“A hundred yard jump! And a girl soldier, too! Say, sister, need help?

The first thing Buck Rogers sees when he wakes from his 500 year slumber is a flying bare-legged woman…with a gun. That Jan. 7, 1929 strip launched American newspaper comics into a new age of heroic continuity strips, which historians have dubbed “The Adventurous Decade.”¹ And across Buck, Flash (Gordon), Dick (Tracy), Pat (Ryan), the Prince (Valiant) and of course Tarzan, this decade in the newspaper back pages became famous for a pulpy hyper-masculinity that culminated in the rise of the superhero in the late 30s. And yet, as Buck’s premiere strip suggests, it would also be one of the weirdest stretches in the depiction of powerful women in popular culture. This would play out especially in adventure comics’ curious fixation with putting women in charge during the Depression years. Amazon tribes, criminal gal gangs, and futuristic matriarchies peppered adventure strips. We are all familiar with the creation of Wonder Woman in 1941 and her origin on the ladies-only Paradise Island.² But this trope started in comics more than a decade earlier, first with Buck but then resurfacing in The Phantom, Tarzan, Alley Oop, and Frank Godwin’s Connie. Fantasizing about matriarchal societies within the adventure genre was not just a clever escapist plot device. Each of these Amazon worlds imagined different alternative societies where women called the shots and shaped the culture. Taken as a while, this pop culture trope suggested a deep ambivalence about the changing roles and independence of women. Putting women in charge was a kind of gender lab that played with ideas of feminine power under the stress of both Depression and modernization.

“Are You Married?”: Buck Rogers’ Girl Scouts

Among all of the Amazon realms of the 1930s, Buck Rogers’ 25th Century America had the most organic and broadly liberal approach. In the daily strips, Buck’s sidekick in both love and war, Wilma Deering, packs a ray gun and looks good doing it. Throughout the adventures she leads both men and women into battle. Meanwhile in the Sunday continuity, Wilma’s kid brother Buddy forms a galaxy trotting power couple with Alura Princess of Mars.³ Putting women both in power and in battle was no problem for creator Phil Nowlan and artists Jack Caulkins, Russell Keaton and Rick Yager. Nowlan seemed to regard genders as equal-but-different in his future Earth. One Venusian tribe, the Aromaks (1931) assign their troops into women sailors and male infantry. On Mars, Alura’s King has a male guard, while hers are women-only, and females are removed from hand-to-hand combat by their special skill as sharpshooters. Nowlan is finding ways to envision women in power without erasing gender, sometimes in weird contortions. In one of the first panels of the strip (see above), Wilma is hoisting the helpless Buck to safety as she says, “My name’s Wilma. are you married?”

And beyond the overall gender-neutrality of the Buck Rogers future, this strip explored more matriarchal queedoms in more ways than any other adventure. In 1933, the all-female “Amazons of Venus” abduct Buddy during one of their regular sweeps for male breeding stock.⁴ These Amazons are resentful exiles who were beat back and hid underground centuries ago after their failed attempt to conquer Venus. In a kind of retributive humiliation, they see all men simply as breeders and kidnap them from the surface to perpetrate their matriarchy. To rescue Buddy, Princess Alura takes a pneumatic ship through Venus’s core only to get stranded at the center with her nemesis, the Amazon Queen Gulia. The two warring royals team up to save themselves and to put down a rebellion from within the Amazon ranks. In a pattern we will see repeated in other Amazon dreams, women in power are as adept at forming sisterhoods as they are at conniving against one another. In a strange twist ending, And somehow, erotic allusions are always nearby. Alura and Guilia ally with the Birdmen of Venus, who use a massive vibrator device to dislodge the Amazon rebels from their stronghold. At the edges of most Amazon fantasies in the comics of the 1930s lurks a vague fetishism. 

But even within the feminine-friendly fiction of Buck’s 25th Century, depicting women in charge took wildly different forms. In a 1937 daily story arc Wilma recruits an army of “Scout Girls” to fight a Venusian invasion.⁵ In the trenches, the scouts boast about their grit and war experience. They are officious and professional in a way that foreshadows the professionalization of many women during WWII. Wilma even adopts the tone of the badgering drill Sargent, taunting her troops for preferring face powder over gun powder.  And yet, they prove susceptible the enemy’s “psycho-attractor ray” that compels them to desert. Several years later, and in stark contrast to Wilma’s professionalized Scout Girls, Buck and his then-sidekick Beanie happen upon the helpless and hapless “Golden People.” Their men have been enslaved by the Tiger Men, and the remaining women become literal tree-huggers, masquerading as trees to avoid capture.⁶ The episode drips with sexist derision, from Buck’s relentless doubts about organizing these “tree babes” as a battle force to their cluelessness around the weapons their men left behind. The radical change in attitude towards women in the strip likely reflects the retreat from scripting duties of the Buck Roger creator, Phil Nowlan and artist Dick Calkins stepping into both story and art roles.⁷

Connie’s Fem-topia: “Are Those Men Over There?”

