Miss Fury is a fictional superhero from the Golden Age of Comics. She first appeared on April 6, 1941, as a Sunday comic strip distributed by the Bell Syndicate, and created by artist Tarpé Mills. Originally called The Black Fury, the strip's title was changed to Miss Fury in November 1941. The character's real identity is wealthy socialite Marla Drake. She has no innate superpowers, but gains increased strength and speed when she dons a special skintight catsuit when fighting crime. The panther skin was bequeathed to her by her uncle, who said that it was used by an African witch doctor in voodoo ceremonies. Miss Fury combats several recurring villains, including mad scientist Diman Saraf and Nazi agents Baroness Erica Von Kampf and General Bruno. Drake was also involved in a love triangle with her former fiancé, Gary Hale, and Detective Dan Carey. A complicated figure, Marla doesn't seem to like being a superhero, resenting the need for a secret identity and the danger it poses. She is sometimes accompanied by an albino Brazilian named Albino Joe. Although Miss Fury was popular, the revealing outfits worn by the female characters provoked some controversy at the time. When Marla Drake was drawn wearing a bikini in 1947, 37 newspapers dropped the strip in response. The Miss Fury strip ran until 1952. Marvel Comics reprinted her Sunday strips in comic book form from 1942 to 1946 in eight issues published from Winter 1942 to Winter 1945. In 1979 Archival Press reissued her early adventures in graphic novel format, with new covers by Mills. In 2011, IDW's "The Library of American Comics" put out a collection of strips covering 1944–49, they also published another volume containing the 1941–1944 Miss Fury strips in 2013.
Other appearances
Tarpé Mills's Miss Fury was revived in a four-issue mini-series published in 1991 by Adventure Comics. In that series, we learned that the new Miss Fury is the granddaughter of the original. Marlene's Aunt Stephanie also becomes a costumed adventurer, called The Black Fury. A battle between the two ends when both fall into a vat of chemicals. This version of Miss Fury would return in Malibu Comics' Protectors series, in issues 10–12. Black Fury has kidnapped the grandson of President Brian O'Brien; O'Brien was formerly the Clock. Miss Fury helps the Protectors rescue the boy, but Black Fury slips away. Miss Fury would continue to appear in the pages of The Protectors until the series ended with issue #20 in 1994. The original Miss Fury also saw a brief cameo reappearance in 2008 when Marvel Comics published the first issue of the series The Twelve. She was depicted as part of an army of 1940s costumed heroes stormingBerlin, Nazi Germany during the final days of World War II. In November 2012,the Golden Age Miss Fury appeared in the Dynamite Entertainment comic Masks, where she joined with other comic and pulp-magazine heroes to combat the villainous "Party of Justice". In April 2013 Dynamite began publishing a comic book with an updated version of the Golden Age Miss Fury.
