The Sorceress of Zoom was awesome, and her stories were awesomely weird. She’s the ruler of the floating cloud city of Zoom, which is populated by her loyal subjects — the monster-zombies of humans she kills! She basically flies around Earth and terrorizes other cities and kingdoms in search of power and slaves.
What’s so weird is that the Sorceress is the main character in all these stories, but she’s clearly a murderous, tyrannical supervillain. So everywhere she goes, a different kind of heroic figure generally rises to ward her off — or she runs into a worse threat than herself, and ends up seemingly “saving” people from her rival.
It’s a pretty great template for a villain-led book. Plus, her headgear was fabulous, and in later stories it became her actual hair.
She appeared in about 20 issues of Weird Comics, published by Fox Feature Syndicate, in the early 1940s. Weird Comics lived up to its name, especially in the very early issues, where the art had a brilliantly bizarre naive quality to it.
Sorceress of Zoom stories were signed by “Sandra Swift,” which is almost certainly a pseudonym used by different writer/artists. Don Rico is credited with creating her.
—Weird Comics #2 (1940)
Reblogging because holy shit this character sounds amazing and, since she’s public domain, more people shouldtotallyuse her.
Like, I can think of several ways I could use her right now…