Like Phil Nowlan in Buck Rogers, Frank Godwin’s Connie adventure strip (scripted by brother Harold) envisioned a future earth where women ascended to political leadership. Male-dominated comics history tends to overlook Connie (1927-1941) as a heroine who starred in an adventure continuity years before Buck. She was also one of the first comic strip time travelers. An extended episode in the 1936 Sundays found her transported to Earth 2941, where the “Woman’s Party” fully controlled the political realm. “Are those men over there?” asks Connie. “They are the first I’ve seen.” In this techno-utopian future most of the world seems to have eliminated national boundaries and formed a woman-led “United Nations.” Men, while not subordinate, appear to have been channeled into special technical and manufacturing roles. But the Godwins’ future seems to enjoy a kind of feminized pacifism.

Under women’s leadership, the United Nations of 2936 has enjoyed world peace for so long they have forgotten how to defend themselves. So, when long-vanquished Asiatic barbarians, The Yellow Combine, attacks, the women leaders ask Connie to teach them the ways of war. She explains that the women of her time had no battle experience. But luckily, the fem-topia of the future can rely on old fashioned men of the past. Connie’s adventure sidekick pal Jack and Dr. Chrono (the inventor of the time machine) have followed her into the future and provide the strategy and new technology that ultimately beat back the Yellow Combine. Like Phil Nowlan, the Godwins envision gender equality that preserves difference, a narrative that may suggest the kinds of social anxieties that lay beneath political progress.

Alley Oop: Designing Women and Neanderthal Men

Whether projected into the distant future or the ancient past, the Amazon motif allowed cartoonists to burlesque common stereotypes of feminine traits and create revealing reversals. When the gruff caveman everyman character Alley Oop and his rhyming pal Foozy get kidnapped and enslaved by the “Wild Women” of AMA (1934-35), he gets schooled by a fellow male slave about the benefits of a life of housework.⁸ “Well, y’aint got much t’do – an’ you git plenty t’eat without havin’ t’risk gittin et up by sumpin — or havin’ t’go t’war an gittin’ bonged on the bean —.” 

Alley Oop creator V.T. Hamlin often used his prehistoric setting to satirize contemporary tribal politics and social dynamics. In 1938, for example, he had Oop take on stone-age Nazis. In his land of Moo, battle-axe wives outsmart, browbeat and toss stone dinnerware at hapless husbands who are, well, Neathderthals. When Alley wins his freedom from AMA and their Queen Eodora, the other Moovian males get wind of this village of wild “dames” and head out for a prehistoric booty call. The AMA quickly enslave them to housework, leaving it to Moo’s Queen Umpateedle and the other wives to declare war and charge into AMA. The two Queens, however, become fast friends, as Eodora has domesticated these, well, Neanderthals into, well, servile domestics. The AMA leader Eodora is modeling for the sitcom wife new ways to control the family breadwinner. “I took the liberty of keeping them well occupied to keep them out of further mischief!” Eodora explains. “I’ve never before seen these lazy loafers do anything but beller for someone to wait on’em” Queen Umpateedle chortles. Upending and inverting a host of sitcom tropes, Hamlin uses the Amazon motif to craft a light satire of modern domestic gender politics. The Amazon conceit playfully pushes the sitcom types – hapless hubristic hubbies and overbearing, conniving and colluding wives to their comic extremes.

Amazons were put to a range of uses in American comics across the Great Depression and into WWII. In Nowlan’s Buck Rogers and the Godwins Earth of 2936, women-dominant cultures are just another part of the gallery of speculative sociology that science fiction explored in the 30s. When the wheels came off both international civility and industrial capitalism, when ambivalence over what modernity had wrought peaked in the 1930s, so did a pop culture fetish around exploring alternative social orders, both in the past and the future. Buck and Connie’s imagined future saw empowered women as an inevitable evolution from a modernizing America. And they constructed that vision in way that allayed fears about losing gender distinctions. But other aspects of the American Depression drove this imaginative energy around the amazon motif. In the next chapter we look at the ways in which pulp adventure like The Phantom, Tarzan pit the new hyper-masculinized adventure hero against Amazons and Queen Bees. 

