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maxwell-grant · 1 year

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Hi. Just found your blog--greatly enjoy your writing! Now, a question: Are there any popular female pulp heroes? What were they like? Thx in advance.

Thanks! Well, popular is a strong word, most people start with asking "were there any female pulp heroes? like, at all?", the answer to which is, Yes!...Nowhere as much as there were male ones, and not in the traditionally accessed avenues for "pulp heroes", but yes, there were, I wrote a bit about them here. Not counting the female sidekicks of male pulp heroes because that's cheating, the most popular female pulp heroes are the ones that exist by proximity to that American pulp hero “scene”, which I must stress again, doesn’t really have that much to do with what pulp fiction was actually like during it’s heyday, but rather that amorphous concept of what people imagine a pulp hero to be like.

In that regard, a popular female pulp hero would have to be a character that managed to break through in some form and inhabit that pop culture archetypal space in some form, or at least linger around in some noteworthy fashion. To an extent, this is something that was achieved more by female villains, in particular H.Rider Haggard’s Ayesha as well as other characters like Shamblau, Black Margot / Princess Margaret of the Black Flame, and Irma Vep who made for memorable, impactful villains of popularity and status approaching that of the male heroes.

With that in mind, upfront I’d argue that there’s at least six unambiguously popular female pulp heroines, and those would be:

The Domino Lady, a masked Gentleman Thief who was a rare example of a female masked vigilante who was actually published in 1930s American pulp fiction. The Domino Lady is, predictably, the least popular of these, but she’s historically significant and fairly popular in her own right and usually featured in stories or images that place all the masked avengers together.

Pat Savage (illustration by Dan Schkade), Science Adventurer Doc Savage’s rowdy tomboy cousin, and Dejah Thoris, the famous princess of Mars from the John Carter saga (key progenitor of the Planetary Romance subgenre), who are kind of on the sidekick side of things, but there's been enough solo outings for them, and the two of them being fairly significant and influential characters in their own right, that I’m obviously not gonna leave them out.

Red Sonja (illustration by Donato GIancola), famed badass of Sword-and-Sorcery. She’s maybe the most famous by far pulp heroine of them all, the only one of these for sure that you could reasonably expect most people to at least know by name or imagery. And she is a 1970s Marvel Comics character who borrows her name from an unrelated character in a non-Conan Robert E. Howard story and her characterization from C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry (1934). Another character we can add to the ever-growing pile of “characters who define the term pulp hero despite never actually appearing in pulp fiction” next to The Spirit, Buck Rogers, The Phantom, The Green Hornet, etc.

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle: Here also standing for the general popularity of Jungle Girls in general who usually take after her in some ways or inspired her in the first place they all just kinda blend together at some point

Barbarella: (no idea what archetype taxonomy I could use for her). You all know or have heard of her at some point and she gets grouped with these characters so often I couldn’t really omit her either. I’ve never seen the movie but I know it is an Italian production based on an erotic French comic that shoots for an American comic book style, and that strangeness is part of what made it fairly memorable. I’ve read a couple of Tales of the Shadowmen collections that feature stories with her as well.

Having named these, I’m also going to name six other pulp heroines who do not follow that mold so strongly and don’t overlap with these, and who were popular and significant in different ways:

Hunterwali: Hunterwali is one of the most significant action heroines in film history, as she was the premier starring role for Fearless Nadia, the most iconic action hero of 1930s Indian cinema and the archetypal action actress for Indian films, really one of the earliest and most significant action movie actresses period. Inspired by the Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood serials, Hunterwali (1935) was a record-breaking blockbuster, with the character said to be “the most popular character of its time” and listed as "Bollywood's best loved character" in 100 years of Indian cinema by CNN-IBN”.

The character is a swashbuckling princess who dons the guise of Hunterwali, "protector of the poor and punisher of evildoers", to become a swashbuckling Masked Avenger bent on rescuing her father and beat up the evil prime minister villain. She runs around on horseback performing stunts like jumping over moving carriages, jumping a horse from a bridge onto the top of a moving train, and defeating 20 soldiers in one sweep with her whip (Fearless Nadia did her own stunts, mind you).

Brigitte “Baby” Montfort: Brigitte Montfort was a highly popular Secret Agent pulp fiction character in Brazil, probably the most straightforward “pulp hero” we have as the star of cheaply printed pocket edition books that arose in the 60s as an alternative to the paperbacks. Brigitte is the daughter of a 1940s feuilleton character (yes, the feuilletons were published here as well) named Giselle Montfort, a Mata Hari-esque spy who bedded Nazis for intel and was eventually killed via firing squad. Brigitte was a globetrotting reporter who secretly operated as a cunning, cutthroat CIA agent, a bikini-clad James Bond. The stories went so in-depth that it was a common rumor at the time that they were written by a CIA agent employed by the editors, and Brigitte lasted about 30 years with circa 500 novels to her name, making her one of the most long-lived pulp characters.

