One of my favorite super-comics this week was the cumbersomely titled Miss America Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1, one of those one-shots Marvel’s been putting out fairly frequently this spring in which a brand-new 22-page story featuring a Golden Age character is paired with some reprints of actual Golden Age material.
Captain America, Namor and The Human Torch have all had their turn in the spotlight, and the previous issue featured a Namor/Torch/Toro/Electro/Angel/Ferret team-up. All of these were characters I was fairly familiar with, with the exception of The Ferret (who was in the Marvel Mystery Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1, maybe the best of the lot), but Miss America was a character I was completely unfamiliar with.
Well, it turned out her comic was pretty great too; Jen Van Meter wrote the story and Andy MacDonald drew it, and like each of the previous ones it featured some of the strongest super-art on display that particular Wednesday. Curious about Timely/Marvel’s Miss America, I poked around The Grand Comics Database to learn a little more about her, and I saw that she had her own single-issue long comic book in 1944, and her costume appeared on the cover of a Miss America Magazine, which appears to have been a romance comic.
And then I realized I actually had read a Miss America story before, and just a few years ago—I just didn’t realize that the Miss America in the 70th Anniversary Special was the same heroine was the same Miss America who appeared in X-Statix Presents: Dead Girl, a 2006 Marvel Knights series by Peter Milligan, Nick Dragotta and Mike Allred.
Let’s take a closer look, after the jump!
Deceased villain The Pitiful One has discovered some green glop in the middle of a version of hell where dead Marvels go, and through its magic he’s able to return a crack team of dead people to the land of the living for 24 hours in an attempt to get Dr. Strange’s attention. His team consists of Mysterio, Kraven the Hunter, former X-Static Tike “The Anarchist” Alicar and, of course, Miss America.
In Milligan’s story, Miss America’s a little too much a product of her time. While the quintet is temporarily alive, Tike makes a pass at her and she responds with a word that makes the hero flinch.
Odds are, it wasn’t “mutie.”
Back in hell, she tries to reach out a little…
But, when Wong is captured, well, black mutants aren’t the only ethnic group she apparently has a little trouble with.
Her and Tike begin to patch things up when they realize how out of place they are among the dead villains, and find out they actually have a lot common.
But, hell being hell, kissing is a painful, horrible experience.
When they end up fighting over the jar of magic green goo, however, they find that if sexual activity is horrible in hell, physical violence is almost as good as sex.
And they lived happily ever after. Well, actually, they’re dead, and are still dead at the end. And in a version of hell. But at least Miss America has learned racial tolerance.
Like the rest of Milligan and Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix run, the miniseries was fairly awesome, and among my favorite comics with the letter X in the title. This series is particularly appealing, as it guest-stars pretty much every dead Marvel character. Including Mockingbird who…hey, wait a minute…
Anyway, it’s available in trade, and well worth a read.
June 12th, 2009 at 10:05 am
If this is the same Miss America I’m thinking of, and I think it is, then she’s part of some interesting knowledge I happened upon a while ago and which has stuck with me:
Top Five Superheroines Created by Otto Binder
5. Merrie, Girl of 1,001 Gimmicks
4. Miss America
3. Saturn Girl
2. Mary Marvel
1. Supergirl
June 12th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Wow, despite being a gigantic X-Statix/X-Force (that one) fan, I forgot all about this! Looking forward to more X-Force/X-Factor/Dead Girl etc., this was really brilliant stuff – beautiful to look, hilarious, thrilling, entertaining…. I’m sure they could sustain this title and the similar in spirit NextWave (or however you capitalize it) – heck I’d even pay (gulp) $3.99 an issue for it!
June 12th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
The entire point of the story was that, in Miss A’s time, it would have been a perfectly acceptable thing to call Tike. She’s not portrayed as hateful, just ignorant. Tike, on the other hand, is a product of our time, and he should have known that its not acceptable to grab the ass of a woman you don’t know. It seemed pretty even-handed to me, especially since Tike Alicar (anagram for racial, get it?) had one specific function on the team and that was to examine race in the context of a 24-hour news-day, celebrity-obsessed culture.
And, sorry, but neither of those words you use to describe white people has any real power in the culture. I’m white and they don’t offend me at all because it doesn’t seem to me like there’s hatred behind them. But that’s just me. Saying the word “nigger”, though, still has enormous power in the culture, which is why you went out of your way to use it in your comment. You wanted to shock or provoke. To blacks nigger=hatred, and its pretty hard to dispute that logic when white people such as you (I’m guessing) use it with an agenda.
And one more thing: it may be a cheap, PC practice to always show the white guy as the villain, but at least there’s some historical basis in it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but all of the actions of the KKK, historically, were done in the service of Christianity. Integrating the south was an “unchristian” thing to do for most of the people there. Christianity has been the weapon of choice for any number of things done to people of color, AND, paradoxically, the basis for the entire civil rights movement. There’s nothing wrong with being christian or white, but a lot of America’s culture and wealth came from the exploitation of people of color by white, christian males, so it seems to me like a little psychic backlash is inevitable.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
My comment was a direct response to a post that is apparently not here anymore, so forgive the direct references to the other guy’s argument.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
As being both very Black and very much a Comic-Book Guy I always find the inevitable, Bi-monthly Message-Board-Racial-Discussions HILARIOUS.
Maybe it’s just my cynicism, but watching (i.e. reading) a bunch of novices (at best) discuss the merits/demerits of American Racism during “Our Time” is one of the most side-splitting things one can come across on the internet.
Though it’s easy to read my post as sarcastic, I assure you there is no sarcasm attached to my comment, I am being very sincere.
Hilarious. Do carry on
June 14th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
What’s sort of funny, though, is that Fahad Arman assumes that, because it’s on the net and on a comics website, every post must be from a novice (at best). It is virtually impossible, I guess, that smart people with resumes and credentials could EVER intelligently discuss American Racism on a comics blog. It feels good to introduce a little hilarity into your life, but maybe you should give the rest of us the gift of your perspective on the historical and modern impact of racism, since no one BUT you knows anything about it. For my part, I was responding to some idiot who was upset that Miss America’s use of the N-word was an issue, when it was clearly ok to call “white people” (whatever the fuck that means) “cracker” or “casper”. I was trying to express my view that the N-word is so much more powerful and damaging than those 2 words for “whites” that we SHOULD be upset about her using it, but that the creators of the comic tried hard to be even-handed about it. I was trying to negate his argument 2 separate ways, but apparently even that was misguided and “hilarious” to the wise and powerful Fahad Arman.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Yes, yes it was.