Obscure comicbook superheroines #4: Moon Girl
Moon Girl was a rare example of an EC Comics superhero title, created in 1947 by three distinguished comicbook legends: Max Gaines, Gardner Fox and Sheldon Moldoff.
Comics publisher Max Charles Gaines had previously helped bring Wonder Woman to All American Comics, even lending his middle name to the character’s pseudonymous credit, Charles Moulton. Writer Gardner Fox had already scored hits by creating characters such as The Flash, Doctor Fate, and Hawkman. Artist Sheldon Moldoff’s name was perhaps less well known to comicbook fans at the time, although they would have been familiar with his work given that he was extensively ghosting for Bob Kane on Batman.
Moon Girl drew influence from a mixture of pulp styles: crime, occult, fantasy, and romance. Moon Girl herself was a princess from “the wild mountains of Samarkand” and a descendant of a 13th Century warrior princess, whose origin story began with her travelling the world in search of her lover, Prince Mengu, aided by a magical moonstone.
The prince had departed upon failing to demonstrate that he could match Moon Girl in strength, a requirement demanded by tradition before the pair could marry. Eventually Moon Girl tracked her boyfriend down to America, where he had adopted the identity of Lionel Manning. Determined to remain with her lover, Moon Girl created her own secret identity, teacher Claire Lune... but when trouble reared its ugly head she threw off her everyday clothes and activated her moonstone to fight for justice as Moon Girl.
Today EC Comics are famous for their controversial 1950s horror titles, and indeed there’s some foreshadowing of those spooky tales in some Moon Girl stories. The Moon Girl strip started out as a basic superhero affair, with Claire Lune and her boyfriend teaming up to fight the usual array of Golden Age thugs. By issue seven, however, the stories took on a grittier true crime angle, only to switch again two issues later to a romance-heavy format (with the titular character playing only a cameo role.) By issue ten Moon Girl was gone, and her comic became a solid cover-to-cover romance anthology title.
It has been suggested that EC wanted to get away from genres (like superheroes) dominated by DC, the 800-pound gorilla of Golden Age comics, given DC’s practice of buying up and amalgamating smaller publishers that had serious potential to become competitors. Whatever the reason, after just eight and a bit issues the Moon Girl character vanished into obscurity, and eventually allegedly fell into the public domain.
Despite her short run, however, Moon Girl never entirely slipped from the conciousness of comicbook fans, and in more recent times Johnny Zito and Tony Trov have re-imagined Moon Girl in a new series of glossy adventures.
