About the blogger: Kevin Yong is a freelance writer and lifelong comic book fan. His various other sporadically updated works can be found online at crosshatchery.com and writerlad.wordpress.com.
About the blog: The origin of this idea was inadvertently sparked by some creative brainstorming with my friend and fellow comic book collaborator, Eric Jansen. We had been discussing Golden Age comics, especially the public domain variety as showcased at various online archives.
During our browsing through the various non-superhero genres of the Golden Age, we stumbled across an oddly recurring character on the covers the Eerie horror anthology comics from Avon Comics. Actually, it wasn’t so much a “character” as a traced image re-used on multiple covers. She started out with black hair, but her looks quickly settled into the distinctive look of a blonde in a red dress…
And once we started noticing her there, we started noticing her in other titles and other genres from other publishers. She was everywhere!
It soon became a running gag each time I stumbled across another Golden Age comic cover featuring this “cover girl”, and jokingly began to treat this ubiquitous Blonde in a Red Dress as if she actually was a single recurring character — which, if so, would have made her the most long-running adventurer in a red dress since the days of Little Orphan Annie, and the most perpetually death-defying damsel since the Perils of Pauline! That running gag led to me creating this photoshopped cover for an APAzine my friend and I are a part of…
…And with mountains of source material available at the Digital Comic Museum and Comic Book Plus online archives, and having long been a fan of other comic cover galleries online (such as James Lileks’ Comic Sins), I eventually was inspired to launch this new site of my own in tribute to this plucky gal who may well be the most prolific comic book cover model of all time!
The covers of these anthology comics very seldom reflected the contents of the stories inside, and so almost nothing is known for certain about this woman of mystery. All I can guess is that her life must be a non-stop whirlwind of heartbreaking romances, courtroom dramas, and gunfights with gangsters and spies, racing from Western roundups, to aerial dogfights, to shipwrecks at sea, all while fighting wild beasts of the jungle, aliens from outer space, and monsters from the unknown! What courage! What moxie! With the Blonde in a Red Dress, one never knows what will happen next.