The Harvey Girls!

 Comics have largely been considered a boy's hobby. But that's just because of the domination of superheroes in the medium for much of the Silver Age and beyond. Before that and even during there were comics starring girls and comics built just for girls. Not just the romance stuff, but books for even younger girls such as Harvey's line-up of Little Audrey, Little Dot and Little Lotta. 

Little Audrey was invented because Famous Studios lost the rights to Little Lulu and still had some material for those cartoons. So they made up a little girl with a lot of imagination and a ton of spunk and launched her into cartoons and later comic books first at St. Johns and then of course at Harvey. I confess to not really having been that impressed by Audrey over the years as her gimmick was more her audacious personality and not as visual a gag like Dot's. But one distinction Little Audrey had is that in the era of "Jim Crow" the title featured a young black character named Tiny. He wasn't done with any disparaging details or habits, he was just one of the kids and as such downright rare if not unique in his time. 

Little Dot was my favorite of the trio. Her fascination with finding and making dots was spectacularly visual and made for some of Harvey's funniest covers. Apparently Dot wasn't always so little, beginning life as a somewhat more  human proportioned character in the back pages of Sad Sack. When Harvey went prowling for new kid's characters, they took her and squeezed down to classic Harvey kid proportions and sent her into her lifetime of obsessive compulsion compulsion when it came to dots. One of the funniest renderings of Dot is this one by Mitch O'Connell of her all filled out for an early Comic Book Artist magazine from Twomorrows featuring a close look at Harvey Comics. (See below)

Little Lotta is a comic book which could not and would not be published today. Having a fat character who is defined by that very aspect would be considered far too politically incorrect for modern editors. Each panel of every story might be interpreted by some do-gooder as a "micro-aggression" (among the stupider modern concepts of a bewildered society). The fact that Lotta's problems with food were offset by her downright superpower of immense strength would have not been seen as a mitigation. 

Harvey Comics Classics Volume Five The Harvey Girls reveals that the editors and creators saw something in all these little girl characters that braced the imaginations of kids all over. Each of them were powerful in their own way, and not victims in any sense. In a world which catered to men in terms of authority and power seeing such stories in which girls mostly won the day with their wits, dedication, and power must have been brilliant to behold. 

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