Betty Barstow, secretary to detective Dan Hurley, shows an active interest in fighting crime. While driving to a masquerade party one night, Betty happens upon a crime in progress. Calling upon her martial arts skills, the costumed Betty fights and beats the criminals. Betty thrills to the experience and decides to wear the costume every night and fight crime as the Silver Scorpion. One of her adventures pits her against a criminal mastermind who steals beauty from glamorous women in exchange for money. But the intrepid Silver Scorpion soon brings his scheme to a close. Meanwhile, Dan Hurley has no idea that his gal Friday moonlights as that feared mystery-woman, the Silver Scorpion!
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With the Green Hornet buzzing on the radio and the pulps’ Spider ensnaring the evil in his web, arthropods were very chic as superhero symbols. Drawn principally by Harry Sahle, the Silver Scorpion briefly joined the ranks of arachnid-heroines like the Black Widow, the Spider Queen, and the Spider Woman. Their male counterparts had names like the Black Spider, the Spider, Fly-Man, and the Fly.
Strangely enough for, the Silver Scorpion’s costume wasn’t silver, and she never used any scorpion-derived gimmicks, only her wits and her knowledge of jiu jitsu (the most popular Oriental martial art in Golden Age comics, despite being derived from Japan). Like Harvey’s Black Cat, another martial artist, the Silver Scorpion proposed to explain her tricks to her readers. Like Timely’s later heroine, the Blonde Phantom, Betty was a detective’s secretary, a convenient job if you moonlight as a crimefighter.
Despite the character’s obscurity, Betty Barstow was revived for the 1993 Invaders mini-series wearing a new silver costume with a scorpion-like stinging device. She has recently appeared as part of the V-Battalion’s Penance Council in Thunderbolts.
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