Panel Vision - Lady Cop, Forgotten Feminist Hero

Edited by Robert Beach

Last week, CW’s Arrow had a very special episode premiered directed by Lexi Alexander, one of the most vocal female directors of color in genre fiction. It was a pretty fun episode and a good way to mark Alexander’s return to the realm of comic adaptation after directing Punisher: Warzone 7 years ago; however, what struck me about the episode was the character played by Rutina Wesley, officer Liza Warner, head of the Star City anti-metahuman task force. 

You may have assumed that Liza Warner was just some random character made up for the episode, but no, she’s actually an adaptation of one of the most obscure DC characters I can think of: Lady Cop, a one-off character from the DC anthology comic 1^st Issue Special, one of the greatest comics of the 1970s. Given that I’m a massive ‘70s comic book geek, I’m also a major fan of Lady Cop, mainly because her first appearance is one of the most amazing and bizarre comics ever written.

Premiering in 1975, created by Robert Kanigher, 1^st Issue Special #4 one of the greatest comic authors of all time. Kanigher is one of the most prolific and imaginative authors to ever grace the comic page, more or less inventing whole swaths of the DC Universe. In the ‘40s, he wrote the Justice Society of America and took over as editor and author for Wonder Woman after the death of her creator William Moulton Marston in 1947. He also created Barry Allen, the Flash, in 1956 and single handedly developed the entirety of DC’s war comics.

The idea of “war comics” might seem a little odd now, but throughout most of the ‘50s and ‘60s, the superhero genre was still sharing the spotlight with other popular genres like weird science and pulp adventure. None was more popular than war stories, especially given how many comic reading kids grew up with dads who were either veterans or died over seas. To try and capitalize on this, DC released 5 major war comics in 1952, all created and written by Kanigher: G.I. Combat, Our Army at War, Our Fighting Forces, All-American Men of War, and Star Spangled War Stories.  

Later, as the ‘60s dwindled and the average age of comic readers slowly crept upward, there was a renewed demand for war comics leading Kanigher to develop Enemy Ace, The Losers, The Unknown Soldier, and Viking Prince. I bring all this up because, at the time of Lady Cop, Kanigher had spent nearly two decades steeped in war stories reinventing the way we told stories about military conflict in a big way. It was his forte, and it totally shows in Lady Cop.

The story of Lady Cop is like the weird fusion of Adam 12 and a female revenge movie that I don’t think anybody was asking for. It starts with the hero, Liza Warner, hiding under her bed as her two roommates are strangled to death by an, in retrospect, incredibly flamboyant murderer. Seriously, the killer is wearing forest green pants with yellow stripes and white cowboy boots with skulls. 

Also, he marks his every kill with an ace of spades. Incidentally, the idea of the killer marking his kills with an ace of spades is actually the first hint of Kanigher’s war stories creeping into Lady Cop as the practice of marking kills with playing cards, especially the ace of Spades, had become popular throughout the Vietnam War. In any event, the murder leaves Liza decidedly rattled, so when one of the investigating officers mentions she’d make a great cop because of her incredible memory, she decides to join the force to find Mr. death shoes. 

This is actually a pretty clever twist on the standard vigilante origin from a lot of DC comics. If this was any other comic, Liza would’ve just dawned a colorful costume to hunt down the murderer instead of becoming the proper authorities. Like I mentioned, you can tell that Kanigher’s approach to storytelling has been colored by mainly writing about grizzled, uniformed normal heroes instead of colorful costumed heroes. 

She passes the academy with flying colors, including this amazing scene of the cops being taught that guns are for arrests not punishment, a sequence that makes this entire comic eerily relevant to the modern day. After she graduates from the academy, she starts her tour of duty, which is where things get amazing. This sequence is basically just Lady Cop wandering around the city fighting off just a dizzying succession of rapists and murderers. The opening action sequence involves Lady Cop rescuing an under-aged girl and then fighting off her rapists while cracking some of the weirdest one-liners you’ll ever read. This is part of what makes Lady Cop as great as it is, Kanigher more or less writes her as a grizzled war bastard who just happens to be fighting crime on the streets instead of the Nazis on the fields of Europe. 

It’s a weird blend as it’s actually extremely rare to see a strong female character personified through the tropes of ‘70s gritty, urban action heroes, which is basically what Kanigher is doing here.  There were female action heroes in the ‘70s, though they arose from the realm of exploitation filmmaking and were all about weaponized sexuality like Pam Grier in Foxy Brown; a trend that eventually gave way to the kung-fu action women of ‘80s low-rent video action like Cynthia Rothrock. Lady Cop is more in line with Dirty Harry or Death Wish, steely jawed and hard-edged bad asses who only quip through clenched jaws and a dedication to justice. 

The main difference is that Lady Cop actually never uses a gun in her adventures; she just beats the hell out of the many flamboyantly dressed crooks she encounters while also shouting at the culprits for underestimating her because she’s a woman. Lady Cop’s dialogue really is the best part of the issue though. It’s all incredibly stilted given Kanigher  had been writing comics since the ‘40s; that’s to be expected, but somehow the awkward and overwrought dialogue blends perfectly with the earnest tone of the issue. 

That’s a big thing to remember as well: Lady Cop isn’t meant to be ridiculing the idea of women police officers or its main character; it’s actually very serious. There’s even a surprisingly well-written interlude where we see Liza off duty relaxing with her fiancé Hal, He tries to pressure her to resign, but she tells him off because being a cop makes her feel like she’s making a difference in her life. There are a lot of quieter scenes like that peppered throughout the issue where we get the sense Liza isn’t just a cop to beat people up. We see her helping a suicidal young girl who’d contracted an STD as well as seeing Liza building a relationship with other people in her community. 

Lady Cop may be an amazing one off comic, though the question of why it was made at all still looms pretty large for me. As fun as it is seeing a female hero slotted into the spot normally occupied by the Charles Bronsons and Clint Eastwoods of the world, I haven’t been able to find anything that indicates what led Kenigher to choose to make this comic. 

The best I can reason is that it was sort of a perfect storm of circumstances that came together to make it the exact right time for this character. On the one hand, the ‘70s saw a growing popularity for cop stories on the big and small screen with shows like Adam 12, Columbo, and Kojak and film franchises like Dirty Harry making big waves.

That alone wouldn’t necessarily lead to a hard-bitten female cop comic as, even with the lady cop fiction of the time like Police Woman, the emphasis wasn’t on action and fisticuffs like here.  Those elements seem far more in line with the quasi-understanding of ‘70s radical feminism that informed Power Girl’s creation a year later. Even the central idea of Lady Cop’s nickname being a pithy nickname given to her by the local hoods she basically adopts as a standard of strength has a lot in common with ideas of language reclamation that had been simmering in the feminist movement since the BITCH Manifesto in 1969.  

Obviously, there’s no way to know how much of this actually impacted Kanigher ‘s writing on Lady Cop, and I highly doubt he set out to make Lady Cop a feminist action story in the same vein as She-Hulk; although, that’s certainly the comic he made. I really hope DC brings her back in the comics now that she showed up in Arrow. Similarly bizarre novelty titles like Prez and Omega Men have found new life in the DC You. And it seems like these days we could use more officers like Lady Cop walking the beat. 


if you liked this article please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter