Wonder woman was the Amazon princess who left her cozy Paradise Island digs for America so that she could battle anyone and anything remotely wicked. We'd like to introduce the newest superhero on the block: Flaxen, the comic-book brainchild of Playboy veteran Susie Owens and Golden Apple comic guru Bill Liebowitz. Unlike Wonder Woman, Flaxen is humble, accessible, of this world (Dallas, specifically)--a user-friendly wonder gal for the Nineties. Curled up on her funky Melrose Avenue-import sofa as Leno yaks in the background, Susie explains: "There was no one in comics who was real, who had a story that was real." And she should know: Flaxen's life on the page mirrors Susie's life odyssey. In this comic book, a homely nurse named Cora is clumsy, fat and mistreated by her co-workers. When fate and nature do a little tango, Cora is zapped by voltage that magically yields Flaxen, a yellow-haired babe with justice on her agenda and not an ounce of fat under her belt. In the flesh, Susie is like two people as well. There's the I'm-beautiful-and-you-can't-touch-me side, attributable to her gorgeous looks. Then there's her accommodating side. This is a woman who would take me, a visiting stranger, out for dinner in her jet-black Bronco, then insist that I stay at her place. (Be real, we slept in separate rooms.) And yet the duality remains. Maybe that's because Susie used to be Cora, a registered nurse who tipped the scales at 150 pounds before she went through a Flaxen-like transformation, albeit using less supernatural means. With a determined attitude and some dietary guidance, Susie adopted a vigorous training program and even took up the game of squash. She continued to work on her appearance, reshaped her hair and redesigned her makeup. "I read Muscle & Fitness to learn how to develop abdominal definition, I read Vogue to learn about hair and makeup. And then there was Playboy." What's it like to have lived on both sides of the before-and-after photo? "My personality is exactly the same," Susie says in a Southern twang. "I'm simply a woman who tapped into a feminine part of herself and ran with it." Susie's also running with Flaxen, bent on making her a formidable opponent of the evils that taint our world. Take that, Wonder Woman.
