Beware the Bad Girls!

In the '40s, the infancy of this thing called comics, GIs and other adults were reading comics too and some publishers catered to their more prurient interests by publishing "good girl" titles - essentially comics built around heroines who were often suggestively drawn and posed.  It was all fairly innocent and fun, though Dr. Frederick Wertham had a few nasty things to infer about such art in his notorious screed Seduction of the Innocent.

The trend pretty much died out, though there were certainly plenty of super ladies and romance comic heroines to tease us along.

And then came the '90s a.k.a. "The Dark Age" or, as I like to call it, "The Bad Girl Years."

It was almost as if the industry finally remembered that their key demographic were horny geek boys in their mid to late teens and thus were were treated to an onslaught of amped up violence and, fortunately, amped-up t&a.

This era belonged to its new heroines:

Lady Death




Purgatori




Razor




Chastity



and many more

And even the mainstream publishers didn't escape the trend, suddenly forcing our old favorites into new shapes, as if the Wonder Women and Supergirls had all recently visited the same plastic surgeon and went thong shopping en masse.  Yes, it was all pretty base and calculated, but we got some rampant sexiness in our comics for awhile and for that I salute the Bad Girl Years!