Posted in: Comics, Heritage Sponsored, Vintage Paper | Tagged: golden age, Joker Comics, Tessie

Marvel's First Female Cover Star Tessie in Joker Comics, at Auction

Not only did Tessie become Marvel's first female cover star in Joker Comics, she also carried three titles at once in the mid-1940s.

While June Tarpé Mills' Miss Fury can be considered the first female superhero published by Marvel/Timely in the Golden Age, and Millie the Model is undoubtedly the most famous female Marvel character to debut in that era, Tessie the Typist is arguably Marvel's first female star character.  Years before Millie Collins, Patsy Walker & company came to dominate the Marvel humor title landscape (and for a time, dominate Marvel's output in general), Tessie was a regular part of Joker Comics, and usually its cover feature.  She had also become the cover feature of three regular series by the mid-1940s. A nearly forgotten character from the Marvel Golden Age who is far more important than she appears at first glance, there are several issues of Tessie's earliest adventures in Joker Comics up for auction in the 2023 April 20 Timeless Good Girl Art Comics Featuring Dan DeCarlo Showcase Auction #40221 at Heritage Auctions.

Marvel's first humor titles, Comedy Comics and Joker Comics, hit newsstands in January 1942.  Both titles had counterparts in Marvel publisher Martin Goodman's magazine line, where Joker and Comedy were risque pin-up style humor magazines launched around this time.  Tessie the Typist first appeared in Joker Comics #2 in a series of one-page stand-alone comics that told a brief gag in eight panels.  The creators of these earliest Tessie comics are unknown.

Tessie soon graduated from small cover inset to becoming Joker Comics' cover feature, beginning with Joker Comics #6.  Notably, the Miss Fury series debuted the next month. Tessie became the cover feature on most issues of Joker Comics for much of the title's run, until Millie was introduced into the title in 1947 to share cover duties with Tessie.  Unfortunately, the creators associated with the Joker Comics Tessie material are largely unknown.  GCD identifies the artist of the Tessie stories in the later part of the run as Morris Weiss.

Despite retaining the "typist" title throughout the series (and the ones to follow), Tessie's adventures soon had little to do with that profession.  In Joker Comics #12, she joined the marines.  But the character came into her own with Joker Comics #14, which finally expanded past the one-pagers and gave the character multi-page stories with some occasional issue-to-issue continuity.  Tessie was discovered by a movie producer in that issue, and found herself playing a Rosie the Riveter-style character in a propaganda film in Joker Comics #16.  As a few other comic book series did during this period, the Tessie saga promoted the increasing importance of women in the workforce during WWII, with the character becoming a nurse, a reporter, and an assembly line worker, among other professions, throughout her war-era Joker Comics adventures.  After the war, the series focused more on the relationship between Tessie and her boyfriend, Skidsy Spenser.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Tessie had become a huge star for Marvel by the mid-1940s.  She got her own series with Tessie the Typist Comics, which hit newsstands beginning in May 1944, and the very next month, Gay Comics was launched with Tessie as the regular cover feature.  The character was the cover star of three ongoing series 1944-1946, until Millie Collins began to crowd her off of the covers of Joker Comics and Gay Comics by the late 1940s. Even then, Tessie was a major presence throughout a number of the Marvel humor titles of the Golden Age.

But it all started in Joker Comics, and there are several issues of Tessie's earliest adventures in Joker Comics up for auction in the 2023 April 20 Timeless Good Girl Art Comics Featuring Dan DeCarlo Showcase Auction #40221 at Heritage Auctions. If you've never bid at Heritage Auctions before, you can get further information, you can check out their FAQ on the bidding process and related matters.

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