Comic strip history fans should run, not walk, to grab the one indispensable reprint project of this holiday book season, Trina Robbins and Pete Maresca’s Dauntless Dames: High-Heeled Heroes of the Comics (Fantagraphics/Sunday Press, $100). And I don’t mean “indispensable” as a blurb-able critical throwaway, either. The female characters and creators reprinted here from the 1930s and 40s have been “dispensable” in too many histories of the newspaper comic. The central value of this volume is the smart editorial decision Trina and Peter have made here: surfacing strips and artists who have been underserved by the standard anthologies and reprint series. Whether it is Frank Godwin’s pioneering adventuress Connie or Neysa McMein and Alicia Patterson’s Deathless Deer, Bob Oksner and Jerry Albert’s Miss Cairo Jones or Jackie Ormes’ Torchy Brown Heartbeats, the editors have not only featured previously un-reprinted and forgotten material. We get here substantial continuities from each strip that allows a much deeper appreciation for each strip’s character interactions and story arcs than we get from typical anthology samples. You are in the hands of two masters here. Trina has single-handedly championed the history of women comics creators in a number of previous historical and reprint works. And the longtime editor and founder of The Sunday Press, Peter is not only a walking library of comic strip history, but a sensitive curator and restorer. As a book, Dauntless Dames has the same qualities as the heroines it reprints: at once brainy and drop dead gorgeous.