The deadliest of the species is the female!!
The strongest of the species is the male!!
Combine these with the killer instinct…
and you have the most cunning, the most vicious, the most fiendish killer of all time!
Subtlety wasn’t something Golden Age (superhero) comics did particularly well, as shown by this splash page from Boy Comics #9: Crimebuster meets he-she. Yet despite the over the top concept of a literally half male, half female killer, the story itself is actually quite well done. Though played for laughs, “he-she” themselves is not made fun off, but rather how they use their feminine side to trick innocent bystanders into helping them escape from Crimebuster.
The plot is golden age simplistic: “he-she” (who’s never given their real name) applies for a room in a boarding house, flirts with the land lady and marries her for her money. Despite the marriage, the landlady only finds out “he-she” is half male, half female when they fight over money, leaving “he-she” to kill her. The police investigate when one of the tenants is suspicious, Crimebuster tags along with them, is slightly more persistent than the plods, then finds the body of the landlady because her cat, who was bricked up with her, was meowing. Cue fisticuffs and car chases, which ends with justice prevailing as “he-she” gets the chair…
According to the Grand Comics Database this story was written and drawn by Charles Biro, creator of Crimebuster though better known for his Crime Doesn’t Pay work. Crimebuster himself was a bit of an odd duck superhero himself: an ordinary schoolboy whose parents had been killed by a nazi spy called Iron Jaw who became a superhero to bring him to justice. He creates a costume by, as Wikipedia puts it adding “his military school’s cape to the contemporary hockey uniform he is wearing at the time this adventure begins (which conveniently features the school’s initial “C” on the chest). Some time later he ditches the cape when a girl tells him it looks silly, which makes him about the only superhero ever self aware enough to care about how he looks to ordinary folk.
The Crimebuster stories are somewhat of a cult favourite, though never having been reprinted much, not quite fitting the superhero niche and therefore somewhat overlooked in Golden Age revivals. If I remember correctly, even Roy Thomas only brought back Iron Jaw, not CB himself in his eighties Alter Ego homage to the Golden Age. To be fair, Iron Jaw is a much more interesting villain than CB is a hero, unrepentently evil and brutal in a way few other Golden Age villains were.
The whole story can be found here (zip file). I’ve copied it from the brilliant Digital Comic Museum, who have the full issue available. The Digital Comic Museum is a site dedicated to preserving public domain comics by making them available in digital form online; you may need a membership to be able to download files. All files are in either *.cbr or *.cbz format, which are basically renamed *.rar or *.zip files, able to be processed by both dedicated comics reading software or unrarred/zipped so you can look at the images directly.
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