Ask the average person to name the first female superhero, and the answer will almost certainly be Wonder Woman. This is perfectly understandable. Wonder Woman has been appearing in comic books since 1941. She has starred in movies and television shows, joined the Justice League, appeared on lunchboxes, and accumulated enough merchandise to fill several abandoned aircraft hangars.

Fantomah has a floating skull with blonde hair.

Advantage: Fantomah.

More than a year before Wonder Woman made her debut, Fantomah was already protecting the jungle, flying through the air, transforming matter, reading minds, controlling animals, and punishing wrongdoers with methods that would have caused Batman to request an immediate ethics review.

She was beautiful. She was practically omnipotent. When angered, her face changed into a blue-green skull with enormous black eye sockets and a grin that would have set Ghost Rider’s heart aflitter.

She was one of the earliest superheroines in comic-book history. Then, almost as quickly as she appeared, she was rewritten, watered down, forgotten, and left behind by the medium she had helped pioneer.

This is the story of Fantomah, the Mystery Woman of the Jungle: environmental protector, supernatural avenger, possible comic-book first, and compelling evidence that Golden Age writers probably needed more supervision than they were given.

The Superhero Business Was Invented on the Fly

Superman debuted in Action Comics #1 in 1938 (or 1931, depending on whether Bill Dunn was the first Superman) and promptly demonstrated that children would exchange hard-earned dimes for stories about brightly dressed people solving problems through a mixture of idealism and property damage.

Batman followed in 1939. Publishers responded in the traditional manner of publishers who discover that something is profitable: They copied it as quickly as humanly possible.

One of those publishers was Fiction House, a company with roots in pulp magazines. Its comic books included titles such as Planet Comics, Fight Comics, Wings Comics, and Jungle Comics. The naming department was not paid by the syllable.

Fiction House had already found success with Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, who first appeared in the British magazine Wags in January 1938 and made her American comic-book debut in Jumbo Comics #1 that September. Sheena was strong, independent, and capable of handling villains without waiting for a man in sensible trousers to finish explaining the situation. Her popularity helped unleash an entire migration of jungle heroines, most of whom wore animal skins despite living in climates where insects presumably regarded exposed flesh as an engraved invitation.

Fantomah appeared in that environment, but she was not merely another jungle adventurer. She did not swing from vines, wrestle a crocodile, or spend most of the story being captured so the male lead could remain busy.

She was something stranger.

Enter the Mystery Woman of the Jungle

Fantomah debuted in Jungle Comics #2, cover-dated February 1940. Her seven-page feature was written and drawn by Fletcher Hanks, who signed the story with the pseudonym “Barclay Flagg.”

The story does not waste time providing an origin, secret identity, supporting cast, mortgage payment, or tragic childhood. Fantomah simply exists. She is introduced as “the most remarkable woman ever known,” which is the sort of confident résumé summary that eliminates the need for references.

Her first adventure begins with a dying elephant covered in jewels being led toward a secret elephant graveyard. Two ivory hunters learn about the jewels and decide to follow. This is clearly an excellent plan, because nothing ominous has ever happened to greedy men entering a forbidden cemetery guarded by a supernatural blonde woman.

Fantomah warns them away. Their hunting dogs become terrified. The graveyard is filled with bones. Fantomah’s beautiful face transforms into a ghastly skull.

The hunters proceed anyway.

There is a useful lesson here. When a floating spectral head appears above an elephant graveyard and advises you to reconsider your itinerary, it may be time to place a little less emphasis on the TripAdvisor reviews.

The men steal the jewels, turn against each other, and are ultimately swallowed by quicksand as Fantomah watches. She does not arrest them. She does not deliver a speech about rehabilitation. She merely allows greed, betrayal, and unusually well-positioned geology to complete the job.

This became the basic formula for Fantomah’s adventures:

A villain entered the jungle. Fantomah warned him to stop. The villain ignored her. Reality then became extremely flexible.

Beautiful Woman, Horrifying Skull, No Further Questions

In her ordinary form, Fantomah appeared as a blonde woman wearing a short black dress or swimsuit. She looked less like a costumed superhero and more like someone who had been interrupted on the way to a remarkably informal cocktail party.

Then danger appeared.

Her skin turned blue, green, or gray, depending on the printing. Her face became skeletal. Her eyes disappeared into black sockets. Her teeth formed a fixed, menacing grin. Her blonde curls remained perfectly intact, because even supernatural vengeance understands the importance of maintaining one’s hair.

Sometimes Fantomah transformed completely. At other times, her skull-like head floated by itself through the sky. Either way, she looked like the result of a collaboration between a beauty-pageant contestant, the Grim Reaper, and an especially vindictive bottle of hair conditioner.

