Misdirections in Matt Baker’s Phantom Lady

Matt Baker, the most successful Black artist in midcentury U.S. comics, amassed over six hundred credits in roughly 150 titles between 1944 and his death in 1959 at the age of thirty-eight.¹ Born in 1921, he started his art career at the age of twenty-three, contributing backgrounds to Sheena, Queen of the Jungle at Iger Studio, and Phantom Lady was his last project before moving to freelancing in 1948. Because of the notoriety of Phantom Lady, it is also his best-known work. The anticomics psychiatrist Fredric Wertham included Baker’s Phantom Lady #17; cover in his Seduction of the Innocent with