Olga Mesmer is a superpowered fictional character in a pulp magazine's comic strip published from 1937 to 1938. Like the newspaper comic-strip character Popeye (1929) and novelist Philip Wylie's protagonist Hugo Danner (1930), she is among the precursors of the archetypal comic-book superhero, Superman.
Olga Mesmer, "The Girl with the X-ray Eyes", starred in a single-page comic strip that ran in issues of the pulp magazine Spicy Mystery Stories cover-dated August 1937 to October 1938.[1] The first story, "The Astounding Adventures of Olga Mesmer, the Girl with the X-Ray Eyes", and subsequent installments are by an unidentified writer.[2] Art for the strip, created at a comics studio run by Adolphe Barreaux,[3] is credited to Watt Dell, who sometimes signed his illustrations for the magazine as Watt Dell Lovett, and may be a pseudonym; as well, some of the Mesmer strips are signed "Stone".[4]
Mesmer's X-ray vision stemmed from experiments done on her Venusian mother, Margot, by her mad-scientist father, Dr. Hugo Mesmer, who exposed Margot to radiation.
With scientifically enhanced super-strength and X-ray vision, but no separate alter ego and with her powers kept secret, she nonetheless is considered by comics historian Will Murray as "the superhero before Superman",[5] though an addition about her mother's extraterrestrial origin may have come only after Superman's debut.[6] More generally, writes historian Peter Coogan, she is considered a precursor:
. Les Daniels. Wonder Woman: The Complete History . . San Francisco . 2000 . ??? . 978-0811829137.