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BOOK REVIEW! FRED KIDA'S VALKYRIE! (Ken Pierce Books, 1982)

No this ain't the Marvel Valkyrie, it's the one who appeared at Hillman, also the home of such now PD figures as Airboy and the Heap! And as far as heroines go who woulda thunk, especially during World War II, that an actual Kraut could become a good gal along with her fraulein followers fighting the very same Axis that they were once allied with! Sheesh, back then you woulda thunk that one Heine was the same as the other, but since these specimens of the female persuasion are so hotcha, how on earth could they be badskis anyway???

Valkyrie got her start in AIR FIGHTERS as the leader of the Air Maidens, an all gal crack squadron who made their grand appearance into comics by wiping out an entire RAF airfield with relative ease! You'd think that Airboy, an Amerigan teenbo attached to the British air command, would be rather angry about it and well,  he is, and when Valkyrie herself is assigned to whip some sense into Our Captured Hero while the Maidens watch you're in store for a pretty kinky session that might have even tingled Eric Stanton a bit! But don't worry because the Maidens have a change of heart while watching this rather sexually charged scene as does Valkyrie herself, who ends up shooting her commanding officer right when Airboy himself is about to be executed and the Maidens are all tied up ready to be flogged themselves as they watch his death! And to prove what Bad Germans these gals are they escape in Airboy's very own flapping jet (named Birdy) and join up with The Allies! Dunno how this woulda gone over with alla those boys reading comic books at the time but sheesh, them Teutonic Tarts are really something! Not a Nico in sight I'll tell ya!

With all of the cleavage that Valkyrie shows when she's ready to either seduce someone or give Airboy the lash you can see why someone like Fred Wertham could have been flustered by a title like this. Naturally the gals are all examples of Nordic beauty and purity proving that maybe those KdF camp outings were of some benefit! Heck, with wimmen like Valkyrie in the Third Reich it's a wonder why the Master Race wasn't the Master-BATE race!

Fans of pre-Code fun and decrepitude should really enjoy these and I sure do, especially the tale featuring Airboy's arch enemy Misery. Not just any sorta Golden Age evildoer, Misery was a stench-spewing walking corpse who flew the Airtomb, a mold-covered airplane that contains the remains of fliers who lost their tangle with this particularly creepy and supernatural being. The story that appears here (Misery uses his occult energies to turn Valkyrie against Airboy who almost joins his flying comrades in the Airtomb for good!) is so disturbingly absorbing like a good horror comic...you get the feeling that in order to sink into the entire makeup of this saga ya gotta huff some old gym clothes with a few post-due date items retrieved from the fridge to get the effect of the rot and decay that the Airtomb obviously exuded! Great stuff, even to the point where the denouement of postwar Golden Age comicdom doesn't affect these stories which pack a whole lotta the paunch they did during The Big One. Unfortunately the Air Maidens are long gone and forgotten (heck, they didn't really contribute that much to these sagas!) but with Valkyrie around I'm sure more'n a few adolescent boys were still front and center for these tales!

The art is fantastic in that Milton Caniff style that everyone with a brain was mimicking at the time, and the comparisons between AIRBOY and TERRY AND THE PIRATES is so obvious as the inner text keeps reminding us (with Airboy the obvious Terry and Valkyrie a sweet European take on the Dragon Lady) that you kinda wonder why no lawsuits were in order! And being German, I'm sure that Valkyrie knew that orders had to be obeyed!!!

However in lieu of over seventy years of virtuous hindsight I must object to the clearly racist portrayal of Germans as sniveling order-takers shown with graphically exaggerated and distorted pointed noses, double chins, bulky builds, monocles, close-cropped or bald heads and grotesque facial features. Oh how the Germans who were living in the United States during the war must have suffered because of such blatant and shameful reflections upon their very being! These racist representations do ruin VALKYRIE! for the modern reader which is quite a disappointment as these stories are rather entertaining. Oh poo, why couldn't people have been as virtuous and altruistic as we higher ups on the evolutionary ladder are in these enlightened days!