I didn't remember to dedicate this month, the month of Halloween, to mythcomics in a horrific vein. However, in one sense Halloween is as much celebrated for all forms of fantasy, not just horror, and I've already suggested how the two super-genres are intrinsically tied together in this essay. So my choice of a Mary Marvel story about "sky spirits" makes a good contrast to a tale centered on the specter of fear-- even though I've chosen another obscure story that even most Golden Age fans have forgotten. As I've done with many such stories with no definite credits, I'll assign total credit for the script to the artist whom fan-artists have tentatively identified as Mike Sekowsky.
Despite the title, neither anything magical nor any slinky gowns play a special role here, and GOWN isn't even explicitly about sexual enticement. However, I feel sure that when Sekowsky conceived the story in 1952, he would have been riffing on one of the most popular tropes seen during the horror-comics boom of 1948-1954. That trope is that of the conniving "black widow" murderess. No matter what form of phenomenality each story utilizes, the basic setup is always one in which a scheming woman marries a man, often older than she is, and then plots to murder him, usually with the help of a male lover, often younger than the intended murder victim.
The story proper introduces the reader to slinky Leonore Black (complete with a telltale hourglass on her dress in the splash panel). Leonore has just married an older, richer man named Richard, but before so doing, she broke off an engagement with a more age-appropriate young man, Dan. Dan is not however Leonore's co-conspirator, and so his only function in the opening scene is to inform the reader that Richard happens to have a huge collection of dead spiders. Leonore coyly references her intention to knock off her new husband, but Dan doesn't pick up on the allusion.
Richard doesn't have long to enjoy his marriage to Leonore. He shows her his dead spider-collection-- the provenance of which is never explained-- and remarks that he fell in love with Leonore's arachnid-like allure. But Leonore is not swayed by flattery, for she carries out her next part of her plan by changing into a giant black widow spider, wrapping Richard in webbing, and giving him with a presumably poisonous bite. Leonore certainly wins no prizes for subtlety in her method of murder, but the police are duly stumped by a victim covered in webs, and no blame attaches to the newly-made widow. Her new status, though, gives her a cultural excuse to wear black all the time.
Leonore also isn't worried about social proprieties, for in a matter of days she's chatted up Dan and talked him into proposing to her. Apparently, even though she's soliloquized about using Richard's money to go after spider-killers everywhere, she harbors some idea of attempting a normal life with Handsome Dan. He takes her to visit a friend who runs a local aviary, and to Leonore's horror, the aviary guy likes to feed some of his birds with -- spiders. Leonore doesn't expose herself right away, but she does tell Dan an abridged "origin story." Young Leonore had an early fascination with spiders. Her paternal unit passed away, and her new stepfather tended to beat both Leonore and her mother. A black widow spider seemingly intervened, killing the stepfather. And after that, with no explanations related to either magic or super-science, Leonore simply manifests her "inner spider," and this gives her the power to change into a giant black widow.
Leonore of course has no intention of letting Dan's aviary friend off the hook, and he's her next target. The second murder makes even a dullard like Dan suspicious, so he invites his fiancee to his laboratory for a chat. Once there, Leonore, who perhaps is not the most attentive listener, learns that her intended is a zoologist, and that his lab is full of boxes conveniently labeled as containing toads, lizards, and wasps. Though Dan has not killed any spiders so far as the reader knows, Leonore picks up on his suspicions and decides that it's time for another extermination. Providentially, Dan has "giant wasps" in one of those boxes, and as soon as the insects are released, they attack the giant spider and sting it to death. Dead Leonore conveniently reverts to her original human form and Dan decides not to divulge her secret to the world.
While male authors don't have a monopoly on the creation of female monsters, real or figurative, I can't avoid noting that nearly all the authors writing and drawing horror comics during this boom-period were men. That probably had some effect on the sheer quantity of "black widow murderess" stories. However, in GOWN, the monstrous female is barely motivated by killing for profit, given that her primary focus is the defense of the tiny arthropods with whom she's obsessed. The influence of her brutal stepfather makes Leonore more sympathetic than most cold-hearted vixens, even though her insanity is no less obvious. Real black widow spiders certainly are known for slaying the males who mate, or try to mate, with them, though at least one online source says that the lady arachnids are usually motivated purely by hunger. Leonore clearly doesn't eat her victims, though a few horror-publishers of the period might have been willing to go there. But the script does play around with one other spider-trait. In the course of the origin-story, Leonore mentions, seemingly to no point, that "I spend hours at the spinning wheel." The only symbolic reason to mention this, since it has no relevance to the plot, would be because Leonore wants to "spin" in some way analogous to the way (some) spiders spin webs. It's at least of passing interest that spinning wheels are dominantly associated with females, because in most tribal cultures, women weave and sew clothing for everyone.
The monster-woman's last name of course references "black widow spider." Her first name, derived from "Eleanor," doesn't have any spidery connotations, but it does have a general horror-association, in that it sounds like the name of the deceased heroine from Poe's "The Raven."
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