(Planet Comics 005, 1940)
Gale Allen was a long-running feature of Planet Comics, which meant that she was a creation of many absent-minded hands. She is always an officer in a gendered space organization, but whether that is the Women's Space Battalion, the Girl's Patrol, the Girl's Squadron and so forth varies from issue to issue. The story is set in the far-off year of 1990 but drifts farther into the future over time. She turns blonde eventually. You get the picture.
Early Gale Allen stories feature spaceman Jack North as a real pill of a sidekick who spends much of his on-panel time carping on about how women don't belong in the space military. They also feature Prince Blaga Daru, a space pirate-turned-world conqueror who has the hots for Gale, possibly because she is semi-secretly a Venusian princess but possibly just because he likes a strong woman.
In his first appearance, Daru has already conquered Europe and set his eyes on invading North America, with Step I of his plan involving taking control of the the Sub-Oceanic Transit Tube, aka the Trans-Atlantic Subway. Gale Allen and her Falcon Squadron set out to stop him, and shockingly don't succeed! That is, they do succeed in driving off the initial attack and then get captured by the Prince's special Gale Allen task force, for you see he loves her and wants to marry her. She of course tells him to go screw and gets away with the help of Jim North.
(the Prince's world domination scheme is kiboshed in the subsequent issue and Blaga Daru himself is punched in the eye for his trouble)
Prince Blaga Daru makes two more spends his next two appearances, in Planet Comics 009 and 011, and in both he has shifted his focus almost entirely to the pursuit of Gale Allen's hand in marriage. But not by reforming and being a cool guy and courting her on her terms, no. Prince Blaga Daru is a space pirate, and space pirates kidnap their love interests and marry them against their wills. It's a real culture clash, and it ends up with the Prince unceremoniously falling out of a spaceship door to his demise.
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