Quality Comics
Phantom Lady first appeared in Quality's Police Comics #1 (Aug, 1941), an anthology title the first issue of which also included the debut of characters such as Plastic Man and the Human Bomb. That issue established her alter ego as Sandra Knight, the beautiful Washington, D.C. debutante daughter of U.S. Senator Henry Knight. One night, Sandra happened across two would-be assassins targeting her father, and stealthily thwarted them with nothing more than a rolled-up newspaper. Knight consequently developed a taste for adventure and crime-fighting, and after finding a "black light ray projector" that a family friend named Professor Davis sent to her father, she adopted the device as a weapon that could blind her enemies, or turn herself invisible if she aimed it at herself.
She assumed the identity of Phantom Lady in a costume consisting of a green cape and the equivalent of a one-piece yellow swimsuit. Stories published decades later by DC Comics after it acquired the character would alter details of this origin by giving her a more active and aggressive role in her own empowerment, explaining her skimpy costume as a deliberate tactic to distract her usually male foes.
Phantom Lady ran as one of the features in Police Comics through #23. Arthur Peddy continued as the artist through #13, with Joe Kubert drawing her feature in Police Comics #14-17; Frank Borth on #18-21; Arthur Peddy returned for #22,; and Rudy Palais on #23. Phantom Lady also appeared in Feature Comics #69-71 as part of a crossover with Spider Widow and the Raven.
Fox Feature Syndicate & Star Publications
After Quality stopped publishing the adventures of Phantom Lady, what was now simply Iger Studios believed it owned the character and assigned it to Fox Feature Syndicate, a move that would later cause confusion as to who actually owned the character's copyright. The Fox version which premiered in Phantom Lady #13 (taking over the numbering of Wotalife Comics) [1] is better known to contemporary comic fans than the Quality version because of the "good girl art" of Matt Baker. Baker altered her costume by changing the colors to red and blue, substantially revealing her cleavage, and adding a very short skirt. Fox published Phantom Lady only through issue 26 (Apr, 1949), though the character guest starred in All-Top Comics #8-17, also with art by Baker. Her rogue's gallery in these two Fox titles included the Avenging Skulls; the Fire Fiend; the Killer Clown; Kurtz, the Robbing Robot; the Subway Slayer; and Vulture.
Baker's cover for Phantom Lady #17 (Apr, 1949) was reproduced in Seduction of the Innocent, the 1954 book by Dr. Fredric Wertham denouncing what he saw as the morally corrupting effect of comics on children. The cover, which illustrated Phantom Lady attempting to escape from ropes, was presented by Wertham with a caption that read, "Sexual stimulation by combining 'headlights' with the sadist's dream of tying up a woman."[2] In the meantime, Fox went under and its assets were acquired by other publishers, and a Phantom Lady story from All-Top was then reprinted as a backup feature in Jungle Thrills by Star Publications, which then itself went out of business.
[edit] Ajax-Farrel Publications
Ajax-Farrell Publications then published four issues of the second Phantom Lady title, cover dated Dec. 1954/Jan. 1955 through June 1955. The company also published her as a backup feature in two issues of Wonder Boy.
By then, Wertham's efforts had led to a Congressional investigation into the comics industry, and publishers formed the self-censoring Comics Code Authority in the fall of 1954. Some changes were consequently made to the Phantom Lady's costume, so that her cleavage was covered and shorts replaced her skirt.
Charlton Comics & I.W. Publications
Farrell's assets were later acquired by Charlton Comics, and, until DC relaunched the character in the 1970s, Phantom Lady's only appearances were in reprinted Matt Baker stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Israel Waldman's I. W. Publications (later Super Comics), a company that published unauthorized reprints from 1958–1964, included Phantom Lady reprints in issues of Great Action Comics and Daring Adventures. These comics featured new cover images of Phantom Lady that bore little visual consistency either to the Fox version of the character or each other (e.g., the character was blonde on one cover, brunette with a brown costume on another).
DC Comics
Sandra Knight
In 1956, DC Comics obtained the rights to the Quality Comics characters, which they believed included Phantom Lady, and reintroduced her 17 years later with a group of other former Quality heroes as the Freedom Fighters in Justice League of America #107 (Oct. 1973).
As was done with many characters DC acquired from other publishers, or that were holdovers from Golden Age titles, the Freedom Fighters were relocated to a parallel world. Their particular earth was referred to as "Earth-X". On Earth-X, Nazi Germany had won World War II. The team was later featured in its own series for 15 issues (1976–1978), in which they temporarily left Earth-X for "Earth-1" (where most DC titles are set) and Phantom Lady was given real phantom-like powers.
In 1981, Phantom Lady became a recurring guest star of All-Star Squadron, a superhero-team title set on "Earth-2", the locale for DC's World War II-era superheroes, and at a time prior to when she and the other Freedom Fighters were supposed to have left for Earth-X. Phantom Lady then appeared with the rest of DC's superheroes in Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story that was intended to eliminate the confusing histories that DC had attached to its characters by retroactively merging the various parallel worlds into one. This left Phantom Lady's Earth-X days written out of her history, and the Freedom Fighters became a mere splinter group of the All-Star Squadron.
DC also retconned the origin of Phantom Lady established in Quality's Police Comics, so that she now belonged to the prestigious Knight family of Opal City, a locale central to DC's Starman line of heroes. Her formative story was changed so that she overtook her father's would-be assassins with her fists instead of a newspaper. Lastly, she was given a more active role in the acquisition of her black light ray, which she no longer received from a mere family friend but instead from a scientist named Dr. Abraham Davis, who had escaped from Nazi-controlled Europe. In the retelling, Sandra Knight gave asylum to Davis, setting him up in a laboratory and helping him to complete his invention. Ted Knight, now established as her cousin, also aided Davis, as a result acquiring the technology that allowed him to become the first Starman.
The 1994 title Damage established the post-World War II history for Phantom Lady. She was made an agent of a Cold War-era government intelligence agency called Argent, in which she met and married fellow former-All Star Squadron member Iron Munro (a character introduced in the 1986 series Young All-Stars). The two were paired on several missions and fought a Soviet-backed agent named The Baron, actually the German Baron Blitzkrieg, a foe both had met during World War II. Shortly after becoming pregnant, Sandra was kidnapped by The Baron who stole the fetus from her womb and left her for dead. After escaping from Communist Poland, Sandra wanted out of the spy game and turned to an old friend, Roy Lincoln. He helped her, and soon thereafter she started the Universite Notre Dame Des Ombres (the University of Our Lady of the Shadows) in the hopes of making further intelligence contacts and finding her baby; unfortunately, she was not successful. Phantom Lady's presence in the U.S. and her work with American Intelligence was kept a secret to most; she never reunited with her husband, and in her old age became headmistress of the school she began, now a training center for female spies in Washington, D.C.
In Manhunter #23 (June, 2006), Phantom Lady met the current Manhunter, Kate Spencer, and it was revealed that she was Spencer's grandmother. Phantom Lady and Iron Munro were revealed to have had a child before their marriage whom they gave up for adoption—Walter Pratt, Spencer's father. The Golden Age Atom, Al Pratt, had allowed Phantom Lady to use his contact information so that she could get into a home for unwed mothers, causing the belief that the child was Pratt's son. Knight and Munro still keep in contact, as she brought him to meet Kate and her son, Ramsey.
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