#ace magazines

Vintage Pulp - Secret Agent X (Aug1936)

Kay McKay Air Hostess managed the unique feat of being the only Golden Age comic book heroine to appear in three different comics titles (Banner Comics, Our Flag Comics and Super Mystery Comics, all published by Ace Magazines) but still only managing to have five actual adventures in total. Kay was a precursor to the much better known Vicki Barr Flight Stewardess in the girls’ novels by Helen Wells from the 1950s and 1960s. Where Kay differed from Vicki however was in her extraordinary range of skills, whether this was Annie Oakley-style dexterity with a pistol, ability to fly a plane and work a parachute or an overall no-nonsense approach to sniffing out onboard bad guys - a skill arguably shared by her real-life modern day equivalents in these security-conscious times.

Perhaps what is most attractive about Kay, who worked for Worldwide Airlines, is her sheer pluck and determination. Nothing seems to faze her and she takes death-dealing peril in her long-legged stride. The stories, to be honest, are far-fetched to say the least (even the publisher described them as “madcap”), but they owed a great deal to the highly popular RKO cinema and adventure series of the 1940s and match those dramas for pace, exotic settings and cliffhanger scenarios. Kay McKay was one of dozens of aviator-style comic book characters of the time (most of whom were male), and may well have been aimed at a female readership, as Vicki Barr was a decade later. Certainly, the courage, toughness, female intuition and lack of reliance on brawn on display in the story featured above , may well have appealed to wartime teenage girls, anxious for role models. “What a woman!” as one of the reluctantly admiring diamonds thieves Kay effortlessly captures in the story, remarks.

Kay’s run may have been short-lived but in terms of glamorous adventure, she arguably she paved the the way for Come Fly With Me, Vicki Barr, and many other stewardess heroines all the way to The Flight Attendant via Jackie Brown. To that extent, Kay was a genuine trailblazer.

The story featured above was published in Banner Comics #3 (September 1941).

THE OOZING HORROR! From WEB OF MYSTERY #23 (Ace Magazines, 1954)

Vintage Comic - Glamorous Romances #082

Pencils: N/A

Inks: N/A

All Love Romances #26, cover by   Alice Kirkpatrick ?          

“Romance Breaker”, by  Al Hartley (A)