Tarpé Mills

Tarpé Mills (25 February 1912 – 12 December 1988) was the pseudonym of the American comic book creator June Tarpé 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 June Tarpé Mills created several action comics characters ("Devil's Dust", "The Cat Man", "The Purple Zombie" and "Daredevil Barry Finn") 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 died on 12 December 1988 in Brooklyn, New York, and is buried in Forest Green Park Cemetery in Morganville, New Jersey. 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.

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 [their] 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.

Censorship Miss Fury was notoriously full of "kinkiness," including "whips, spike heels, female-on-female violence, and lingerie scenes."

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." 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."

Evie Nagy for The Los Angeles Review of Books remarked that "the flow of Mills's sequential art feels completely organic."

Madrid wrote, "Mills' approach to a secret identity seemed more realistic, injected with a feminine practicality."

Mills was inducted as one of the four Judges' Choices into the 2019 Eisner Award Hall of Fame on July 19, 2019, at Comic-Con International in San Diego.