Butterfly

Butterfly
Real Name	Marian Michaels
First Appearance	Hell-Rider #1 (August, 1971)
Original Publisher	Skywald
Created by	Gary Friedrich, Ross Andru, & Mike Esposito

Origin

Outfitted with a jetpack and a costume laden with incredibly bright strobe lights to blind her enemies, Marian Michaels is a Las Vegas cabaret singer by night and the crime-fighting Butterfly by even later night.

In her first appearance, she investigates the Claw (Skywald), a group of cat costume-wearing heroin dealers who are using their profits to build a fascist army out in the desert.

In her second, she was seen battling the Brothers of the Crimson Cross, a fictitious white supremacist group that the issue refers to as “a gathering of sick, distorted minds such as this country has not witnessed since the Ku Klux Klan‘s rule of terror held the South in its deadly grip.”

Public Domain Appearances

• Hell-Rider #1-2

Notes

• Skywald did not include a proper copyright notice on its issues of "Hell-Rider" (it did not consist of the word copyright/the symbol for copyright followed by the year of publication and the name of the copyright holders) and thus, because of copyright law at the time, became public domain upon release.
• Butterfly was the first African American superheroine in comics.

Butterfly blinding her enemies.

See Also

• ComicVine
• Out of this World Blog
• Journey Into Awesome
• Hero Heroine History
• Museum of Uncut Funk
• Femmes Fantastique