I have featured Starlight, the warrior-woman of the Huron, previously in this blog, but I thought it worth featuring her again, simply to reflect what made her almost unique amongst Golden Age comic book heroines. Foremost, she was a strong female character whose stories were written by a female author, Ann Adams. I think this must have contributed to Starlight’s feminism, demonstrated by her refusal to accept her status as a second class member of Huron society and proving through her dexterity with arrow, knife and combat skills, to be as proficient as any man, and in her stories it is frequently Staright leading her people’s fight against their encroaching enemies. In this, Starlight could be compared to her fellow Native American heroine Firehair, and any number of contemporary comic book jungle women, but unlike those characters, Starlight was not white, making her one of the very few minority characters in a mainstream title (Indians Comics) in the early 1950s.
Finally, Starlight is illustrated by the fine artist Ralph Mayo, who drew and coloured the later adventures of Camilla the Jungle Queen so well. Even less than Camilla, Starlight is not particularly sexualised. In Mayo’s depiction she is beautiful certainly, and attractive, but her appearance is always one of a strong and independent woman and she has no male companion to order her about or rescue her from peril. The story featured above explores this dynamic more explicitly when Starlight finds herself banned, as a woman, from the ceremonies of Manhood Day, where “stripling hunters” are inducted to adulthood, something Starlight is not permitted even to witness, owing to her gender, which of course she finds infuriating.
The pre-colonial America depicted by Adams and Mayo is of course romanticised and exoticised, but as a respectful imagining of an independent “warrior-maiden”, Starlight’s stories are, in context, truly admirable.
The page featured above is from the Starlight story which appeared in Indians Comics #4 (November 1950).
Source: comicbookplus
