Miss Fury

Miss Fury holds a special place as one of the earliest costumed action heroines created and drawn by a woman. Her creator, Tarpé Mills — born June Tarpé Mills, who adopted a gender-neutral pen name in a male-dominated field — launched the character in the early 1940s. Marla Drake, a wealthy socialite, fights crime and wartime villains in a sleek black panther-skin catsuit, in adventures notable for their glamour, fashion, and surprisingly frank sensuality. Mills drew her heroine with real style and confidence, and the strip built a devoted following before being collected in comic-book form. As both a pioneering woman cartoonist and the creator of a fully realized action heroine years before many better-remembered examples, Mills is an essential figure in any honest history of the medium. Long overlooked, her work has been recovered and celebrated in modern reprints and scholarship. Miss Fury appears in this gallery to correct the record: the Golden Age was not made by men alone, and one of its most stylish and independent heroines came from the pen of a woman working at the very front of the form.