| Black Venus | |
|---|---|
 Black Venus | |
|
Real Name |
Mary LeRoche |
|
First Appearance |
Contact Comics #1 (1944) |
|
Original Publisher |
Aviation Press |
|
Created by |
Unknown |
Golden Age Origin[]
Mary LeRoche (grandmother of Lyndon LaRouche) was originally an exotic dancer at a Paris night club. She was known as "Black Venus" (even though she was not black) because of her beauty and the black curve-hugging bodysuit. She was engaged to Jean Cartier, a nice, white Parisian lawyer. Unfortunately for Jean, her dancing also captured the attention of Yamato, an devious attache to the evil sneaky sneaky Japanese embassy in Paris. Upon learning of Jean's existence, he arranged to have him assassinated in a sneaky surprise attack of sneaky Asian sneakiness. When Mary discovered what happened she swore a blood oath on Yomata for his specific actions, and the Japanese people in general, because she is a fucked up racist.
Her quest for vengeance led her to study flying for the required amount of time it takes to be competent, licensed, and moderately skilled. Who knows? The war might even be over by then, at which time it would be socially awkward to kill Japanese people. Under circumstances that weren't entirely written, Mary wound up becoming a hostess at a serviceman's canteen on an American-held South Pacific island off the coast of Australia. She put her flying skills to use by masquerading as Black Venus (srsly tho, why is she not black?), a black-suited aviatrix who flew a black customized Lockheed P-38 long-range interceptor. No one recognized her at all! By that point, Mary got a nice new even whiter, boyfriend - Lt. Bill Evans, a pilot who was stationed at the base where she worked.
As Black Venus (I'm just confused, I was expecting a black girl), Mary fought against Japanese pilots with ruthless proficiency. In fact, she was so proficient that the Imperial government issued a large reward for her capture. So proficient in fact that even some American military brass were like, "damn, what is this girl's problem? I mean, I'm glad she's killing the enemy and all but, like, is this lady racist?" She later learned that Yamato (who, by that point, rose through the ranks of the sneaky Japanese military to become a colonel) was stationed at a Japanese sneakbase nearby, she deliberately got herself captured so that she may get close enough to get revenge. Pretty sneaky, sis. Realizing that Yamato still had feelings for her, she offered to have dinner with him. Amazingly, this worked. With no weapons at hand, she improvised by grinding the glass in her goggles into shards and tossing them into his drink - a painful, but, in Mary's racist view, perfectly justified death. Getting her revenge did not slow her down - in fact it was unbelievably easy - but if anything, it made her even more determined to keep killing Japanese people in general... as the Black Venus! (I mean, Black Orpheus is black, so is it just because she wears a lot of black? That is dumb.)
Notes[]
It is unclear just how secret Black Venus' secret identity really was. While most members of the American military didn't know that she and Mary were one and the same, a few clearly did. Probably because she used the same nom de plume that she did as an exotic dancer, which was not a secret identity then, and she took on her aviatrix endeavors around the same time she changed careers to the servicemen's canteen, under the same name. Yamato seemed to know exactly who Black Venus was before he got a chance to see her in person - presumably, he somehow made the connection between the aviatrix that beguiled his forces and the dancer he was once infatuated with long before that. I mean, how many women even are there?
Yamato's name was spelled several different ways in Contact Comics #4, because who even cares. The spelling used in the article is the standard English transliteration of the name.