1. Ron Goulart, The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties. Neshannock, PA: Hermes, 2005 (reprint of 1975 edition] ︎
2. Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Vintage, 2015. ︎
3. The Sunday Buck Rogers continuity starring Buddy Deering launched on March 30, 1930, with Alura introduced in the first storyline. Under Russell Keaton and then Rick Yager’s drawing, it was notably more polished and visually imaginative than the dailies, although Buck’s creator Phil Nowlan probably wrote the stories until late in the 1930s. ︎
4. “Amazons of Venus” (12/17/33 to 5/6/34) (Series I, Strips 195 to 215). ︎
5. “Interplanetary War With Venus” (3/22/37 to 11/13/37) (Series III, Strips 1 to 204). ︎
6. “Goddess of Stygia” (3/25/41 to 10/11/41) (Series V, Strips 302 to 474). ︎
7. “List of Buck Rogers Comic Strips, Wikipedia, accessed Nov. 21, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buck_Rogers_comic_strips. ︎
8. Alley Oop Sundays, Dec. 23, 1934 – Jan. 27, 1935. ︎

The built legacy of the Soviet Bloc is undergoing a dramatic reappraisal, from crumbling concrete brutalism to Instagrammable socmod chic. Hatherley’s critical survey of a growing body of work in this area—examining modernist constructions from Vilnius to Tashkent—asks the question the new studies largely avoid: what, if anything, makes this architecture socialist?

Laura Jean McKay’s 2020 Arthur C. Clarke Award winning The Animals in That Country is a stand-alone science fiction novel.

Outback wildlife-park guide Jean has a straightforward life. She guides tourists around the park, helps with the animals, dotes on her granddaughter Kimberly, and coexists awkwardly with her boss Angela, who is also Kimberly’s single mother.

Enter a novel super flu, zoanthropathy.

…

I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.

Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again.

An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next.

Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st.

Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Shore. Roughly three hundred agents deployed flashbangs, busted down doors, and took people indiscriminately. US citizens—some women and children—were grabbed from their beds, marched outside without even a chance to dress, zip-tied, and loaded into vans. Residents returned to find their windows and doors broken and their belongings stolen. Despite the violence of the raid, it appears no criminal charges were filed.

Understand what it is to lead Chicago. On October 3rd, Alderperson Jesse Fuentes asked federal agents to produce a judicial warrant and allow an injured man at the hospital access to an attorney. The plainclothes agents grabbed Fuentes, handcuffed her, and took her outside the building. Her lawsuit is ongoing. On October 21st, Representative Hoan Huynh was going door-to-door to inform businesses of their immigration rights when he was attacked by six armed CBP agents, who boxed in his vehicle and pointed a gun at his face. Huynh says the agents tried to bash open his car window.

Understand what it is to live in Chicago. On October 9th, Judge Ellis issued a temporary restraining order requiring that federal agents refrain from deploying tear gas or shooting civilians without an imminent threat, and requiring two audible warnings. ICE and CBP have flouted these court orders. On October 12th, federal agents shoved an attorney to the ground who tried to help a man being detained in Albany Park. Agents refused to identify themselves or produce a warrant, then deployed tear gas without warning. On October 14th, agents rammed a car on the East Side, then tear-gassed neighbors and police.

On October 23rd, federal agents detained seven people, including two U.S. citizens and an asylum seeker, in Little Village. Two worked for Alderperson Michael Rodriguez: his chief of staff Elianne Bahena, and police district council member Jacqueline Lopez. Again in Little Village, agents tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed protestors, seizing two high school students and a security guard, among others. Alderperson Byron Sigcho-Lopez reported that agents assaulted one of the students, who had blood on his face. On October 24th, agents in Lakeview emerged from unmarked cars, climbed a locked fence to enter a private yard, and kidnapped a construction worker. As neighbors gathered, they deployed four tear gas canisters. That same day, a few blocks away, men with rifles jumped out of SUVs and assaulted a man standing at a bus stop.

“They were beating him,” said neighbor Hannah Safter. “His face was bleeding”.

They returned minutes later and attacked again. A man from the Laugh Factory, a local comedy club, had come outside with his mother and sister. “His mom put her body in between them, and one of the agents kicked her in the face”.

Understand what it is to be a family in Chicago. On October 25th, agents arrested a 70-year-old man and threw a 67-year old woman to the ground in Old Irving Park, then deployed tear gas, disrupting a children’s Halloween parade. One parent spoke to NBC news about her two-year-old child’s response to the gas. The same day, agents deployed tear gas against residents of Avondale.

“Kids dressed in Halloween costumes walking to a parade do not pose an immediate threat to the safety of a law enforcement officer. They just don’t. And you can’t use riot control weapons against them,” Judge Ellis said to Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino.

Understand how the government speaks about Chicago. On November 3rd, paralegal Dayanne Figueroa, a US citizen, was driving to work when federal agents crashed into her car, drew their guns, and dragged her from the vehicle. Her car was left behind, coffee still in the cup holder, keys still in the car. The Department of Homeland Security blamed her, claiming she “violently resisted arrest, injuring two officers.” You can watch the video for yourself.

