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The Golden Age comic book character Lady Luck is the creation of comics legend Will Eisner and artist Chuck Mazoujian. Mazouzian made his comics debut with the cover of Marvel Mystery Comics #2, and by the next year was working on Lady Luck for Will Eisner’s The Spirit newspaper sections. That backup series was soon taken over by artists including Nick Cardy and Klaus Nordling, and many of those stories were reprinted in Smash Comics #42-85 (April 1943 through October 1949). When the Smash Comics title became Lady Luck with the December 1949 cover-dated issue, the brief new series featured new covers by Gill Fox, and new Lady Luck stories by Nordling and Fred Schwab. But long before that, Lady Luck made her first comic book cover appearance on Smash Comics #43, with cover art by Reed Crandall just an issue after her comic book debut in #42. The character would not appear on a comic book cover until taking over the re-named title entirely over six years later, which makes this early cover an interesting little bit of the character’s history. There’s a Smash Comics #43 (Quality, 1943) Condition: GD/VG and many more issues of the Smash Comics series including Smash Comics #1 up for auction in the 2022 May 29-30 Sunday & Monday Comic Books Select Auction #122222 at Heritage Auctions.
The character has a typical and somewhat Batman-like origin story: Brenda Banks is a young socialite heiress and the daughter of a wealthy mine owner. Frustrated with the idle complacency of her peers, she trains in martial arts and becomes a costumed detective, an “elusive enemy of crime”. This issue of Smash Comics with the first comic book Lady Luck cover comes up for sale surprisingly rarely, but there’s a Smash Comics #43 (Quality, 1943) Condition: GD/VG and many more issues of the Smash Comics series including Smash Comics #1 up for auction in the 2022 May 29-30 Sunday & Monday Comic Books Select Auction #122222 at Heritage Auctions.
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