Ginger Maguire was another
Fly Girl, debuting a few years after
Flyin' Jenny and
Gale Allen in 1944's
Jumbo Comics #68.
Sky Girl was rather different from the other Fly Girls. While they were adventurers and aviators, Sky Girl was sort of the sitcom version - with emphasis on the 1940s perception of "Girl"...
As was all too often the case in those days,
Bill Gibson is a house pseudonym. The identity of the writer for Sky Girl is lost to time
(and the attitude that only the money counts, not the actual creators/workers).
Here is the premiere episode of Sky Girl, with art by
Alex Blum -
There's a fair chance that Ginger Maguire was based on the lady who shaped & defined sitcoms for television - Lucille Ball. While this was seven years before her tv show hit the air, she'd been in 60 films by this time, and this is how she looked at the time:
Purely conjecture on my part, but it doesn't seem to be a great stretch.
Sky Girl ran for more than 60 episodes, from Jumbo Comics #68 to #130
So, did things get better for Ginger over time?
Not so much, as we can see here, with
Matt Baker taking over the artwork -
Ginger might be a comedy waitress, but she's definitely a Fly Girl adventurer, too. She just lives in a very different world from the others.
Let's close out this post with the story that accompanies the splash panel used for the opening, with Matt Baker once again -
page art by Alex Blum and Matt Baker for Jumbo Comics #s 68, 90, & 113 (1944, 1946, 1948)