The transformation had no scientific explanation. It was not caused by alien ancestry, experimental chemicals, childhood trauma, or a bite from a radioactive blonde zombie. Fantomah did not explain herself because Fantomah did not need to explain herself.

She was not a woman wearing a superhero costume. She was a supernatural presence who occasionally adopted the appearance of a woman.

Her jurisdiction was the jungle. Venue was wherever the villain happened to be screaming.

Her Superpower Was Having All the Superpowers

Modern comic-book writers spend considerable time defining what a superhero can and cannot do. Superman has kryptonite. Green Lantern has the color yellow, depending on which decade we are discussing. Aquaman must endure people pretending that commanding whales is somehow unimpressive.

Fantomah had no such limitations.

Her powers consisted of whatever Fletcher Hanks needed to finish the story by page seven.

She could fly, levitate objects, read minds, command animals, project energy, transform human beings, alter matter, see distant events, control the weather, summon monsters, and manipulate objects of virtually any size. In one adventure, she levitated an entire city. In another, she redirected a giant asteroid.

This was not a balanced set of abilities. This was the entire superhero buffet, including the sneeze guard.

Her villains responded to these demonstrations by continuing to challenge her. This raises questions about Fantomah’s enemies, most notably whether the jungle contained some previously undocumented plant that caused catastrophic failures of judgment.

In one story, Fantomah took four criminals, fused them into a single man, and abandoned the unfortunate composite in the “Secret Pit of Jungle Horrors.” Today, we call such a place “high school.”

In another story, Fantomah battled women who rode tigers and threatened the jungle. She drew a giant moonstone from a volcano, had it absorb the tiger-riding women, and sent it crashing into Mars. Most superheroes would have disarmed them and contacted local authorities. Fantomah implemented an interplanetary removal policy.

When the Nazi-coded New Blitzers launched an airborne assault, she gave African lions the power of flight so they could tear apart the invaders’ parachutes. During another adventure, gorillas fought resurrected Egyptian mummies.

This is what comic books were like before anyone established adult supervision.

Justice Was Swift, Surreal, and Frequently Permanent

Fletcher Hanks had a distinctive understanding of justice. Criminals in his stories did not merely lose. They were subjected to elaborate punishments that reflected their crimes, exposed their moral corruption, and often rearranged their anatomy.

His other major superhero, Stardust the Super Wizard, treated villains in much the same way. Hanks’s heroes were all-powerful judges administering sentences in a universe without probation officers.

Fantomah’s enemies were poachers, ivory hunters, mad scientists, conquerors, treasure thieves, and assorted men who arrived in Africa carrying rifles, bad intentions, and absolutely no awareness of the established supernatural regulatory environment.

She often warned them first. That is important. Fantomah believed in due process, provided due process consisted of one terrifying apparition telling you to stop before turning you into a monster.

Once the warning was ignored, however, negotiations concluded.

Her punishments were sometimes grotesque, but they were rarely random. Greedy men were destroyed by greed. Those who abused animals were attacked by animals. Conquerors lost control of the forces they had assembled. Hanks’s stories operated according to the moral logic of a fairy tale, an Old Testament judgment, and a fever dream sharing one very small apartment.

This is one reason the original stories remain so entertaining. They are not conventional superhero adventures. They are morality plays in which the personification of jungle vengeance happens to look like a fashion model whose face has fallen off.

Was Fantomah Really the First Female Superhero?

Of course, superhero history becomes argumentative the moment anyone uses the word “first.” Just as there is an ongoing debate over whether the Golden Bat or the Phantom deserves recognition as the world’s first superhero, the identity of the first superheroine depends heavily on how one defines the term. Does she need supernatural powers? A costume? A secret identity? Must she appear in a conventional comic book, or do illustrated pulp stories and other formats count? Fantomah has an excellent claim, but Sheena, Queen of the Jungle; Magician from Mars; Olga Mesmer; the Woman in Red, and several other early contenders are standing nearby with their attorneys and competing chronologies.

The answer depends on what qualifies as a superhero.

Sheena appeared in 1938 and predates Fantomah, but she had no supernatural powers and is generally classified as an adventure heroine. Olga Mesmer, a superpowered woman with X-ray abilities, appeared in the pulp magazine Spicy Mystery Stories beginning in 1937, although her adventures occupied a murky territory between illustrated prose and comics.

The Magician from Mars, a superpowered woman from the future, debuted in Amazing-Man Comics #7, cover-dated November 1939—three months before Fantomah. She therefore has a very strong claim to being the earliest superpowered heroine in an American comic book.

