Phantom Lady

Real-life History

Read Phantom Lady’s adventures at Comicbookplus.com. She’s in Police Comics 1-23.

Phantom Lady is widely known today as a comic book sex symbol. If you know anything about the character, you probably know her from the Seduction of the Innocent crusades of the 1950’s and how her cover from Fox’s Phantom Lady 17 became one of the most famous images in comicdom because of it. But before Fox published Phantom Lady, she was part of Quality comics’ toy chest of superheroes where she was notably more subdued in her self-presentation.

 

Mostly.

 

Arthur Peddy

 

Phantom Lady was created by Arthur Peddy, and she’s definitely his most well-known creation. Debuting in Police Comics 1, Phantom Lady was with Quality since the very beginning, though she never made the cover of a comic. Though she only lasted until Police Comics 23, that’s more than can be said for others that debuted in Police Comics 1, like Firebrand the Mouthpiece.

 

Phantom Lady had a long going for her, which probably resulted in her long-lasting popularity despite her initial obscurity. She was a woman, and though she wasn’t the first superheroine, she was one of the first comin in at 1941. She was a debutante with a senator father, the perfect dependent for a superhero on the cusp of WW2. She used a black light projector, a rather novel device with a cool visual effect.

 

 

I love how the black light portrayed as these webs of darkness, it’s so cool.

 

Now, a real-life “black light” projects visible light shifted up towards the ultra-violet spectrum. It’s more accurately a “purple light,” but Phantom Lady’s projector snuffs out light. She turns it on and boom, instant darkness, instant blindness. As with the Black Condor’s black ray gun, no explanation is given as to where Sandra got her projector, which allowed me to answer both questions in the Eternal Universe through a little worldbuilding.

 

Though later writers would depict Phantom Lady as a sex bomb, she was pretty tame originally. She wore more than Wonder Woman and her chest, while ample, wasn’t ballistics grade. She also wasn’t flirty. Phantom Lady was glamorous, but also tough. She had a Sheena-like edge to her that would be lost as soon as Peddy was off the character.

 

 

In Police Comics 1, Phantom Lady begins her comic career by escorting her father to a bomb test site. Is that something senators actually attend? Seems like a waste of tax payer money to fly out a senior citizen to watch what to their eyes might as well be a fireworks demonstration. How’s he supposed to tell a good test from a bad one? Anyway, bad guys hijack the bomb site and try to blow up the Knights. Enter Phantom Lady to save the day.

 

The bad guys in 1 were heavily implied to be Germans but weren’t explicitly stated to be so. This was par the course for early golden age comics. Before America entered the war, it was common see superheroes not-Nazis and not-Japs. It was only after Pear Harbor that “Teutonberg and Jitler” became “Germany and Hitler.” Case in point, in issue 2, Sandra uncovers a plot by “an oriental power” to frame “Herma” while shopping for netsukes at an oriental curio shop. Anyone that knew what a netsuke was knew which “oriental power” Sandra was fighting against.

 

Issue 4 was pretty good. In it, Phantom Lady rescues an “Anglian” ambassador and an entire zeppelin full of passengers. You got to love it whenever a big airship shows up in an old comic, it is such a cool set piece. Phantom Lady also shows that she has a “robot plane” in 4, in other words, a plane with autopilot.

 

Wonder Woman’s “robot plane” would show up in January of 1942. Police Comics 4 would hit the shelves in November of 1941, meaning Phantom Lady used a robot plane before Wonder Woman.

 

Issue 5 is another good one. In it, Sandra goes down South to “Parador” to do some diplomatic wine and dining wither her boyfriend Don Borden of the State Department. There’s some cute “Oh I’m jealous Sandra is taking the diplomat to dinner so I’ll take this girl to make her jealous” stuff, but the real draw is in the fight scenes. Sandra really gets to show off her jiu jitsu skills in this one.

 

With issue 10, we finally get explicit Nazis, and Sandra would fight them in the form of 5th Columnists and saboteurs until Peddy left the book. In issue 12, we get a good issue where Sandra goes undercover as a riveter to flush out saboteurs. It’s cool to see debutante Sandra Knight roll up her sleeves and work a blue collar job in the name of patriotism. She also meets a new member of her supporting cast, a rather superficial girl named Maisie who’s worried about chipping a nail while working the line and keeping her makeup on. I like Maisie. She’s a good foil to Sandra. Maisie is who Sandra pretends to be.

