Cross Captain America with Wonder Woman...

Cross Wonder Woman with Captain America and you get Timely Comics’ Miss America, who was created by writer Otto Binder and artist Al Gabriele for the company that would become Marvel Comics.

In Marvel Mystery Comics 49 (Nov. 1943), when a scientist’s device was struck by lightning, plucky Washington, D.C., heiress Madeline Joyce gained the powers of Miss America. Her super strength faded over time, but she continued to fly.

Quality Comics had previously featured an unrelated character named Miss America in Military Comics in 1941 and 1942. Marvel’s version was part of a wave of female superheroes that included DC’s Black Canary, Quality’s Phantom Lady, EC Comics’ Moon Girl and Timely’s Venus, Sun Girl, Blonde Phantom, Golden Girl and Namora.

Here, in the March 1944 Marvel Mystery Comics 53, she fights the Flaming Hate. The art’s by Charles Nicholas. Miss America teamed up with other 1940s Marvel superheroes (and met her future husband) in the All-Winners Squad over in All Winners Comics, and also starred in her own title. The second issue featured a photo cover of a unknown model dressed in the Miss America superhero costume, and introduced a long-running teen-humor character called Patsy Walker (who remains alive and well on the Netflix TV series Jessica Jones).

William Manchester on Not Breaking in Half

Thirty-five years later, writing his World War II Pacific combat memoir Goodbye, Darkness, historian William Manchester ticked off the Marines he had known well and seen killed.

“Shiloh Davidson II, Williams ’44, a strong candidate for his family’s stock exchange seat, crawled out on a one-man twilight patrol up Sugar Loaf. He had just cleared our wire when a Nambu burst eviscerated him. Thrown back, he was caught on improvised wire. The only natural light came from the palest wash of moon, but the Japs illuminated that side of the hill all night with their green flares. There was no way that any of us could reach Shiloh, so he hung there, screaming for his mother, until about 4:30 in the morning, when he died.

The Battle of Sugar Loaf on Okinawa

“After the war, I visited his mother. She had heard, on a Gabriel Heatter broadcast, that the Twenty-ninth was assaulting Sugar Loaf. She had spent the night on her knees, praying for her son. She said to me, ‘God didn’t answer my prayers.’ I said, ‘He didn’t answer any of mine.’’

Recalling Okinawa, Manchester wrote, “I was in the midst of satanic madness: I knew it. I wanted to return to sanity: I couldn’t. All one could do, it seemed to me, was to stop combat from breaking you in half, to keep going until you reached the other side of your immediate objective, hoping it would be different from this side while knowing all the time, with the weary cynicism of the veteran, that it would be exactly the same. “It was in this mood that we scapegoated all cases of combat fatigue — my father’s generation of infantrymen had called it ‘shell shock’ — because we felt that those so diagnosed were taking the dishonorable way out. We were all psychotic, inmates of the greatest madhouse in history, but staying on the line was a matter of pride. Pride was important to young men then. Today it is derided as machismo. But without that macho spirit, California and Australia would have been invaded long before this final battle.”

When Dinosaurs Fly Through a Hole in the Sky

When I was a boy in the early 1960s, my heart belonged to the superheroes. But my favorite title outside that genre was probably editor Julius Schwartz’s Strange Adventures, then its heyday at DC.

The menaces were outsized and outré, but the attitude was a sunlit can-do American optimism, brotherhood of man stuff. The clean lines and lyrical stylization of the art by Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Sid Greene and Murphy Anderson reinforced that unshadowed atmosphere. Even a post-nuclear war dystopia like the Atomic Knights series seemed to have its cheery aspects, such as friendly giant riding Dalmatians. And for a small child, that was reassuring.

The title really hit its stride from about 1957 through 1963. Perhaps coincidentally, its optimism seemed to end at about the same time America’s did — on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

My favorite issue, No. 121, had arrived on the newsstand earlier, cover-dated October 1960. The stories by Gardner Fox — The Wand That Could Work Miracles, a “Space Museum” tale called The Billion-Year Old Spaceship and Invasion of the Flying Reptiles — all offered science fictional wish fulfillment.

A hole opens in time and releases invulnerable pteranodans from a hundred million years ago over Washington, DC. Yikes. But luckily, a plucky husband-and-wife team of scuba-diving scientists, Jim and Rhoda Trent, have found a plesiosaur frozen in ice (Schwartz’s titles were always resolutely feminist, their female characters smart, stylish, cool-headed and brave). Befriending the revived dinosaur, whom they nickname Ol’ Pleasure, the Trents — by offering themselves as bait on water skis — are able to use the plesiosaur to defeat the pteranondans. My favorite part was the last panel, with the Trents happily tossing fish to their plesiosaur pal at a seaquarium.

The story was probably popular, because the Trents returned to help giant undersea frog people in Strange Adventures 130. And the cover idea — flying dinosaurs coming through a hole in a sky — was recycled for Green Lantern 30, cover-dated July 1964. 

Fairly Unbalanced: Here's a News Quiz for You

Obama is inviting in “the barbarians at the gate.”

“Everything that the president is doing seems to benefit what ISIS is doing.”

