Before we start, let's get in the mood:
We've had Miss America make an appearance in our comic book funhouse before, but the one we're more familiar with actually isn't the original. The first Miss America appeared for 7 issues of Military Comics and promptly disappeared for decades. Let's check out her cringeworthy origin:
It Was Only a Dream... Or WAS It? (tm!)
If you managed to make it that far, you'd find that she is basically omnipotent:
Miss America! That's what I'll call myself! The fact that it's readily-associated with a beauty queen has nothing to do with it at all! Don't challenge me or I'll turn you into a bird.
But I found some Fun with Out of Context Dialogue (tm!), so there's always that:
Heh.
She was so insignificant at the time that Timely Comics (which would later become Marvel Comics) went ahead a year or later and created their own Miss America, whose exploits we've seen right here on the blog.
Anyway, she was revived in the 1980's when Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron brought a bunch of Golden Age forgotten heroes back from publishing oblivion (much to my delight). Here's a look at her origin from issue #26 of Secret Origins:
That guy with the Ricky Ricardo getup is Ramon, her arch enemy. I wish I were kidding, but I'm not.
"All out of juice?" That sure never happened in the original run, where her only limitations were her natural sense of self-restraint.
And... that sure never happened, either. Miss America couldn't accomplish anything unless she could resolve it with her powers, like that creepy kid who everyone was terrified of in The Twilight Zone because he was also all-powerful but had the temperament of a spoiled child.
See you tomorrow!
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4 comments:
I'll say one thing for the first Miss America pages here - the figure drawings were definitely a cut above the usual for the early Golden Age. That last panel with the old gentleman and the heroine is positively well drawn! Do you know who the artist was?
On a sidenote, here in Brazil Wonder Woman was published as "Miss America" for many years, becoming WW only after the Lynda Carter's TV series made the character famous beyond the comic reader people. That kind of odd "translation" was not unusual: until the first Christopher Reeve's Superman Movie, Lois Lane was "Mirian Lane" to the brazilian readers, ignoring the whole "LL" initials thing.
I didn't know, that Clevio. I wonder why they did that. Patrick, the artist was Elmer Wexler (aka "El Wexler"), who did both the pencils and the inks. I agree... it was very nice work for the time.
Thanks for the artist info! :)
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