 

Issue 13 would be the final Peddy issue. Maisie shows back up, so apparently she and Sandra became BFFs over riveting work. I like that. It’s rare to see continuity and character progression like that in the golden age. It also makes me a little sad, because it seems like Peddy had some more ideas for Maisie and Sandra, ideas he wouldn’t get to put to paper because he’d be replaced in 14.

 

In 13, Phantom Lady has to stop a look-alike saboteur from ruining her good name. The story presaged what was to come, because the Phantom Lady in 14 may have looked like Sandra Knight, but she certainly acted different.

 

Frank Borth

 

In Police Comics 14, Phantom Lady was taken over by Frank Borth, who freelanced all over the golden age comic landscape doing work for Lev Gleason, Timely, Harvey, and Quality. He would start introducing changes to the strip.  Sandra Knight became sillier, flirtier, and if not sexier, certainly more aware of the sex appeal of a woman in skin-tight uniforms fighting evil with acrobatics. Observe:

 

 

Though the Borth comics set Sandra’s personality for her Fox comics, where she really blew up, and provided the prototype for funny sex bomb superheroines to come like She-Hulk and Power Girl, I can’t say I prefer them to the Peddy comics. They’re too goofy, and read like a parody of what came before. Borth didn’t see to care much for Sandra’s previous stories and just did whatever he wanted. In 14, Sandra doesn’t use her black light projector. She’s not even shown holding it outside the first page, where it looks disappointingly like an actual flashlight one would buy at a store. Don is gone, as is Maisie, and Henry Knight is only mentioned as “her Senator father.”

 

In 15, Don’s back to help Sandra bust up a “school for spies,” but Sandra’s stuck wearing a hideous mask. It looks like what the Clock would wear but in yellow.

 

 

In 16, Sandra, still with the stupid banana peel mask, investigates a robbery at an opera house. It’s not a bad story and treats itself with some seriousness. The mask would be gone with 17, a fairly stupid story about the Knight residence getting “haunted” by a black cat after Sandra reads Poe’s Black Cat to house guests, along with some some other fabric from her costume.

Like Sheena, Phantom Lady eventually cut the middle out of her one-piece to up her sex appeal.

 

In 18, Sandra wears a domino mask and I’m not quite sure what Borth’s intentions were for

 

18 is also the issue in which Sandra encounters the closest thing she ever had to a supervillain rival–the Easter Bunny.

 

 

I told you Borth Phantom Lady was silly.

 

More specifically, an assassin dressed up as the Easter Bunny so as to infiltrate an Easter party at the Knight residence with a basket full of exploding Easter eggs.

 

I am shocked that this was never a level in Hitman.

 

Does this guy count as a true supervillain? Probably not. He would if he had some sort of Batman looney compulsion to dress up as the Easter Bunny, but this was just a guy with a lot of creativity who seized an opportunity. If it was a 4th of July celebration he would have dressed up as Uncle Sam. Still, if you have to put a name down for Phantom Lady’s rouges gallery, you can put down the Easter Bunny.

 

In 19, Sandra fights off assassins while water skiing. It’s a decently imaginative premise and a decently written story, but it’s hilarious how Sandra not only wears more with her bathing suit than her Phantom Lady costume but wears one of the most conservative swimsuits imaginable.

 

 

All she did to get ready to swim was kick off her shoes, apparently. I’m betting Borth was having himself a laugh.

 

Issue 20 was interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s another issue with Sandra in the domino mask. I don’t know why Borth liked putting Sandra in masks. She always used her black light projector to hide her face from those that knew her, and who would be able to figure out she’s Sandra Knight just by looking at her? Do you know the daughters of all the US senators? Do you know, let me randomly select a name here, what Mike Lee’s daughter looks like?

 

Borth’s V-cut would define Phantom Lady’s look, but not his masks, that’s for sure.

