Early comics tube-girl appearance

Otherwise little-known superhero “the Purple Mask” is apparently about to save our heroine from being fired as an artillery shell by a bunch of Nazis. Why are they doing this? Perhaps firing women as artillery shells is just how comic-book Nazis relax after a hard day’s oppressing the subject peoples of Europe, although personally I think it would be a more interesting story if they had a mad scientist on their side who had figured out some way of using pretty women as effective munitions. In any event, this is a cover done by Alex Schomburg (1905-1998). Daring Mystery Comics was a short-lived (8 issues) series put out by Timely Comics between 1940-1942. Hat-tip to the podcast Comics in the Golden Age, whose twitter feed @ComicsintheGA brought my attention to this cover.

Looks like Maghella’s going to be experimented on

And she’s perhaps not going to like it. Bacchus’s explanation:

This is cover art from one of the nearly 150 Maghella fumetti comics published in Italy and France in the 1970s and 1980s. According to this Italian eBay auction it is issue #124 from 1979. On the cover is visible the text “Maghella. Vietato ai minori di seidici anni.” There is an Italian eBay auction here that offers a high quality reproduction of the cover art (without markings); the artist is identified by the seller as Renato Averardo Ciriello.

Reblogged from a 20 January 2014 post at Infernal Wonders.

Pre-code comics carried on the old pulp tradition

This is the cover from a series called Black Cat Mystery Comics, Issue #32, published December 1951. I hesitate to imagine what that poor girl is about to be plunged into. (A hot spring? Hell itself?) Details on the issue are thin, but there’s an entry for in in the Grand Comics Database here. This image is a reblog from a 16 November 2013 post at Infernal Wonders, itself originally picked up from the now sadly defunct tumblr Great Grotto.