Then You See Her

Saturday Surprise Day. 

I have about 50% of 1949/1954 of Invisible Scarlett O'Neil. I don;t know if she was the first invisible hero in comics, but the started out in 1940 and managed to have her adventures until 1954 and even that was not the end of it. Scarlett herself had been losing her prime position and was replaced by a odd looking private detective in the later stories. To reflect that, the strip was renamed after him and went on to 1956 as Stanless Steel.

Invisible Scarlett O'Neil was created  by Russell Stamm, who had previously been an assistant to Chester Gould on Dick Tracy. His style from the start was a lot more friendly, but falls aquarely into what I call the Chicago school - which includes (to my eye) a wide range of artists, from fan favorite Boody Waters to Dick Moores - who is best know for his Disney work (Brer Rabbit) and taking over Gasoline Alley and seeting a new style for it. What all these artists have in common is a less literal approach to realism and none of them used the black and white inking techniques that were introduced by Noel Sickles and Milt Caniff and often drifting into the realm of caricature.

Scarlet's adventures were a little light on Nazi spies, Japanese saboteurs, master criminals and the like and frankly a little bit dull. From 1949 she is said to have used her invisibillity powers less, so we shal see how that turns out. I hope to do all of my pages, but it may take a while. I have the strip in various formats, but as you can see from the first two samples, I have reformatted them all the same - as a comic book sized one pager. I think they read the best that way (and it seemed more logical than turning some of my full page scans in to three tier half pages for unity).