 

20, believe it or not, was one of the first superhero crossovers. In it, Phantom Lady rescues the Raven, another Borst creation, who had a strip over in Feature Comics. While characters within the same company interacting with each other is taken for granted today, it wasn’t such a sure thing back in the golden age. Things like “shared universe” and “continuity” were mere suggestions rather than rules. Nothing said that the world one character lived in was the same world other characters lived in.

 

 

The story ran in 1943, which made the Borst-verse relatively late to the multiversal party. In 1939, Namor and the Human Torch crossed over in Marvel Mystery Comic, creating the first crossover in American comics…if the Shield and Wizard didn’t beat them to the punch by a year. Captain Marvel and Spy Smasher would then crossover in 1941 in a cool story where Cap frees Spy Smasher from mind control. So the Borst-verse doesn’t even take the bronze, but it is still interesting, if nothing else.

 

There’s one more interesting thing to note about 20–it would be redrawn for obscure Canadian publisher Bell Features crossover between their characters Wing and Nitro, proving that Canadians are without honor, as if that wasn’t already well known.

 

In 21, the Borst-verse crossover continues with the underworld writing strongly worded letters to both Phantom Lady and the Raven’s partner Spider Widow (she dresses up as a Halloween witch and controls spiders). The ladies take the bait, because they both have the hots for the Raven…somehow.

 

What the hell happened to Don?

 

 

Hey, I dig a good catfight, but not when it makes everyone involved look really stupid. Having a sword fight over Dollar Tree Hawkman, over “Honey I got that Hawkperson action figure you wanted from the laudromat.” No one wins here, everyone loses. Humanity is diminished in the eyes of the universe.

 

23 would mark Phantom Lady’s ending not with a bang, but a whimper, as Phantom Lady deals with a mansion overrun by escape mental patients. Banal slapstick ensues as if Phantom Lady was trying to stave off cancelation by transforming herself from a superhero comic character to a humor comic character.

 

After 23, Phantom Lady would vanish from the pages of Police Comics, never to be seen at Quality again, though she appear in Fox, making her a rare example of a superheroine that jumped companies, and then later still in Ajax-Farrell before coming over to DC when DC bought out Quality. Someone clearly bungled IP rights to have her end up at so many companies, but its a moot now that she’s in the public domain–and in the Eternal Universe.

Eternal Universe History

Sandra Knight was always a troublemaker. A life-long fan of mysteries, she had been stealing peaks at her father’s work since she was a teenager. She wanted to see what classified documents looked like, and was more than a little disappointed that they were all dull logistical reports about infrastructure and funding. She found them math homework with more words. But one day, she found a report mentioning that the black ray gun used by the famous superhero Black Condor had been constructed by a brilliant scientist named John Wells. Mr. Wells suffered from Von Thorp syndrome which granted a man incredible intelligence at the cost of emotional instability and for that reason hid how brilliant he truly was, though he offered his services as a private investigator .

 

Sandra filed John Wells’ address in the back of her mind and returned her father’s things. She was glad she finally learned something interesting from Henry Knight’s folders.

 

Then in 1941, her father was hospitalized from an assassin’s bullet. Henry Knight was an outspoken proponent of supplying England with munitions and as such was a target for Axis agents. Henry Knight would recover, but slowly, and Sandra was always by his side to help him through his physical therapy. She was the only one in the all the world that knew he sometimes needed a cane to get around.

 

Vowing to protect her father from future attacks, Sandra remembered what she had read about John Wells and sought him out. She found him and asked him to make her a black ray gun so that she could become a superheroine. But, impressed by how Sandra learned about him and snuck up on him, Wells built a set of tools that complimented Sandra’s natural sneakiness and transformed her from Sandra Knight into the Phantom Lady.

 

Her main tool was a variation of Wells’ earlier black ray gun called a black light projector. The black light projector tapped into the same power source that Black Condor’s ray gun did, a extradimensional entity known as Mahorela tied to the shadows of all the multiverse, but it used that power in different ways. The black ray gun used shadow energy to emit a beam that could energize and drain the energy of targets. The black light projector emitted a wide code of piercingly cold darkness that no light could penetrate. Visible light was completely snuffed and different frequency bands across the electromagnetic spectrum were muffled. Radio signals were jammed within the black light.

