Comics historian Trina Robbins is taking a look back at World War II heroines and the female artists who created them in Babes in Arms: Women in the Comics During the Second World War, to be released later this year by Hermes Press.
Clocking in at more than 300 pages, the book collects the wartime comics of four female cartoonists: Barbara Hall, Jill Elgin, Lily Renee and Fran Hopper. Some might call them the original Carol Corps, but I like to borrow a name from one of Hall's earliest comics, Girl Commandos.
Comics by female creators such as Hall, Elgin, Renee, Hopper and others showed American service-women taking on the Axis Powers in books like Black Cat, Girl Commandos, Pat Parker, War Nurse and Senorita Rio. In Babes in Arms, Robbins is collecting some of those stories, along with her own commentary and accumulated extras.