“All uses of force have been more than exemplary,” Bovino stated in a recent deposition. He is, as Judge Ellis put it, lying. Bovino personally threw a tear gas canister in Little Village. He claimed in a sworn deposition that he was struck in the head by a rock before throwing the canister, and when videos showed no rock, admitted that he lied about the event. When shown video of himself tackling peaceful protestor Scott Blackburn, Bovino refused to acknowledge that he tackled the man. Instead, he claimed, “That’s not a reportable use of force. The use of force was against me.”

“I find the government’s evidence to be simply not credible,” said Judge Ellis in her November 6th ruling. “The use of force shocks the conscience.” The court’s November 20th opinion provides exhaustive evidence. “The BWC video shows that the protesters were simply standing there when agents first deployed any force,” Ellis writes. “DHS tried to claim protestors threw fireworks at agents… when the helicopter and BWC footage indicates that those explosions were instead agents’ flashbang grenades.” These stories go on and on. “It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendents represent.”

Understand what it is to be Chicago. To carry a whistle and have the ICIRR hotline in your phone. To wake up from nightmares of shouting militiamen and guns in your face. To rehearse every day how to calmly refuse entry, how to identify a judicial warrant, how to film and narrate an assault. To wake to helicopters buzzing your home, to feel your heart rate spike at the car horns your neighbors use to alert each other to ICE and CBP enforcement. To know that perhaps three thousand of your fellow Chicagoans have been disappeared by the government, but no one really knows for sure. To know that many of those seized were imprisoned a few miles away, as many as a hundred and fifty people in a cell, denied access to food, water, sanitation, and legal representation. To know that many of these agents—masked, without badge numbers or body cams, and refusing to identify themselves—will never face justice. To wonder what they tell their children.

The masked thugs who attack my neighbors, who point guns at elected officials and shoot pastors with pepper balls, who tear-gas neighborhoods, terrify children, and drag teachers and alderpeople away in handcuffs are not unprecedented. We knew this was coming a year ago, when Trump promised mass deportations. We knew it was coming, and seventy-seven million of us voted for it anyway.

This weight presses on me every day. I am flooded with stories. There are so many I cannot remember them all; cannot keep straight who was gassed, beaten, abducted, or shot. I write to leave a record, to stare at the track of the tornado. I write to leave a warning. I write to call for help.

I want you to understand, regardless of your politics, the historical danger of a secret police. What happens when a militia is deployed in our neighborhoods and against our own people. Left unchecked their mandate will grow; the boundaries of acceptable identity and speech will shrink. I want you to think about elections in this future. I want you to understand that every issue you care about—any hope of participatory democracy—is downstream of this.

I want you to understand what it is to love Chicago. To see your neighbors make the heartbreaking choice between showing up for work or staying safe. To march two miles long, calling out: “This is what Chicago sounds like!” To see your representatives put their bodies on the line and their voices in the fight. To form patrols to walk kids safely to school. To join rapid-response networks to document and alert your neighbors to immigration attacks. For mutual aid networks to deliver groceries and buy out street vendors so they can go home safe. To see your local journalists take the federal government to court. To talk to neighbor after neighbor, friend after friend, and hear yes, yes, it’s all hands on deck.

I want you to understand Chicago.

This essay has been building—eating at me, really—for the last two months. My thanks to all the friends, family, neighbors and colleagues who have talked with me about ICE and CBP. In particular, I want to acknowledge the families of Rayito de Sol—parents like Maria Guzman and Tara Goodarzi, whose powerful speeches have been lodged in my chest. Also the members of One Northside, Aldermen Vasquez and Martin, Senator Simmons, and everyone who spoke at the rally Wednesday. Your call to “tell the story” caught me, and I hope I have done some small part of that work here.

I was particularly moved by Kelly Hayes’ In Chicago, We Run Toward Danger Together and Dan Sinker’s What I Need You To Understand, which inspired the core motif of this essay. His follow-up Ghosts in the Graveyard is also worth your time. Cam’s On Repacking Your Unpacked Funeral Clothes breaks my heart. Laurie Merrell’s Dispatch from Occupied Chicago is a lucid, reflective piece which mirrors my own feelings.

ICE and CBP affect us all: south, east, north and west; city and suburb. In particular, ICE has hit Little Village, a predominantly Latino neighborhood on the Southwest Side, hard in recent weeks. Marginalized communities especially deserve our focus and care.

You can donate your time and money to organizations like ICIRR, which connects immigrants and refugees with legal aid and social services. I also suggest a donation to the non-profit Block Club Chicago or Chicago Sun-Times, both of whom have been doing exceptional local journalism in this dark time. Without their reporting, this would have been impossible.