 

Her second tool was a green cape that Wells inadvertently created while trying to copy an invisibility cloak created by the late Professor Hans Van Dorn and given to the superhero Invisible Hood. Wells’ cape couldn’t confer invisibility, but it could deflect electromagntic weaponry.

 

Her third and final tool was a heavily customized black sedan equipped with four black ray projectors, two in the front and two in the back. Sandra named her car Dupin after the Poe character.

 

With these tools, Sandra not only protected her father and boyfriend, special agent of the Department of State Don Borden, from 5th Columnists, but she actively rooted out 5th Columnists throughout the nation.

 

Eventually, Sandra snooped her way into a meeting of various superheroes called in order to discuss strategy against the Axis powers while investigating an Axis assassination plot and saved Plastic Man from an acid bomb designed to eat his normally indestructible body away. She was asked to join the superhero community, and though she was reluctant at first, preferring to work alone, she was eventually convinced to under the argument that as a member of the Allies’ skirmish and infiltration team, codenamed Crack, she would be able to strike deep at the heart of the Axis for the first time. There was a condition to her joining, however–she wanted her father to be given a superhuman bodyguard while she was overseas. The military agreed and had Martha Dane, wife and crime fighting partner to Darrel Dane, the Doll Man watch over Henry Knight during the war while Sandra was “sequestered at a secure location for her safety after classified information revealed her to be a target for 5th Columnists.” It was an arrangement that Darrel loved because it kept Martha away from the front lines, but Martha hated it because it kept her apart from her husband. She never forgave Phantom lady for taking her spot on Crack, but the brass figured that anything she could do Darrel could do as well, but Phantom Lady was a unique asset. And towards the end of the war, Martha worried more about Darrel defending himself from Phantom Lady than the Axis given her reputation as an “unattached woman.”

 

Before going overseas with the Crack team, Sandra revealed her identity to her Don Borden, leading to a falling out between the two. Don saw Sandra as foolhardy and reckless in the role of Phantom Lady. He dismissed her work as mere thrill seeking better left to male superheroes. Don demanded that Sandra resign from the Crack team. Sandra refused. The two never reconciled from the split.

 

Now broken up with Don and away from her father, Sandra threw herself into her Phantom Lady persona. She found liberation in her costumed identity. Don wasn’t fully wrong. The adrenaline high was fun. Her teammates on the Crack team were Plastic Man, Doll Man, Black Condor, Quicksilver, and the Invisible Hood, and she flirted with each man, even Darrel, though she was never serious about it. She just wanted to see what Darrel would do.

 

Doll Man was married. Quicksilver gave her a brief romantic fling as they were both adrenaline junkies, but their relationship quickly burned out as it was founded more on lust than love. Plastic Man was too straight-laced for her liking. Invisible Hood rejected her advances. And Black Condor, the man who inspired her to become a superheroine, stole her heart.

 

She has always loved the weird and the strange ever since she got her hands on her first Poe collection as a girl, and who could possibly be stranger than a man raised in the wild by giant condors and grew to become a Washington senator?

 

The wild man and the debutante. They couldn’t get enough of each other.

When the war ended in 1945, Black Condor and Phantom Lady joined the FBI and then married. Sandra would unmask to her very confused by very proud father. Black Condor and Phantom Lady had a daughter, Elmira, in 1946, and then another, Morella, in 1950, and finally a third, Ligeia, in 1953. They were a happy family, but their happiness would be short lived. Between the years 1945 and 1955, the NBI rose to power and began preparing to start a war with Russia by goading America’s superheroes into attacking through false flag assassinations. Henry Knight vocally denounced the NBI and their overreach as unamerican, and this made him a target for “removal.” What was worse, Sandra was breaking into their offices and reading their material. She was coming very close to discovering how corrupt the NBI truly was. So to kill two birds with one stone and to goad Black Condor into attacking Russia, they staged the assassination of Henry and Sandra Knight through a Russian superhuman named Spektr, in reality, Agent G-1 of their postwar superweapon program, who used powers derived from shadow technology.

A grieving Black Condor would resist the urge to take revenge, but in 1956, a nuke was set off in San Francisco, and America’s superheroes could not longer ignore the Russian “threat.” Black Condor fought in the atomic war, but while many of his allies would perish, he would survive. He credited his survival to his children. He couldn’t leave them alone, and the thought pushed him beyond his limits in the heat of battle.

