Legacy Girl's Creators

In the 40s, superheroes were popping up left and right. Aspiring sports journalist Charles Katz took an interest in these heroes - Superman, Captain America, all of those early crimefighters and paragons of justice - and swiftly changed the trajectory of his life to attempt to create his own fictional superhumans.

Being a writer, not an artist - Katz has been quoted as saying he "drew about as well as a drunk donkey" - Charles reached out to former college roommate Joseph "Joey" Manning, illustrator, to ask him to collaborate on this new undertaking. Joey recalls this phone call in his memory A Legacy Defined; he was, admittedly, less than thrilled at Katz's proposal. Katz and Manning had parted on bad terms after college, and Joey wasn't sure he wanted to work with Charles on what he thought was a farfetched idea.

It took a couple conversations to convince Manning to work on what would eventually become Legacy Girl, but Charles did succeed eventually. The first concepts for a crime-fighting superhero were "abject failures" according to Joey, who was a perfectionist at heart (he would often re-do Legacy Girl comic pages four or five times over, arguing with Charles about the flow of text and even changing dialogue without him knowing, not to mention fiddling with the art itself before he was completely satisfied). Many of them would come back in some form, like Splendorman (who was originally an alien from space, like Superman, though they scrapped the idea as being too much of a rip-off) and Ray Ace, who eventually returned as part of the Ace family with his siblings Will, Maria, and Gene.

In 1942, Joey drew a woman with a purple costume and an L buckle on her cape. He dubbed her Legacy Girl, and the first issue of Super Star Comics, part of the newly-founded Legacy Comics publication company, came soon after.