Miss America
1904 - Joan Dale is born to a textile worker in Philadelphia.
1911 - 7-year-old Joan's father loses a hand in the textile mill. To help support her family, she begins working in the local schoolhouse.
1919 - 15-year-old Joan finds references in her reading that suggest the existence of hidden chambers under Philadelphia dating back to the 1700s. She begins hunting for these chambers, slowly uncovering a hidden history of magecraft by the founding fathers.
1921 - 17-year-old Joan starts working as a school teacher.
1922 - 18-year-old Joan first has one of her articles published in an underground feminist publication using the pseudonym Miss America
1923 - 19-year-old Joan first meets Derek Verheyen, an undergraduate history student. She shares her research into the secret magical history of the founding fathers. He admits it's possible, and starts secretly helping her.
1926 - 22-year-old unlocks a mysterious vault under Independence Hall, finding the secret chamber where the founding fathers wove the spells infused in the forging of the country. Now able to sense when that magic coalesces anywhere in the country, Joan finds she can tap into it to push herself past her own limitations. She chooses to use those abilities to protect people from being exploited, writing about her escapades in her articles.
1930 - 26-year-old Joan becomes a traveling reporter for the Philadelphia Post. She and Derek Verheyen marry, but she does not take his name as she travels the country as Miss America
1934 - 30-year-old Joan chooses to retire both as a reporter and superhero when she has her first child.
1942 - 38-year-old Joan stops Helmut Streicher from attacking the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. She decides to come out of retirement, and joins the Justice Society.
1945 - 41-year-old Joan leaves the Justice Society and retires at the end of the war. She deliberately closed the chambers under Independence Hall, & allows her powers to wain.
1953 - 49-year-old Joan chooses to go before the Un American Activities Commission, to give testimony about her career as Miss America.
1954 - 50-year-old Joan writes her memoirs. Her book is a benchmark in the feminist movement.
1964 - 60-year-old Joan dies of breast cancer.
We were kind of on a mission with Miss America. While there hadn't really been a version of her in the comics that I would say was vital to creating an ideal version of DC, we just couldn't shake the idea that there was something there, some reimagined version of the character that would provide us something with a lot of story and history, even if that reimagined version came entirely from us rather than from the existing comics. So this is our take on Miss America rather than the comic accurate version, As always, your feedback is invaluable; we'd love to know what you think, but we really do think we managed to find that compelling version of her we were looking for.
Miss America's Comic HistoryMiss America was one of the anthology stories in Military Comics #1 in 1941, a Quality Comics book which is also the first appearance of the Blackhawks. She's one of the only superheroes in the book, a lady reporter who takes a nap on a bench near the Statue of Liberty which, in her dream, grants her magic powers to help her country. When she awakens she discovers that she has transmutive powers with practically no limits at all, which she uses to stop some saboteurs. It's as thin an origin as Quality has ever created, but once you get past the frankly terrifying implications of her powers, she comes across as a pretty competent early attempt at a female superhero. She doesn't yet have any sort of superhero costume, but instead wears a very classy red dress and heels. She's obviously drawn to appear attractive, but it's surprisingly classy.
She would go on to appear in the first seven issues of Military comics, eventually getting an early version of her costume. (As an aside, reading those seven issues of Military Comics is hard. These are some of the most racist Golden Age comics I've ever seen... although the Miss America stories manage to dodge the worst of it.) When DC pulled characters from the Quality roster to assemble the Freedom Fighters they were almost entirely from Police Comics, so Joan wasn't part of this original take on the team. |
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Like so much of DC's Golden Age content, Joan appeared again in the pages of Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron, primarily as an incidental character appearing in the stories that reintegrate the rest of the Quality roster. She appeared to die in that story, but she returned Post-Crisis in a pretty surprising place. In the aftermath of the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Golden Age characters of Earth 2 were now merged with the rest of continuity, so there could no longer be alternate versions of characters occupying both worlds, so characters had to be swapped out to fill roles previously held by others. In this case, Miss America became a member of the Justice Society, filling the role once held by Wonder Woman. What's more, the modern day hero Lyta Trevor from Infinity Inc, who previously was the daughter of Earth 2's Wonder Woman, was now the adopted daughter of Joan Dale. This later came full circle during Phil Jimenez's Wonder Woman run when, in a time traveling adventure to the past, Diana actually disguises herself as Miss America
When Justin Grey & Jimmy Palmiotti created a new version of the Freedom Fighters in the mid 2000s, they incorporated a version of Miss America whose transmutive powers had evolved to include flight, super strength, healing powers... she was literally described as the most powerful metahuman on Earth. |
Our Miss America StoryThis is going to take a bit of explanation, because I really want to describe the way we've reimagined this character. First of all, we're not giving her transmutive powers at all. She's not going to have Superman levels of power. We're aiming instead for Captain America. She has what we call "try-hard powers" where she can always be just a little bit stronger, a little bit faster... She can push herself just that little bit further to always be just as powerful as she needs to be in the moment.
We've also completely reimagined her origin and how her powers work. The conceit is that she has discovered the secret magic that was woven into the creation of the country... magic that persists in places where the country is strongest. She is empowered by that magic... the collective patriotism of the people around her. So if she's at the Lincoln Memorial, or the Grand Canyon, or a Veterans Day parade, or maybe even a baseball game... she can tap that magic and become stronger. It is admittedly a very innocent, Golden Age idea... but that IS what we're talking about here. We also spent a ton of time trying to get the era of her story just right. We knew we wanted her to serve in the Justice Society, but not as a new hero. She needed to be someone who had already had her whole career, coming out of retirement when her husband is called on to serve in World War II. |
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We wanted her to feel like she's at the very beginning of social movements in the country. She's just barely too young to have been part of the suffrage movement, but we made a point to make her a young schoolteacher in an era when they were some of the very first workers to engage in labor negotiations. Like in the comics, we made her a reporter, but we deliberately made her a reporter for underground feminist publications. The name Miss America is one she uses as a nom de plume before she ever gets her powers. When she does get them, she's very specifically using them to protect people from being exploited, and as she travels the country as a reporter, that can be anyone. Workers, women, minorities...
This is what we want our version of Miss America to be. We want her to be a foundational part of the country in a time when we were just barely learning to confront some of our uglier parts, protecting the people who need protecting the most. A lot of patriotic heroes tend to come from a military angle, or are structured around a sense of blind patriotism and American exceptionalism. We really like the idea of someone who, from the very beginning, was tapping into what the country COULD be and fighting to make sure it can be that for everyone. |