 

In 1957, Plastic Man would free the necromancer Zero from NBI captivity and Zero would begin to expose the NBI by summoning the ghosts of those they had slain to testify against them. Sandra was a particularly strong ghost. Most ghosts needed to bind themselves to a living host in order to manifest, but she was able to manifest on her own as a “living” shadow of black light, a true Phantom Lady.

 

Reborn as a phantom, Sandra assisted Zero in exposing the NBI and killed G-1, shorting his black light weaponry with her own body and causing him to freeze to death in an instant. But her previous life as Sandra Knight was truly over. While she was in the ground, Black Condor remarried, and Sandra’s daughters had a new mother. Not wanting to create friction or confuse her children, Sandra kept her distance, but she would appear to her daughters from time-to-time as their “imaginary friend” “Aunt Shadow.” She was their playmate and, when they got older, her teacher. The three Phantom Sisters would carry on the legacy of their father and mother and wield state-of-the-art shadow weaponry their parents could barely imagine.

 

After the NBI was destroyed and rebuilt from the ground-up, Zero would form the Eternals, a superteam consisting of young superheroes mentored and empowered by the ghosts of old heroes. Phantom Lady and the Phantom Sisters joined, but Sandra left the team to adventure the world on her own a soon as she could see that her daughters could handle themselves.

 

Sandra continues to patrol the night, going where mysteries hide, gliding through the night as a protecting angel, a laughing shadow, a Phantom Lady

 

Sentinels of the Multiverse Cards

Character Cards

Phantom Lady

 

Power: Into the Shadows

Until the beginning of your next turn, redirect all damage that would be dealt to Phantom Lady to another hero.

 

Defeat: Disarmed!

–Deal 1 target 2 melee damage

–Destroy an environment card.

–One player may draw a card and play a card.

Phantom Lady Reborn

After Sandra Knight was killed by the NBI, her ghost was raised by Zero the Ghost Detective. Unlike most ghosts, she didn’t require a human focus to manifest. She could manifest on her own, and did so as a living shadow of black light energy. As a true Phantom Lady, Sandra avenged her death and the death of her father Senator Knight by assisting various superheroes in exposing and dismantling the NBI. After the NBI was defeated, Sandra joined the Eternals, a team of young superheroes mentored by the ghosts of old superheroes, but, as independently minded in death as she was in life, Sandra would often leave the Eternals to fight crime by herself or to visit her daughter Ligeia as “Aunt Shadow.”

She continues prowling the night, preying on those that would prey on the innocent.

Unlock Condition: Win a game while Phantom Lady is defeated. Phantom Lady must deal the final blow (in other words, kill the boss with Phantom Lady after she’s “dead.”)

Power: A True Phantom Lady

Deal 1 target 1 cold damage.

GAMEPLAY: Phantom Lady is immune to melee, projectile, radiant, and toxic damage.

Defeat: On the Other Side of the Mists of Eternity

–Deal 1 target 2 cold damage.

–All damage is cold damage until the beginning of your next turn. Deal all nonhero targets 1 cold damage.

–1 player draws 2 cards.

The Fox-Universe Phantom Lady

This is a Phantom Lady from another universe. She doesn’t know who Uncle Sam and Black Condor are, but she knows who Samson and Blue Beetle are. She’s a younger, more reckless Phantom Lady who thrives off the adrenaline high of dangerous situations.

Unlock Condition:

Win a game with Well? Come on! in play.

Power: Black Light Combo

Deal 1 target 1 cold damage. Deal 1 target 1 melee damage.

Defeat: Disarmed!

–Deal 1 target 2 melee damage

–Destroy an environment card.

–One player may draw a card and play a card.

Sidekicks

Don Borden

5 HP

At the beginning of the game, search your deck for this card and put it into play.

At the end of your turn, Don Borden deals 1 target 1 melee damage and one player may draw a card.

Don likes secrets, just like I do. It’s why he joined the State Department. But I lack his patience for red tape.

Equipment

Black Light Projector

Equipment, Device

5 HP

Power: Deal 1 target 1 cold damage. Decrease damage dealt by that target by 1 until the start of your next turn.

Dr. Wells called it starless midnight in a cup. Accurate.

