LEGENDARY HEROES #46

PHANTOM LADY

One of the first super heroine characters of the Golden Age, Phantom Lady was produced for Quality Comics by the Eisner-Iger Studio and drawn by Arthur Peddy.  Phantom Lady made her debut in Police Comics #1, August 1941, in the same issue that saw the first appearance of Plastic Man by Jack Cole.  Phantom Lady was the alter ego of Sandra Knight, a beautiful Washington, D.C. debutante and daughter of a U.S. Senator.  Her outfit which consisted of a green cape and a yellow one-piece bathing suit, was a deliberate tactic to distract her male foes.  She used a "black light projector" to blind her enemies and make herself "invisible", and drove a car whose headlights would also project black light when needed.  Sometimes she was assisted in her fight against criminals by her fiance Donald Borden, an agent of the U.S. State Department.  Phantom Lady appeared in Police Comics until October 1943.

After Quality stopped publishing the adventures of Phantom Lady, Iger Studio believed that it owned the character and assigned it to Fox Features, a move that would cause later confusion as to who actually owned the copyright.  The Fox version premiered in her own title Phantom Lady #13 (the numbering was a continuation of a previous title that had been cancelled) and was drawn by Matt Baker.  Baker gave her a new costume of a red cape with a blue outfit that showed a LOT of cleavage.  Matt Baker (1921-1959) is the first known African-American artist to find success in the comic book industry.  He entered the comics field through Iger Studio and his first work was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle in Jumbo Comics #69, November 1944.  Baker quickly gained the reputation of being one of the best renderers of "good girl art", which often meant leggy, big bosomed women.  His skills got him steady work at Fiction House, Fox Features, Quality Comics, St. John Publications, and later at Charlton.  Late in the 1950s he worked for Atlas, which would become Marvel Comics, and died of a heart attack on August 11, 1959.  He was only 38 years old.  

Fox printed the Phantom Lady through April 1949, ending the series with issue #23.  Just how skimpy was the blue costume that Matt Baker gave the character?  The front cover of Phantom Lady #17 was reproduced in the book "Seduction of the Innocent" by Dr. Frederic Wertham as an example of the morally corrupting effect that comic books had on children.  Wertham also referred to large breasts on female characters as "headlights".  In the meantime Fox went out of business and Star Publications reprinted a Phantom Lady story in their Jungle Thrills title...then they went out of business.  Then Ajax-Farrell Publications published four issues of the Phantom Lady from December 1954 through June 1955.  By this time Dr. Wertham's efforts had led to a Congressional investigation into the comics industry and publishers formed the self-censoring Comics Code Authority.  This resulted in changes made to the Phantom Lady's outfit - her cleavage was covered and her shorts became a skirt.  Ajax-Farrell's assets were later acquired by Charlton Comics and the only appearance there of the Phantom Lady were reprints of the Matt Baker stories.

In 1956 DC Comics obtained the rights to the Quality Comics characters, which they believed included the original Phantom Lady and they introduced her 17 years later in a 1973 issue of Justice League of America.  And over the decades DC has tried to reboot the character with new origins and different versions ever since.  And all of this while various publishers have continued to produce their own versions of the Phantom Lady, believing the original character to be in the public domain as the original owners failed to renew the copyright.  DC threatened legal action (there's a surprise!) but never has, probably because there is no clear ownership of the character.  Reprints of the Quality and Fox stories have appeared in numerous comic books, and the Phantom Lady has been renamed by various publishers as Cobweb, Blue Bulleteer, Nightveil, and Shadow Lady, usually appearing in a more undressed version of the Baker creation.  Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Phantom Lady is a result of Alan Moore.  When DC acquired Charlton's superhero line of characters they assigned Moore the task of writing a story for the heroes.  He created The Watchmen and based his characters on Charlton's characters.  Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, the Blue Beetle became Nite Owl, and so on.  But one of the Charlton heroes was a woman named Nightshade, but Moore didn't care for her.  So he instead based his character of Silk Spectre upon Phantom Lady.  And so it goes.