Thursday, May 21, 2009

Pulp Wet Dreams - The Domino Lady!


I've only become aware of the Domino Lady recently, and it seems there's a small avalanche of material out on her in the last few years. Moonstone just released a short story collection in which she teams up with the Phantom among others and they have plans for more comics-related stuff. Steranko illustrated a neat collection of her original pulp stories several years ago. All this features a sexy and saucy woman who fights crime in a man's world, but it has its boundaries. In the early 90's Ron Wilbur did some comics for Eros Comics featuring the Domino Lady and those go a bit further, but still manage to evoke a strong classic pulp feel.

I just managed to find both three-issue runs of Domino Lady by Wilbur and reading them is a hoot. In the first series she runs afoul of big city thugs, mad scientists, exotic natives, and dinosaurs all within the confines of NYC. The story is brisk and Domino Lady spends most of it unclothed. But Wilbur handles the nudity and the meager sex scenes with wit and aplomb and they add to entertainment. It's not a case of the titillation getting in the way of the narrative, but Domino's blindness to her own nudity gives it a weird normality. Only when she actually starts to put clothes back on does she get modest and it's funny when it happens. Guys want to make it with her, but something always seems to interfere and that too is a running gag in the stories.

In the second trilogy she goes to Africa to battle Mussolini and rescue Hailie Selassie and she has the same clothing malfunctions and the same difficulty with finding some quiet time. She skins a big cat for its fur, but her Sheena-look doesn't last long either. It's this sense of humor and the fact that the plots are pure pulp adventures spritely paced that makes these comics work. The sex is a sidebar here, not a mainstay and you read the stories for their own merit. These aren't great comics by any stretch, but they are fun and offer up more than a smidge of pulpy goodness.

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