Black Light Car

Equipment, Device

8 HP

Prevent all damage that would be dealt to Phantom Lady by environment cards.

Power: Deal all environment cards 1 cold damage. Prevent all damage that would be dealt by the environment until the start of your next turn.

The Dupin contains a more powerful version of my hand held projector, capable of covering an entire area. I hear the military is experimenting with spy planes armed with similar projectors.

Black Light Cape

Equipment, Limited

5 HP

Equip to any hero.

Reduce radiant, energy, and electrical damage by 2.

Prevent all radiant, energy, and electrical damage dealt to Black Light Cape.

“The cape was actually a mistake. Dr. Wells was trying to copy Invisible Hood’s cloak. It can’t make me invisible, but it does shield me across the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Ongoings

Day into Knight

Ongoing, Limited

Prevent all radiant and projectile damage.

Reduce all melee damage by 1.

Increase all cold damage by 1.

Power: Destroy this card. Any player may use this ability.

Hey, where did the sun go?

–Joseph Becker, 5th Columnist

Lost in Darkness

Ongoing

Decrease damage dealt by one target by 1.

The true power of my projector is this: you can see the men inside the cone, but the men can’t see out.

Well? Come on!

Ongoing, Limited

Power: Destroy this card.

Reduce melee damage dealt to Phantom Lady by 1. Whenever Phantom Lady is dealt melee damage, deal the source of that damage 1 melee damage. Redirect all damage to Phantom Lady.

Father made me take jiu jitsu lessons when I was girl so I could defend myself. I stuck with it because I found I was very, very good at it.

Bump in the Knight

 

Ongoing, Limited

Whenever damage is redirected, you may deal the source of that damage 1 melee damage.

It’s all about redirecting momentum. Let your opponent do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Oneshots

Cone of Darkness

Deal 1 cold damage to all non-hero targets. Prevent all villain damage until the start of your next turn.

Dr. Wells created my projector to have a wider area of effect than Black Condor’s ray gun but fewer functions. I don’t regret it. There’s nothing like a one-button blackout.

Watch Your Step

Deal 1 target 1 cold damage. Destroy an environment card. Deal that target 2 melee damage.

Aiming the black light in their face is the most intuitive thing you can do, but sometimes you’ll want to aim it at their feet.

Jumping at Phantoms

Deal two targets 1 cold damage. Those targets deal each other 1 projectile damage.

Never take a shot in the dark.

Jiu-Jitsu Throw

Deal 1 target 2 melee damage. Draw a card.

I’ll have some fun while I wait for the bulb to cool down.

Senator Knight’s Daughter

Other players may draw a card. You may draw two cards.

Being a senator’s daughter has its perks. Fine dining, a heavy purse, close proximity to experimental weaponry…

Knight Investigation

Reveal the top two cards of either the environment or villain deck. Place one card on top of its deck and the other at the bottom.

I’ve always been nosey. I just can’t handle not knowing things. 

Heroclix

 

Enhancement: I’ll blind them, you shoot them.

Close Combat Reflexes: Well, come on!

Stealth: Going where father wouldn’t approve.

 

I do take a little pride in incorporating Phantom Lady’s colors into her dial.

VS Battle Information

I already did a battle between her and Timely’s Sun Girl, but that’s certainly not the only viable fight for her. One day, I want to do a battle royal between Phantom Lady, Black Cat (the Harvey one, not the Marvel one), and Black Canary. Three women known for jiu jitsu, tempestuous attitudes, and sex appeal. Burnette vs Redhead vs Blonde.

On the whole, her Quality incarnation isn’t very strong. She doesn’t have the crazy feats of her Fox incarnation. While she can give your typical musclebound goon a beating, she can also be captured just from being grabbed from behind.

Powers and Abilities: Jiu Jitsu master, black light projector projects a wide cone of darkness useful for distracting foes, robot plane (Police Comics 4), car equipped with black light projectors in the front and back (1).

Strength: Thrashes a man twice her size (5), Puts a man in an armlock (16), Endures the oxygen being drained out of a room long enough to knock out a goon and turn the oxygen back on, even while grown men around her were falling unconscious (22).

Speed: Tosses a fencing foil through a man’s torso (21)