FIGHT COMICS Featuring Senorita Rio Volume 3

It's time to finish this fight with the third and final volume featuring Señorita Rio, "The Queen of Spies!" The lovely actress-turned-secret-agent survived in a male-dominated world due to her extraordinary skills. She was an excellent markswoman, extremely athletic, capable of amazing feats and an expert fighter, skilled in jiu-jitsu and fencing. She battles Axis agents throughout South America. Wonderful artwork throughout! Señorita Rio was one of the first female and Latin characters created by Fiction House and had a long, successful run. Lily Renee is only credited with one story this time. But Kamen dominates, with seven stories to his credit! It's all excellent pre-EC work, with lots of good-girl art in the best tradition of The Phantom Lady, Miss Fury and other steamy female characters of the 1940s. A wonderful bonus is a long 22-page introduction that talks about Jack Kamen's and Nick Cardy's work for Fiction House, supplemented by lots of artwork and splash pages, plus coverage on ALL the other contributors. Additional artists include Edmund Goode and John Forte, both little known now but extremely competent artists. And Will Eisner? See below! Two stories, from Fight #65 and 66, are "Drawn in a quasi-Eisner-SPIRIT style. This has traditionally been attributed to Jerry Grandenetti, but it simply doesn't conform to what we know of his style - either pencils or inks. Possibly another foreign artist?" That's what Comics.com says, probably Jim Vadeboncoeur. What I think is that these two stories came out of the Eisner Studio, where Grandenetti worked during this time. I think Eisner was doing the layouts, if not Jules Feiffer, who emulated Eisner's work very well. They are as much like the primo Spirit stories from this time as all those wonderful Doctor Drew stories in Rangers Comics. Artist Michael Gilbert collected all the Doctor Drew stories into a trade paperback several years ago. I hadn't known about these two Rio stories, but you'll like them, they are superbly done. And the rest of the book isn't bad either! Look at the cover of the hardcover and tell me that's not Eisner or someone emulating him! The cover on this softcover is by Lily Renee.