Hero Histories: Lily Renee

Thursday, October 31, 2019

WEREWOLF HUNTER "Priestess of the Spider Death" / "Mistress of the Web"

It's a double-feature Halloween treat...

..with two versions of the same tale, true believers!

The original version of this terrifying tale is from Fiction House's Ranger Comics #15 (1944)!

But, when it was re-presented in Fiction House's Ghost Comics #3 (1952), not only was it partially-redrawn (beginning at page 3) to remove a page of story, it was re-written (from the splash panel onward) as well!

Fiction House did a lot of this sort of editing when reprinting material in the late 1940s since th earlier magazines, like Rangers Comics, were 60 pages, but the later books like Ghost Comics were only 36 pages!

Lily Renee illustrated the original version.

But, judging from the crudeness of the art modifications, she didn't work on the modified reprint!

BTW, we're part of the amazingly-kool CountDown to Halloween 2019 Blogathon!

Click HERE to see the other pround participants!

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Lily Renee, Escape Artist

Trina Robbins

Thursday, October 24, 2019

WEREWOLF HUNTER "Puppets of the Witch Queen"

After a round-robin of various artists...

...the series settles down with the woman who would become the strip's signature artist, Lily Renée!

As we mentioned last week, the new artist, Lily Renée escaped real-life horror!
In 1938, after the Germans annexed Austria, the then-teenage Lily Renée Willhelm was sent by her parents to England.
In 1940, she was reunited with her family (who escaped from Austria) in NYC, and finished high school.
Lily had an artistic flair, so she became both a clothing catalog model and illustrator.
In 1943, she answered an ad from pulp/comic publisher Fiction House for an illustrator.
With most of their regular contributors in the military, the editors immediately put the young artist to work on several existing strips including the sci-fi series Norge Benson and Lost World, the horror strip Werewolf Hunter, and wartime spy series Senorita Rio!
After the war, Lily married fellow artist Eric Peters and collaborated with him on St John's Abbott & Costello comic series in the late 1940s!
Trivia: in interviews, Lily stated she tried to steer the Werewolf Hunter strip away from lycanthropes since she claimed she couldn't draw them well!