Crushing a lot more than your hopes and dreams: THE IRON LADY
Crushing more than your hopes and dreams: the IRON LADY
One of the more twisted heroes of the Golden Age, the Iron Lady only appeared four times but she made quite an impressions (mostly on your bones, ha ha). Her real name was Doris Parker. Her origin story was in AIRBOY# 36 February 1947; then she hopped over for two stories in CLUE COMICS# 13 March 1947 and # 15 May 1947. You didn't see her for a few months before her final story turned up in the September 1947 issue of REAL CLUE CRIME COMICS. After that, the Iron Lady faded away to join the hundreds of other short-term crimefighters in Comic Book Limbo.
Well. What was her deal? Doris Parker was a wealthy Bostonian who was motivated to find crime because her own father had been brutally killed by crooks. In fact, his body was left in a trunk outside the front door for her to find, which is traumatic enough by anyone's standards. He had just purchased a notorious pair of iron gloves, which Doris took and used as her weapons in the battle. These gloves had been crafted centuries early by a Swiss watchmaker (named Zurich Bern...!) who was sick and tired of being bullied, and they had some tiny motors in them which gave them a grip strong enough to crunch anything from stone to steel. I don't know if they had great batteries or were supposed to just amplify the wearer's natural strength or what, it was the Golden Age and you just went with it. The Swiss watchmaker used the gloves on the big bruiser of a customer who had abused him, breaking the bones in the guy's hands ("My hands.. you've CRUSHED them!"). This was a recurring image in the strip, and a little unsettling as a crook stood there with his hands reduced to limp floppy appendages that were never going to heal right. The strip had kind of a MEAN feel to it.
The gloves were later used by an executioner for years (where in Hungary did they carry out executions by strangling...?) and eventually made their way into Walter Parker's collection of oddities. With his death, Doris put them on and ran out to terrorize the Underworld. A tall brunette in a dark red evening gown, the Iron Lady often concealed her metal mitts in a white fur muff (and evidently she was known briefly as "the Muff," which doesn't really have that scary ring to it, ya know?). Doris was a bit more cold-blooded than most Golden Age super-heroes, carrying out planned executions rather than killing as part of an open fight, and she left a trail of strangled gangsters wherever she went. In one story, she pushed a teenage JD out a window after he stole her gloves and used them to kill a gang boss. ("It's just as well. When a rat goes young, there isn't the danger of what he might do if he had reached full growth..." she dismissed him with. )
From a practical viewpoint, the Iron Lady was less plausible than usual. Unlike the Black Cat or Sheena or Miss Fury, the Iron Lady was not a fast-moving agile acrobat in a skintight suit that would let her run around nimbly. She wore a clingy full-length gown and heels, which is okay if you're a cerebral mystery-solver but not so hot for physical confrontations. Against mobsters who packed automatics and Tommy guns, all she had was a pair of mechanical gloves that she had to get real close to use. Even then, the gloves would not be that great an advantage. You'd think a tough guy used to real fights should be able to deck her with a few right hooks before she could choke him. Maybe that's why the Iron Lady didn't really catch on and had such a short career.