Ethel King: Ethel King was a rare, prototypical Great Detective who debuted in German dime novels and was subsequently published all over Europe for the following two decades. Driven to fight crime by the loss of her father and fiance, she was referred to as “the female Sherlock Holmes” as well as “the female Nick Carter” for French and Italian publishing, and she takes after the two of them in a way.

Like Holmes, she employs brilliant reasoning and goes around with a wisecracking assistant (in this case her governess), and like Carter, she’s also assisted by a younger sidekick (an orphaned cousin she raised on her own), she gets into gunfights and has a tough attitude, and she deals with a massive Rogues Gallery of horrid villains with wild names and even wilder characters (including three evil doppelgangers). She would go on to become a formative influence not just on future female detectives, but also the German hefteromanes that spun out of the dime novels.

Nila Rand: Perfume, pistols and mystery in one package, she was created by Hedwig Langer under a pseudonym, one of the only two characters in this list created by a woman. Nila Rand was a thrill-seeking adventurer Femme Fatale featured in Scarlet Adventuress who dabbled in arms dealing, smuggling of stolen goods and gunfighting.

"She did not know which intrigued her the more, the alluring promise of exotic love, or the threat of terrible and violent death. The last was as necessary to her as the first. Nila Rand had played too long for high stakes and it needed the element of danger to make the game a thrilling one." - The Shanghai Stakes (1935)

Nila is a key example of what separates the femme fatale in the pulps from the films (far more frequently protagonists, rarely the sidekicks or girlfriends but instead solo operatives or leaders of their own gangs, rarely deliver on actual sex and instead manipulate men's desires to their advantage), but far more important than that is the fact that she was openly acknowledged to be bisexual, which goes without saying was extremely rare in any form to find in the pulps in any form.

Even in these spicy/erotic pulp magazines that were all about sneaking stuff past the radar (and thus a place where, for better or worse, writers could play around with topics other magazines would shy away from and would be unthinkable outside of pulp magazines). Finding a queer pulp hero from any period prior to the 1970s, let alone a protagonist and not an outright villain, is bordering on impossible, but it exists and here she is.

Lu Siniang: A lot of Wuxia/Nuxia storytelling is born from similar undercurrents of working class escapism and anger and desire for justice that led to many of pulp fiction’s most prominent heroes, and Lu Siniang is a particularly powerful embodiment of that. She was spun out of real life circumstances involving the execution of Lu Liuliang and his entire family for “literary crimes” against the Qing government, and the subsequent death of the Yongzheng Emperor, and said to be Liuliang’s daughter who had managed to survive away, learn martial arts and join/form a group of revolutionaries in a mission of revenge that culminated in her skewering/beheading the emperor. No Wuxia/Nuxia protagonist had dared to go that far before.

The story was reprinted several times following it’s inception, becoming particularly popular in the 1910s-1940s as the character would star in the Lu Siniang / Fourth Madam Lu serials starting in 1940, that comprised the first Chinese film franchise and film series about a fictional character, as well as one of the first action film series focused on a female protagonist alongside Hunterwali mentioned above.

Pussy Fane: The only other character in the list created by a woman. She was created by prolific romance writer and editor Jane Littel, who was repeteadly stressed to be the "longtime companion" of another pulp romance writer Margaret Wallace (one of the pseudonyms Margaret wrote under was called "Margaret Littell", make of that what you will), with Pussy Fane being a short-lived attempt to combine crime and romance.

Pussy Fane is a Proto-Superhero from 1931, a beautiful escort/party girl who grew up in the circus among jungle cats and is forced to deal with blackmailers and gangsters. She regularly douses herself in perfume to mask their scent, and is burdened with regret and sorrow over her upbringing and nature, repeteadly hearing others refer to her as inhuman and more than half cat. She is also superhumanly strong and athletic, said to have the strength of 20 men, and she also regularly rips off the arms of would-be-rapists.

Yes, it’s a tragedy you’re only just now hearing about this character, it’s a damn shame the stinky classy-yet-feral woman who runs around ripping off the arms of grubby rapist gangsters missed her call in pop culture stardom as did so many of these.

So here there are, 12 female pulp heroes all encompassing different archetypes, as well as different genres and countries of origin. There are more, yes. They are difficult to find enough info to write about, yes. Is the effort worth it? You bet. I find it imperative to shout to the world that these characters and others like them existed, that plenty of them were popular and acclaimed in their own right, even in ways that overshadow the American characters and defy our pop culture preconceptions of what pulp female characters all have to look like.

There was no archetype or type of story available to pulp heroes that was closed off to the women, not now, not a hundred years ago when Ethel King established new paradigms for the Great Detective and dime novel fiction before Hunterwali made action film history doing everything Douglas Fairbanks was doing and then some, not even well over a hundred years ago when Lu Siniang was beating The Count of Monte Cristo and all the ensuing dramatic masked avengers to the punch in backstory and over-the-top revenge. We only stand to lose confining these to the dustbins of history and standing by such a shallow perception of what could be done, and what was done, back then with pulp heroines.

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