[4] Phantom Lady first appeared in Quality's Police Comics #1 (August 1941), an anthology title which also included the debut of characters such as Plastic Man and the Human Bomb.

Sandra Knight assumed the identity of Phantom Lady in a costume consisting of a green cape and the equivalent of a one-piece yellow swimsuit.

According to Jess Nevins' Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes, "she fights the cowgirl Ace of Spades, the arsonist Fire Fiend, the Killer Clown, the Robbing Robot, the woman-killer the Subway Slayer, and the cloud-seeding saboteur the Vulture".

[9] Baker altered her costume by changing the colors to red and blue, substantially revealing her cleavage, and adding high-cut loose shorts.

Fox published Phantom Lady only through issue 23 (April 1949), though the character guest starred in All-Top Comics #8-17, also with art by Baker.

Her rogue's gallery in these two Fox titles included the Avenging Skulls; the Fire Fiend; the Killer Clown; Kurtz, the Robbing Robot; the Subway Slayer and Vulture.

Baker's cover for Phantom Lady #17 (April 1948) was reproduced in Seduction of the Innocent, the 1954 book by Dr. Fredric Wertham denouncing what he saw as the morally corrupting effect of comics on children.

The cover, which illustrated Phantom Lady attempting to escape from ropes, was presented by Wertham with a caption that read, "sexual stimulation by combining 'headlights' with the sadist's dream of tying up a woman".

[10] In the meantime, Fox went under and its assets were acquired by other publishers, and a Phantom Lady story from All-Top was then reprinted as a backup feature in Jungle Thrills by Star Publications, which then itself went out of business.

Farrell's assets were later acquired by Charlton Comics, and, until DC relaunched the character in the 1970s, Phantom Lady's only appearances were in reprinted Matt Baker stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

[11] As was done with many characters DC acquired from other publishers, or that were holdovers from Golden Age titles, the Freedom Fighters were relocated to a parallel world.

The team was later featured in its own series for 15 issues (1976–1978), in which they temporarily left Earth-X for "Earth-1" (where most DC titles were set at the time) and Phantom Lady was given real phantom-like powers.

Knight consequently developed a taste for adventure and crime-fighting, and after finding a "black light ray projector" that a family friend named Professor Davis sent to her father, she adopted the device as a weapon.

In 1981, Phantom Lady became a recurring guest star of All-Star Squadron, a superhero-team title set on "Earth-2", the locale for DC's World War II-era superheroes, and at a time prior to when she and the other Freedom Fighters were supposed to have left for Earth-X.

This left Phantom Lady's Earth-X days written out of her history, and the Freedom Fighters became a mere splinter group of the All-Star Squadron.

Lastly, she was given a more active role in the acquisition of her black light ray, which she no longer received from a mere family friend but instead from a scientist named Dr. Abraham Davis, who had escaped from Nazi-controlled Europe.

She was made an agent of a Cold War-era government intelligence agency called Argent, in which she met and married fellow former-All Star Squadron member Iron Munro (a character introduced in the 1986 series Young All-Stars).

He helped her, and soon thereafter she started the Universite Notre Dame Des Ombres (the University of Our Lady of the Shadows) in the hopes of making further intelligence contacts and finding her baby, but she was not successful.

Phantom Lady's presence in the U.S. and her work with American Intelligence was kept a secret to most; she never reunited with her husband, and in her old age became headmistress of the school she began, now a training center for female spies in Washington, D.C.

A second Phantom Lady, Delilah "Dee" Tyler, was introduced in Action Comics Weekly #636 (January 1989) and was given a back-up feature in that title through #641 with art by Chuck Austen.

It was heavily implied in that series that she was not alone in being thus trained and equipped, as her "college roommate" Marie Saloppe also appeared in the guise of Phantom Lady in Action Comics Weekly #639.

She also possessed a wrist-mounted blaster, and a holographic projector developed by her childhood friend and roommate Sarah that could be used to cast powerful illusions.

Like other members of the Blüdhaven team, this incarnation of Phantom Lady is a cold-blooded killer, although there are indications in issue #1 of Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, as she finds herself defending her actions, that she may be disturbed by what she is ordered to do.

In the second Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters series (September 2007), Stormy, still in shock over her father's death, begins to take drugs and drink heavily.

After she drunkenly cuts a super-powered troublemaker in half on live television, Black Condor takes her to the extra-dimensional Heartland, where Uncle Sam tells her she will not leave until her habit has been kicked.

Moore found the Nightshade character boring, and based Silk Spectre on the Phantom Lady and DC's Black Canary instead.

alongside her other Golden Age contemporaries, and many of Erik Larsen's original characters, where they battled subterranean demons invading the surface.