I’ve talked quite a bit about patriot-heroes before. Between seeing how they stack up against Captain America and diving deep into some of the odderheroes to defend American values during World War II, I thought I’d gained a certain measure of immunity against how bonkers these characters could be. Well, you can guess the punchline here: I found someone with a whole new brand of weirdness that caught me off guard. And she’s a woman this time!
Miss America was one of the many backup features that appeared in Quality Comics’ Military Comics. From 1941 to 1942, reporter (later “FBI assistant” or “FBI girl,” whatever that means) Joan Dale would use her powers to protect America against saboteurs, saboteurs, and did I mention saboteurs?
It all started when she visited the Statue of Liberty one day and started making conversation with the statue, as one does.
What powers does she think the giant statue possesses, exactly? Did everyone back in the 1940s think the Statue of Liberty had powers that I, in my millennial ignorance, am not privy to?
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Joan falls asleep on the bench and dreams that Lady Liberty comes to life to give her powers with which to defend the United States. When she wakes up, Joan realizes it wasn’t just a dream: she really does have superpowers. What powers does the Statue of Liberty/the newly minted Miss America have? They mostly seem to be in the matter-manipulation category: she can make things disappear or change in size, transmute people into animals or objects (whether she can change them back is a question left unanswered), teleport, move objects telekinetically, and whatever this is.
In the ensuing issues, there is, of course, no shortage of freedom-hating bad guys for Miss America to fight. Apparently, they keep her so busy that she doesn’t have time to design a costume until Issue 4. Until that point, she only ever wears the same red dress she wears as Joan. Despite this, all of the other characters politely refer to her by the name that is most appropriate for the situation: Joan Dale when she’s doing reporter/FBI business, and Miss America when she’s beating up villains.
When she does get around to donning a costume, there’s no mask to it. But hey, if that’s good enough for Clark Kent, why not for Joan Dale?
There’s an inkling of an interesting story here. A capable, superpowered woman constantly having to overcome roadblocks and disbelief from her male employers is really not a bad idea. Unfortunately, while Miss America herself is a charming and entertaining character, the stories she appears in do her a disservice. Her origin story makes little sense, her powers are a random hodgepodge (towards the end, she is shown flying without explanation), and she has no real direction or memorable villains to fight. I get the impression that the Miss America stories were just filler that no one cared enough about to turn into a well-developed series. This might explain why, in Military Comics #8, Miss America’s spot in the book was taken over by a very different female hero: X of the Underground, a master of disguise who leads an all-female resistance group while trying to evade the advances of a stalkerish reporter.
And yet, this was far from the end for Miss America. After DC Comics bought up Quality’s characters, they revived Joan Dale, gave her a less nonsensical origin (by comic book standards) that involved nonconsensual government experimentation, and had her appear in such titles as All-Star Squadron, where she died, and Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, where she helped stop a robot impersonating the president from implanting control chips in the entire U.S. population.
But never forget that it all started with a reporter falling asleep on a bench on Liberty Island back in 1941.
