Kitty Kelly, also known as Yankee Girl, but not to be confused with the Wonder Womanesque heroine of the same name covered earlier in this blog, had a varied career and also an unsettled comic book history. Kitty was a wartime air stewardess, with not-so-secret aspirations to be an aviator, but who brought a level of toughness and detective skills to her role as flight attendant. Rather like her cabin crew contemporary Kay McKay, Kitty was as likely to be high-kicking Nazi spies in the face at 30,000 feet as she was doling out pre-prepared meals to hungry passengers. Although the sequence of events is not exactly clear, Kitty eventually left her air stewardess role to become some form of social worker but even in this benign profession, she comes up against criminals and exploiters and feels obliged to bring them to justice. To help her do this, the dauntless Kitty dons a superheroine crime-fighting costume, but normally has no super powers so, like many of her Golden Age sisters, she makes up for this with a combination of courage, brains and fighting skills, in one story supplemented by super strength which she obtains “at times of crisis”. Kitty has no use for a secret identity either, her costume sometimes displaying the giveaway initials KK on her chest. If these sudden changes of tone and direction for Yankee Girl seem jarring, that’s because they are.
For all this complexity, and despite appearing sporadically between December 1941 and July 1946, Kitty Kelly only featured in six adventures across three different titles. She debuted as a dark-haired air hostess in the first two issues of Punch Comics, before she was moved to Captain Flight Comics for three issues (#6, 8 and 9), where she mysteriously became a blonde, and finally featured in one last full-on superheroine adventure in Red Seal Comics. This nomadic existence did speak to an uncertainty on the part of the publishers, seemingly unsure as to whether to pitch Kitty as something of a campy ditz like the more successful Sky Girl; as a spy-busting, crime-thwarting tough gal like Jane Martin, or a super strong righter of wrongs in the vein of the Blond Bomber. Ultimately it seems as though the character’s creators rather gave up on Kitty.
The panel and page featured are from Kitty’s best adventure in my opinion in which, trapped in snowy wastes after her plane ditches, the intrepid stewardess locates her inner Agatha Christie in order to unmask the murderer of fellow passengers and reveal him to be a German spy. I suspect if this incarnation of Kitty - part professional flight attendant and part detective - had become permanent, then her tenure might have been a little longer lived. The full story can be found in Captain Flight Comics #9 (September 1945).