The Woman in Red, one of the earliest masked female crimefighters, arrived shortly after Fantomah in 1940. Wonder Woman did not appear until All-Star Comics #8 in December 1941.

Consequently, calling Fantomah the first female superhero requires qualifications large enough to be visible from orbit.

What can safely be said is that Fantomah was one of the earliest clearly superpowered female protagonists in American comic books. She predates Wonder Woman by more than a year and belongs to the tiny group of heroines who helped establish that women could occupy the center of a superhero story.

She was not a secretary, girlfriend, assistant, or female version of an existing male hero. She had no male commander and no romantic subplot. Men did not rescue her. Men generally spent their limited time in her presence regretting several recent decisions.

Wonder Woman became the enduring cultural icon, and rightly so. Fantomah was there earlier, lurking in the jungle with a disembodied skull and a remarkably aggressive conservation policy.

Fletcher Hanks: The Man Responsible for All This

Fletcher Hanks was as unusual as the comics he created.

Born in 1889, he was around 50 years old when Fantomah debuted—considerably older than many of the young artists entering the new comic-book industry. Between 1939 and 1941, he produced roughly 50 stories under his own name and several pseudonyms.

Hanks handled nearly everything himself. He wrote the scripts, drew the pages, inked them, and supplied the lettering. At a time when comic books were increasingly produced through an assembly-line system, Hanks operated as a one-man creative disturbance.

His artwork is instantly recognizable. Bodies are stiff. Hands are enormous. Faces look carved from damp wood. Characters fly with their arms pressed against their sides, creating the impression that they have been fired from an invisible cannon and are trying to remain polite about it.

His storytelling is equally distinctive. Events do not so much flow as collide. Villains announce plans with unnecessary thoroughness. Narration explains things already visible in the panel. Characters experience sudden transformations, invasions, mutations, and astronomical disasters with the emotional subtlety of people discovering that the restaurant has stopped serving breakfast.

Yet the stories have undeniable power. They are bold, direct, colorful, and completely free from the cautious calculations that later shaped corporate superheroes. Hanks’s work feels less like something developed by a publishing committee and more like imagery transmitted from a troubled planet.

The man himself was not an endearing eccentric whose personal flaws can be brushed aside as part of a charming artistic temperament. Accounts gathered by comics historian Paul Karasik describe Hanks as an abusive alcoholic who mistreated his wife and children and abandoned his family. His son later recalled him with little affection.

Hanks abruptly left comics in 1941 for reasons that remain uncertain. Decades later, in January 1976, his body was found frozen on a park bench in Manhattan.

It is tempting to romanticize obscure artists after their deaths, particularly when their work is strange and compelling. Hanks resists that treatment. He created remarkable comics and appears to have caused considerable pain to the people closest to him. Both facts belong in the story.

Fantomah Was Gradually Made Less Fantomah

Hanks’s final Fantomah story appeared in Jungle Comics #15 in March 1941. Beginning with issue #16, writer W. B. Hovious took over the feature, with the artwork tentatively attributed to Robert Pious.

Fantomah retained some supernatural abilities at first, but the atmosphere changed. Her skull transformation disappeared. Her powers diminished. The surreal punishments and cosmic absurdity gave way to more conventional jungle adventures.

It was as though someone had inherited Dracula and decided audiences would find him more relatable if he stopped drinking blood and became a guidance counselor.

The transformation continued in Jungle Comics #27 in March 1942. Fantomah became the incarnation of a pharaoh’s daughter, received a sacred Egyptian costume, and became ruler of the lost city of Khefra. Her blonde hair also became red.

The mysterious supernatural guardian had acquired an origin story, a kingdom, a wardrobe change, and the administrative responsibilities associated with municipal government.

The feature was renamed “Fantomah, Daughter of the Pharaohs.” She occasionally called upon Egyptian gods, but even those powers gradually faded. By the end, she had become a mostly conventional jungle queen battling rival tribes, lost civilizations, curses, and the assorted hazards produced whenever Golden Age writers attempted geography.

Fantomah’s original feature ended in Jungle Comics #51 in March 1944.

The name remained, but the character who had once hurled enemies toward Mars had largely vanished.

The Jungle Came With Considerable Historical Baggage

Any modern discussion of Jungle Comics must acknowledge that the fictional Africa appearing in its pages bore only an occasional and frequently accidental relationship to the actual continent.

The stories relied heavily on colonial fantasies, racial caricatures, invented tribes, and depictions of African people that range from patronizing to grotesquely offensive. Fantomah may have been progressive in allowing a woman to hold absolute power, but she exercised that power in a setting built from many of the era’s worst stereotypes.

