Pulp Hero Sketch Spotlight 2
So I was browsing Don Markstein’s Toonopedia looking for 1930’s adventure comics, and it turns out there was a whole squadron of aviators in the papers around this time! Here’s a few that caught my interest…
Connie Kurridge – I’ll bet you didn’t know there was a girl aviator in the newspaper funnies, did you? Okay, to be honest, I didn’t know about her, either, until today. Seems she holds the honor of being the first female hero in American adventure comics. Ain’t that something! What little art I can find looks gorgeous. It has the same level of realistic rendering as you might find in other contemporary adventure strips, but with a refreshing looseness in the inking.
Scorchy Smith – I’ve heard of this comic before. Scorchy managed to keep flying years after his contemporaries had retired to the hangar. Like other legacy comics, it passed through the hands of a number of artists. Apparently there’s a book about one artist’s revolutionary stint on the comic. I should probably read that before I say anything more about it.
Brick Bradford – Aviation is just one of the many tools at Brick’s disposal, though it’s not necessarily the focus of his eponymous strip. He started out as an aviator, but quickly found himself thrown into a wide variety of incredible science adventures. Aliens, robots, morlocks, dinosaurs, Brick has tussled with all of them and lived to tell the overblown tale.
Tailspin Tommy – Here’s another I just learned about. Tailspin Tommy hails from a small town outside of Denver, CO, where he lived with his widowed mother and worked on repairing cars in his garage (some surprising parallels with Kitty, there), dreaming of flying. He finally gets his chance when an aviator in trouble needs help fixing a plane engine. Tommy does such a good job, the fellow invites him to join the company, delivering goods and getting into trouble.
That’s all for this Spotlight. Let me know if I missed anything important about these folks, or what other characters you’d like to see me cover in a future Spotlight.
July 17th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
It might be interesting to find out who has the rights to some of these characters. They could have a new incarnation as web comics.
July 19th, 2009 at 11:37 am
@Docsmith626: Were you thinking of reprints, or all new stories?
I’d imagine Brick Bradford is still owned by King Features.
July 25th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
LOVED Brick Bradford and the Time Top in the funnies when I was but a tiny! Of course by then, early fifties, it was a different thing from its origins — which I didn’t know about till now actually. Thanks!
July 30th, 2009 at 12:39 am
I love your work. It has been an inspiration to me in more than a couple of ways. I got thinking a while ago about how as humans move into foreign spaces (Moon, Mars) they will bring with them rituals and traditions that we enjoy here on earth such as camping. From that came the idea of people telling campfire stories on the moon and I wrote a reasonably decent first-past story about a man telling a story about a hazard that exists in the moon or, as he says it “earth does not hold a monopoly on horror and death”.
In this story is a young girl, Emily, and she is a fan, an absolutely adoring fan of “Jenny jet pack”. Emily has all the Jenny jet pack merchandise including sneakers, underwear, and her own personal Jenny jet pack air ballet kit complete with propulsion tank, main thrusters, wrist and ankle control thrusters and full feedback computer control. Actually, Emily is a damn good pilot as will be seen in a later story when she plummets 3 km from cliff into a black cavern in the lunar surface.
You didn’t specifically create the character but, the whole ambience of your stories just trying to me for this 1930s character set in the distant future.
I’ll spare you the URL of the story because I know what it feels like to have others stories forced upon you. But thank you (and cordwainer Smith) for inspiration.