Essentially a Distaff Counterpart to Al Capp's Lil' Abner, "Babe: Darling of the Hills" by Gordon "Boody" Rogers in 1948 focuses on the daily adventures of Babe Boone, a super-powered country girl who gains her tremendous strength from lightning juice, distilled from the bark of trees struck by lightning. Using her powers mostly to compete in sports, she faces up against a colorful array of characters, such as the long-running Triple-Lunged Twins, a group of chauvunistic centaurs who seek to ride human women (as in like a horse) and Mr. Guppy the Man-Mermaid, among other colorful characters.
The series ran for only 11 issues before it ultimately wrapped up with Rogers ultimately losing interest in comic-writing. The full comic can be read here.
This work contains the following tropes:
- Action Girl: Babe often competes in contests against men to prove her prowess.
- Brainless Beauty: Babe may be strong and sure-willed, but she isn't especially bright.
- Bizarre Alien Locomotion: One issue deals with Teddy Tripod, a three-legged caveman-like creature called a Triskelion, who runs with two legs at a time and alternates the leg at rest to keep running for far longer.
- Carry a Big Stick: Teddy Tripod wields a club and likes to bonk people on the head with it.
- Graceful in Their Element: Mr, Guppy effortlessly beats Babe in a swimming race, but when she offers to take him for dinner to her house a mile from the river, he laments that "it'd take me hours to crawl that far," as he has no legs. She carries him home instead.
- Hook Hand: The Triple-Lunged Twins have one each.
- Multiple Head Case: Oliver and Boliver, a two-headed member of the freakshow. They haven't spoken for a month after having an argument, to which Babe laments they "were such good friends".
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Values Dissonance: Being a 1940s cartoon, some concepts such as the portrayal of women, blackface caricatures and the use of the Mammy and Pappy tropes can come off as cringeworthy to a modern audience. - Whale Egg: The caveman-like Teddy Tripod hatches out of an egg spewed out of a volcano.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human??: As shown in the page image, Pappy has no qualms about frying up Mr, Guppy's tail for dinner, despite Babe's protests that the tail is a part of him, and with Pappy otherwise treating and addressing Mr. Guppy like a normal person.