That contradiction is part of her history.

Fantomah was independent, fearless, and vastly more powerful than any man around her. She protected animals from poachers and defended local populations from foreign exploiters. At the same time, the stories often portrayed those populations through demeaning imagery and denied them much meaningful agency of their own.

She was ahead of her time in one respect and firmly trapped inside it in others. History is inconsiderate that way. It rarely arranges itself into clean categories for our convenience.

How a Forgotten Heroine Returned From the Dead

For decades, Fantomah was little more than an obscure name in old comic-book indexes. Fiction House closed in the 1950s. Hanks had disappeared from the business. The character had no television series, toy line, radio program, or corporate owner spending millions of dollars to keep her visible.

Her revival came through comics enthusiasts and historians who recognized that Fletcher Hanks’s work was too strange to remain buried.

Hanks’s stories began resurfacing in alternative-comics circles. Paul Karasik later researched Hanks’s life and edited collections of his work, including I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! in 2007 and You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation! in 2009. The collections introduced a new generation to Fantomah, Stardust, and Hanks’s peculiar universe of omnipotent heroes and spectacularly doomed criminals.

Fantagraphics eventually gathered the material into Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!: The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks, with a new paperback edition released in 2025.

Meanwhile, the original Fantomah stories entered the public domain, allowing them to be preserved and read through archives such as the Digital Comic Museum. It also meant modern creators could reuse the character without negotiating with a corporate rights department whose natural habitat consists of conference rooms and billable hours.

Fantomah subsequently appeared in modern comics, including Hack/Slash. In 2017, Chapterhouse Comics published a new interpretation written by Ray Fawkes and illustrated by Soo Lee. That series reimagined Fantomah through Paz Gallegos, a young woman connected to a violent supernatural force.

The modern version did not simply repeat the jungle stories. It retained the central elements that made Fantomah memorable: transformation, horror, vengeance, and the uneasy question of whether the woman controls the monster or the monster merely permits the woman to believe she does.

Why Fantomah Still Matters

Fantomah never became a household name. She did not establish a lasting franchise. Her original creator produced only 14 of her stories before leaving comics, and later writers removed nearly everything that made her distinctive.

Her importance lies elsewhere.

She appeared when the rules of superhero fiction were still unsettled. The Comics Code Authority had yet to exercise its restraining influence on the genre. Nobody had yet decided that a heroine required a secret identity, a carefully defined power set, a romantic interest, a supporting team, or a costume suitable for trademark registration.

Fantomah was not a female imitation of Superman. She belonged as much to horror and mythology as to superhero comics. Her transformation anticipated later characters such as Ghost Rider. Her role as a protector of animals and the natural world gives her the flavor of an environmental avenger decades before ecological superheroes became common.

Most significantly, she occupied the story’s highest position of authority.

Fantomah did not ask permission to act. She did not need validation from male characters. She did not prove that she was “as good as” the men because no man in her stories operated anywhere near her level. She was the supreme power in her world, and everyone else would have been wise to behave accordingly.

She is not a straightforward feminist icon. The stories were created by a deeply flawed man, published within a genre saturated with colonial stereotypes, and marketed partly through the visual appeal of scantily dressed women. Fantomah’s legacy is more complicated than a simple forgotten-pioneer narrative.

But it is still a legacy worth remembering.

Wonder Woman demonstrated that a female superhero could become a durable cultural institution. Fantomah showed, earlier and with considerably more nightmare fuel, that a woman could stand at the center of a comic-book story as its most powerful, mysterious, and terrifying figure.

The Skull Beneath the Footnote

Comic-book history tends to favor the survivors. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman endured because publishers continued printing them, revising them, promoting them, and introducing them to each new generation.

Fantomah did not receive that institutional life support. She was rewritten beyond recognition, abandoned, and nearly forgotten.

Yet she remains startlingly modern in her strangeness. More than eighty years later, there is still something arresting about that smiling skull framed by immaculate blonde curls. She does not look like a preliminary sketch of a later superhero. She looks like a character who wandered out of an entirely different genre and decided the jungle required immediate management.

Whether she was the first female superhero depends on which definition one uses and how vigorously one wishes to argue on the internet. She was unquestionably one of the first. She arrived before Wonder Woman, wielded powers that made most of her male contemporaries look underqualified, and left behind some of the most bizarre pages produced during the Golden Age of comics.

Fantomah may be a footnote in superhero history.

But it is a footnote with a skull face, an army of jungle animals, and the demonstrated ability to launch people toward Mars.

Some footnotes are best approached respectfully.

---