confine her abilities to homemaking and parenting.
One of the first movies about jet pilots gave us a character worthy of any of those in Wings Comics, a Russian aviatrix spy played by Janet Leigh. This movie, produced by Howard Hughes, was definitely the flip side of his classic Hell’s Angels, and it is so nonsensical that no one had the courage to release it until 1957, seven years after it was made. John Wayne plays an Air Force colonel stationed at a remote Alaskan air base near the Soviet Union. He is put in charge of Leigh’s aviatrix, who claims she wants to defect. Leigh is actually a Communist spy and her comrades kidnap Wayne, but in the end she rescues him, having fallen in love with both Wayne and democracy.
While Jet Pilot is a hokey, propagandistic movie, the one thing in it that echoes something true is the character of the Russian pilot who combines traditional macho derring-do with feminine sensibilities. During World War II, WASP pilots were basically given the jobs of ferrying military aircraft from one point to another, delivering secret documents, and towing targets in anti-aircraft gunnery practice — but the Russian aviatrixes were actually used in combat. There were three regiments of all-women pilots, who came to be known as the “night witches,” and they flew 24,000 sorties during the war, 68 of these fliers receiving the Gold Star, Hero of the Sovien Union award. A separate article could be written about how these regiments were organized by the famous Russian aviatrix, Marina Raskova, and the role they played in several battles on the eastern front.
Today there are any number of women pilots flying for the airlines, flying combat missions, and flying as astronauts in outer space, theirs the real-life heritage of the fantasy world of Jenny Dare and Gale Allen. It’s been a bumpy flight, but the seat belt sign is off and it’s time to enjoy the view.
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Three of the more offbeat comic-book aviatrixes of the 1940s deserve special attention. One was Mary Marvel, who didn’t need a plane to fly. Like her older brother, Captain Marvel, she was naturally airborne, and she looked better than a P-51 in her short red dress, white cape with yellow piping, and yellow boots. The second was Wonder Woman, who had an invisible airplane that she could summon with her mental powers, although in later years she was given the ability of unassisted flight like Mary Marvel. And there was Bulletgirl, Bulletman’s girlfriend and partner in crime fighting, a heavy-caliber heroine whose Gravity Regulator Helmet allowed her to fly and deflect bullets.