June Tarpé Mills


Tarpé Mills was the pseudonym of comic book creator June Mills, one of the first major female comics artists. She is best known for her action comic strip, Miss Fury, featuring the first female action hero created by a woman.

Biography

Born June Tarpé Mills on 25 February 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, she signed her work by her middle name "Tarpé" to conceal her sex. She also used the pseudonyms "Edgar Allen, Jr." and "Nella."
Mills worked as a model while helping to support her deceased sister's children and her widowed mother along with her academic studies. She attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York, and she received her higher education at the Pratt Institute in New York.
Mills' professional career began as a fashion illustrator. She created several action comics characters before creating her most remembered character, "Miss Fury," in 1941. Mills also wrote original scripts, penciled, and inked stories for these comic book series prior to Miss Fury: Funny Pages, Star Comics, Amazing Mystery Funnies, Amazing Man Comics, Masked Marvel, Prize Comics, Target Comics, and Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics.
Miss Fury ran until 1952, when Tarpé Mills mostly retired from the comics industry. She briefly returned in 1971 with Our Love Story for Marvel Comics and in 1979 began work on a Miss Fury graphic novel which would remain unfinished.
She died on 12 December 1988 in Brooklyn, New York, and is buried in Forest Green Park Cemetery in Morganville, New Jersey.
June Tarpe Mills was inducted into the ComicCon Eisner Hall of Fame on July 19, 2019.

''Miss Fury''

The Bell Syndicate first published the Miss Fury comic strip on April 6, 1941, predating the first appearance of Wonder Woman by six months. The strip "ran in full color in the Sunday comics pages for 351 consecutive weeks from 1942 through 1949, and was also collected in comic book form by Timely Comics." Circulation included over 100 newspapers at its most popular stage. As the Miss Fury strip became more popular, it eventually became public knowledge its creator was a woman.
Miss Fury, the alter ego of socialite Marla Drake, was a character based loosely on Mills' own appearance.
During World War II, "Miss Fury" was painted on the nose of three American warplanes in Europe and the South Pacific. Two of the recurring villains were the Nazi agents Erica Von Kampf and General Bruno. Mills' own white Persian cat Perri-Purr was introduced in the strip, and during World War II Perri-Purr became an unofficial mascot of the American troops.

Fashion

The artwork was created in a glamorous style with considerable attention placed on the heroine's outfits. These outfits varied from lacy evening gowns and lingerie to bathing suits and athletic costumes. Mills' attention to fashion in Miss Fury was mirrored in the work of her contemporary Dalia Messick's "Brenda Starr," and in this sense the women were ahead of their male counterparts who typically "dressed heroines in plain red dresses."
Cut-out paper fashion dolls were included for the first time in the comic-book reprints of Miss Fury, leading Trina Robbins to guess that these books were intended for a female audience. Mills sent paper dolls to young women who had written fan mail requesting art.

Censorship

Miss Fury was notoriously full of "kinkiness," including “whips, spike heels, female-on-female violence, and lingerie scenes.” One character's costume in a 1947 publication "was so daring that 37 newspapers cancelled the strip” that day. A bathing scene from the tenth Miss Fury Sunday page on June 8, 1941 ran in newspapers at the time but was later excluded from the 1942 Timely Comics reprint.
Trina Robbins said on Miss Fury:
“The only outrage I have seen were those newspapers that censored Mills’s strip in which she dressed her nightclub entertainer character, Era, in an outfit that would not bother us in the least today. But it obviously shocked the pants – yes, verbal joke intended – off some people."

Style

Mills' art in Miss Fury was modeled on the work of Milton Caniff. Her portrayal of action across multiple panels, as well as the natural poses and facial expressions of her characters, has been described as "cinematic," echoing the film-noire style. Mills' characters also possessed a "pinup quality."
Dean Mullaney, editor and publisher behind Eclipse Enterprises, wrote that “ art is drawn very traditionally—no surprises, no ah-ha moments.”
Evie Nagy for The Los Angeles Review of Books remarked that “the flow of Mills’s sequential art feels completely organic."

Legacy

June Mills' legacy as the first woman to create a female action hero in comics was contextualized by Victoria Ingalls for the American Psychological Association. Out of a list of hundreds of female “superheroes” surveyed in her abstract, Ingalls identified only eleven as being created by a woman not working in a team with a male writer. Mills' Marla Drake is the chronological first of these eleven heroes.
According to Mike Madrid in his book The Supergirls, Marla Drake belongs to the “Debutante” caste of early comics female heroines, who include Sandra Knight, Dianne Grayton, Diana Adams, and Brenda Banks. These characters form a ‘sorority’ of heiresses and socialites who had been forced into lives of propriety, submission, and “tedious leisure.” “Putting on a cape and mask liberated these women” to embrace their own identities, fight crime, and trade their “entitled boredom” for thrills.
Madrid wrote, “Mills’ approach to a secret identity seemed more realistic, injected with a feminine practicality.”

Awards and honors

Miss Fury: Sensational Sundays 1941-1944 was a 2012 Eisner award nominee.
Mills was named one of 16 nominees to be inducted to the 2018 Eisner Hall of Fame.
June Tarpe Mills was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame on July 19, 2019 at ComicCon International in San Diego.

Posthumous