Good Girls didn’t come any “Gooder” back in the Golden Age than Bill Ward’s Torchy, the prototypical ditzy blonde who unwittingly drove men wild.
The creation of cartoonist Bill Ward, Torchy was originally the star of a “morale-boosting” World War II comic strip distributed to military bases. After the war, the character appeared in Quality’s Modern Comics as a back-up feature until Torchy proved popular enough to warrant her own title.
Torchy’s career as a comic-book headliner proved short-lived, however, due to Frederic Wertham’s campaign against “inappropriate” comics. Ward left the industry shortly thereafter, but continued drawing his blonde bombshell for decades in magazine cartoons that degenerated into pornography by the ’70s. Still, Ward remains one of the few Golden Age creators who profited from his creation years after its Golden Age heyday.
He passed away in 1998.
The following tale is taken from a more innocent point in Torchy’s career. From Modern Comics #92 (Quality, 1949), here’s Bill Ward’s blonde bombshell as depicted by one of the character’s most frequent ghosts, Gill Fox.
The Time Bullet 