Tuesday, September 26, 2017

The Best Way To Become A Super-Heroine, Statistically Speaking!

Stop me if you've heard this one before...

Betty Barstow, secretary to a gruff but lovable private detective, has plans for the night.

And she decides to go as...a super-hero!!
You almost certainly know where this is going, because this is the exact same origin as Batgirl!!

Of course, she stops by the cemetery to visit a client, the watchman, and stumbles upon a Scooby Doo crime:



Fortunately, Betty is skilled in Jui-jitsu!








It turns out the crooks were using fake ghosts to scare away the watchman so they could use one of the tombs as a headquarters for their counterfeiting ring. As always happens.

But the big takeaway--crooks beaten by A GIRL!!


Well, Betty knows a good thing when she stumbles onto it!!

Look, that's at least two super-heroines whose origin is "woman goes to masquerade dress as hero, ends up fighting crime with her self-defense skills." Ladies, if you want to become a hero, that's the course I'd recommend--it's bound to work!!

It's worth noting that Silver Scorpion was Timely/Marvel's first female super-hero--heck, she even predated Wonder Woman!! But after only 3 stories, she vanished, until Roy Thomas brought her back in the 1993 Invaders mini-series--because of course Roy Thomas brought back an obscure Golden Age hero. Unfortunately, she was put into this horrendous post-Image armor:

Ewww.

Later she was retconned into having hung out with the Invaders and the Liberty Legion, and then further retconned into the retcon-created V-Battalion, which ran around quietly hunting escaped Nazi war criminals.

But in my heart, she will always be the hero whose origin story crossed Batgirl and Scooby Doo.

From Daring Mystery Comics #7 (1941)

1 comment:

  1. "Girl Called Silver Scorpion Routs Mob" screams the front page headline....but at no point does she, or anyone else, call herself that.

    FAKE NEWS!

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