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Connie. Connie was created by Frank Godwin and appeared in the comic strip “Connie” (1927-1944); the strip was reprinted in Spain in 1942 as “Maria Cortes y la Doctora Alden.”

Constance Kurridge, known to her many friends as "Connie," is a blonde woman in her late teens or early twenties, but she is the opposite of the dumb blonde stereotype. She is independent, wily, clever, witty, and absolutely refuses to settle for anything less than what she wanted to do. She begins as a carefree young woman living with her parents in suburban New York and having relatively mundane adventures, fending off suitors and enjoying herself. But after she learns to fly her life becomes truly adventurous.

She flies to Mexico in search of buried treasure, she becomes a reporter for the Daily Buzz and reports on and helps solve various crimes and kidnapings, and she gets involved in squelching a Red revolt in the flyspeck Central American republic of Anchovy, whose El Presidente makes her a field marshal in gratitude for her help in stopping the rebellion. When Connie’s parents are ruined by the stock market crash, Connie goes to work in earnest, first as a full-time newspaper reporter, and then as a private eye and owner of her own detective agency.

Her cases, and various other stories, took her far, far beyond the limits of the United States, With Jack Bird, her pilot friend, Connie discovers an Lost Race in the Andes. She finds another lost city, Lahkpor, in the Tibetan Himalayas, and when she discovers that Lahkpor's leaders are planning to use their atomic technology to CONQUER THE WORLD!, Connie sees to it that their plot is foiled. She travels into the future a thousand years and finds a gynocentric society. She travels across the solar system with Dr. Alden, a female scientist and one of Connie's many friends, and finds alien races, ably defending herself and Dr. Alden when they are attacked. Connie fights invisible men, works as an agent of the United Nations, is capable of anything she put her mind to, and is damn near perfect.

* I've included "Connie" in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because the strip is perfect. Frank Godwin was a hella talented artist, and he did some of his best work on "Connie." Godwin was skilled enough as a writer to know how, when, and why to manipulate pulpy cliches, tropes, and plot devices and to recombine them into something fresh. And "Connie" is, simply, huge fun to read. Connie herself is charming, her friends (like the redoubtable Dr. Alden) are similarly so, and her exploits are some of the best of the Pulp Age's adventure comic strips. 

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