#dynamic comics

Dynamic Comics #022

Dynamic Man

Art by Paul Gattuso

Socialite Lauren Mason, could transform into the stars-and-stripes clad heroine Yankee Girl by uttering the magic words Yankee Doodle Dandy! after which she would plunge into super-powered crime fighting. A patriotic version of Mary Marvel, Lauren was perhaps too derivative to stay the course and only featured once, in Dynamic Comics #23. This is a shame as she was illustrated by the excellent Ralph Mayo and her one and only story, The Cat Show Murders, featuring a dastardly plot to dispose of wealthy cat-owning pensioners by turning their pets into lethal poison-carriers thus enabling the baddies to loot their homes after they had expired, was certainly original.

Despite her brief appearance, Lauren was resurrected in the 1990s as part of the FemForce series, where her powers of super strength, flight and probable invulnerability were explained by Lauren being granted these abilities by the wizard Merlin, during World War II, on her pronouncing the magic words. Despite this reboot, Yankee Girl sadly remains something of an obscure Golden Age heroine.

The page featured is from the Yankee Girl story, The Cat Show Murders, published in Dynamic Comics #23 (November 1947). Art by Ralph Mayo. This was her debut/only appearance.

Charles Sultan - Dynamic Comics #2 (Chesler, 1941)

Dynamic Comics #1 (October, 1941). Cover by Charles Sultan.

This issue includes the origins and first appearance of not only cover star Major Victory, but the first Dynamic Man, Hale the Magician, and the Black Cobra.

Major Victory was another of the seemingly unending parade of patriotic superheroes that followed the arrival of MLJ's The Shield the previous year. It seems that no one told the comic book publishers that America had not entered World War ll.

The Major was a nameless soldier who got an oil lantern to the face and blown up by an evil saboteur. Father Patriot, a poor man's combination of Uncle Sam and the wizard Shazam, takes pity on the soldier and brings him back to life. Father Patriot tasks the newly christened Major Victory with protecting America.

Father Patriot even goes so far as to equip the Major with a costume, a wireless shack with a super radio, and an airplane hangar complete with an airplane (which he destroys on his first mission) on a remote mountaintop somewhere.

Vintage Comic - Dynamic Comics #013

Pencils: Gus Ricca

Inks: Gus Ricca