I like stories about women that are drawn by women. Honey Blake, the Blonde Bomber, is a young reporter, along with her cameraman, Jimmy Slapso, from the generation before television. Her time was during the newsreel era, when to see the news one went to a movie theater and got glimpses of the outside world that we now take for granted. Honey and Slapso got involved in their stories.
The Blonde Bomber had a good run in Harvey Comics, including
Green Hornet, but also appeared in a few issues of
All-New Comics and
Speed Comics. According to online sources Blonde Bomber was created by Barbara Hall, who is credited with the artwork on this origin story from
Green Hornet Comics #7 (1942).
No relation to the Blonde Bomber who tried to attach herself to Blackhawk in Military Comics a year later (over at Quality Comics), or the (male) boxer who appeared a year earlier in Daredevil Comics. Honey Blake is a blonde, but where does "Bomber" come from? Is this just a case of straining for alliteration, like Stan Lee used to do?
ReplyDeleteIn 1931, Jean Harlow was nicknamed “the Blonde Bombshell”. (There was a preëxisting use of “bombshell” as a metaphor for that which is disruptive, and originally the nickname was probably in reference to Harlow as a disruptive force, but of course people tend to infer meanings from context, to make mistaken inferences, and in this way to associate new meanings with terms. So “bombshell” became a term for an attractive dame.) All these characters are surely called “Blonde Bomber” simply as a modification of Harlow's nickname.
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