Lady Luck (graphic novel review)
Lady Luck was a creation of Will Eisner and a couple different scriptwriters for an American Sunday newspaper supplement back in the 1940s. Looking it up, she had 220 stories. Considering my interest in writing female characters, I was interested in reading some of the stories and pulled two different books featuring her sixteen of her tales. It was only when I sat down and read them that they reprinted the same stories 20 years or so apart. I’ll give the book details below. Interesting, neither of them promote them as Eisner books although its obvious from the art and title logos that it should be a selling point. I mean, do you know who Klaus Nordling is? No, me neither.
So who is Lady Luck? Under her green hat and various green outfits and a green transparent veil covering half her face she is rich dilettante Brenda Banks out to break the criminals in her city. Her chauffeur/bodyguard, Peecolo, is in on her secret and helps out from time to time. She also has a Lady Luck Patrol, with several women involved although they don’t know her real identity. Considering each story is 5 pages long, there is a developing continuity here on par with Denny Colt’s alter-ego. Rather amusingly, she is asked to pose as Brenda Banks to stop a kidnapping and then wryly when her alter-ego is apparently killed uses it to her advantage for a while.
There’s a couple line examples that are priceless. Mincemeat Mike who dices up his victims to feed his guppies. ‘Murder her slightly’ as if there was another way to do it.
I had a look on-line and it looks like what little there is is based on these 16 short stories but there are still copies out there if you want more Eisner and who doesn’t? if you can get the Nordling book then it’s a bit bigger than the Mini-Komix I suspect they are all public domain now but hard to get all the stories. Enjoy what you can.
GF Willmetts
November 2025
Lady Luck: Sixteen Complete Stories by Klaus Nordling
(pub: unknown, 1981)
Daring Dames: Lady Luck
(pub: Mini-Komix, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-359-87532-0))
