WANDA BYRD -- AN EARLY AVIATION ADVENTURE COMIC STRIP

• Adventure in the Skies
• Romanceau contraire
• Humor
• Mystery
• Drama
• Thrills

All the above was promised in the new air adventure newpaper comic strip Wanda Byrd and Chesty Cabot!  

(Chesty was included in some of the trip's prepublication advertising but never actually made into the strip's title.  Potential readers might have conjured up a pneumotic female sidekick with a name like "Chesty," but au contraire, it turn out that Chesty was Wanda's boyfriend, a fighter ace from the War to End All Wars.  Quel dommage!)

For the record, here are the main players:

• Wanda Byrd - She wanted to be in the talkies; her philosophy was if you wanted a thing long enough, you'll get it.  Yes, our Wanda is a miss with pluck and determination.
• Chesty Cabot - The famous war ace and gypsy pilot.
• Wally Racket - "Beer baron who would rather marry Wanda than smuggle a plane filled with narcotics or champagne, but says he'll do both even if he has to have our hero Chesty Cabot bumped off."
• Runtus, alias The Fox -- Wally Racket's flying racketeer, "jealous of Chesty Cabot's flying record.  He has smuggled so much liquor, narcotics and aliens over the Mexican border for Wally Racket that Wally could send hin to prison for life."

Wand is not only a pretty face and a talented actress, she is also a daring pilot and soon she and Chesty are planning to make a historic around-the-world flight.  You really don't need to know much more than that.

Comics expert Art Lortie wrote:  "It's not a great strip by any means, full of racial stereotypes, a plot ripped off from AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, and bad art -- but it's historically important"

It appeared in a few newspapers with promos and advertising beginning on June 30, 1930 and ran (maybe, the record's not clear) until June 13, 1931.

The strip was written by Evan J. David, a former editor of Flying magazine and an experience pilot.  Supposedly he wrote a lot of aviation short stories and articles and "was considered the go-to guy for info on the fledgling air industry," but I could only find refence to five pieces of fiction and seven articles by him on the Fiction Mags Index.  (Not that this has anything to do with the comic strip, but David was once charged with causing a motor vehicle accident in Massachusetts which killed two persons; he got out of the charges by marrying a witness so she could not testify against him.)

The artwork was done by John M. Grippo, who, as Jan Grippo later became a Hollywood agent

and producer, working with Leo Gorcey to transform the Dead End Kids into the lucrative Bowery Boys film franchise.

Comic Book Plus offers this compilation of Wanda Byrd:

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=83077&comicpage=&b=i