Obama’s “hatred of America” may be “because he’s part black … He does not wish America well.”

Obama’s willing to expose the U.S. military to “the Ebola virus to carry out this redistribution of the privileged’s wealth.” Can you guess what “news channel” aired those “journalistic” remarks? Oddly, I’ll bet you can.

Those Embarrassing Capes and Masks

Dr. Solar tried superheroics without a costume in 1963...

In the comics, particularly those with relatively crude art, the costumes served to easily identify and dramatically focus attention on the protagonists. But that function is served, in movies and television, by the looks, manners and stage presence of the stars, so garish costumes are superfluous.
Superhero costumes were probably not quite as odd-looking in the 1930s as they are today.

After all, American audiences were accustomed to seeing bold colors, capes and tights that emphasized the breathtaking bodies of men and women who could perform astonishing physical feats that even defied gravity. They were circus performers, acrobats and trapeze artists, and their garments must have seemed a natural fit for fast-moving four-color individuals like Flash Gordon and Superman.

But circuses have faded even as superheroes have flourished, and nobody dresses like that anymore. And that makes costumes problematic when popular characters are transferred to the screen.

In the 1930s, the superhero costume wasn’t quite the fetish it became. Superman, for example, would go into action without it when he had to in his early comic book exploits. Oddly, he did wear the costume in his radio adventures, even though he took care that no one could see him acting as Superman for the first few years of his show.

But the costume convention took a firm hold of the popular imagination during the 1940s and 1950s. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby tried to defy it in the fresh approach they took to their 1961 title The Fantastic Four, only to find that the readers demanded costumes. And by the third issue, they got them. Gold Key tried the same thing in 1963 with their Dr. Solar, the Man of the Atom, holding out until the fifth issue before giving their nuclear-powered hero a costume, mask and dual identity.

...But found that he finally had to surrender to comic book convention

In the comics, particularly those with relatively crude art, the costumes served to easily identify and dramatically focus attention on the protagonists. But that function is served, in movies and television, by the looks, manners and stage presence of the stars, so garish costumes are superfluous. And also, talented comic book artists can cast costumes in the light of thrilling, flowing romanticism, but on TV and in movies, real people have to wear the things.

TV, in particular, is a medium comfortable with the mundane, and not so comfortable with the outlandish. TV’s Superman had a costume in the 1950s, but that was clearly a children’s show. The costumes in 1966’s hit Batman TV show only helped to emphasize how campy and absurd the whole idea of superheroes was, and that parody element was echoed in the superhero sitcoms Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific in 1967. The one show that tried to take costumed heroes seriously, 1967’s Green Hornet, only lasted one season.

And it wasn’t that TV audiences of the era didn’t care for superheroes — they proved that by making hits of the non-costumed Six Million Dollar Man in 1974 and its spinoff The Bionic Woman in 1976.

Lynda Carter was successful as the flag-costumed Wonder Woman in 1975 in part because her show initially had a nostalgia angle, pitting her against Nazis in World War II. And The Incredible Hulk was well received in 1978, but didn’t have a costume, just green skin. The companion series Spider-Man featured a costumed hero and failed in 1977, in part because it was so poorly executed.

Producer Stephen Cannell had a hit with a costumed superhero in The Greatest American Hero in 1981, and he managed it by being clever in his approach. Cannell required from the beginning that the hero’s super powers would be contained in his caped alien costume. So he’d have to wear it, and could still play against it.

Then came 1990’s The Flash, a costumed superhero who lasted only a season. Then 1993’s successful Lois & Clark, which deemphasized the costumed hero even in its title. Then 1997’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who needed no costume. Then 2001’s Smallville, which gave us Superman without a costume (and became the longest-running Superman TV series). And then 2014’s Gotham, which gave us Batman’s world without Batman, kind of the ultimate cheeky TV move, I’d say.

The costumed superhero has been successfully revived on TV with Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl. In 2015, Marvel’s Daredevil redeemed the costumed superhero on TV, even though the character’s full costume is seen only at the end of the first season. And now we have Marvel’s Jessica Jones, which astutely uses the costume as a metaphor. The super-powered heroine — alliteratively named as a wink at all the Bruce Banners, Clark Kents, Billy Batsons, Peter Parkers and Sue Storms out there — is presented as once having tried to be a costumed hero, or its equivalent. But Jessica, whom I like to call Supergoth, learned the hard way that her world is too dark and cheerless for fancy dress.

The Name Is Olsen. James Olsen

The comic book industry was always alert to popular trends, including the 1960s superspy craze inspired by the success of James Bond 007.

Marvel Comics offered us Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, with his nemesis Hydra. Charlton turned Sarge Steel from a private eye into a special agent. Tower Comics crossed superheroes with spies in THUNDER Agents. Even Archie Andrews pitched in as the Man from RIVERDALE.

And DC gave us a guy named Olsen.

James Olsen.

“Now, you can probably see the problem here already,” the Silver Age blog observed. “James Bond was suave, cultured, handsome and the epitome of cool. Whereas Jimmy was naive, unsophisticated, homely and as square as the Bizarro World.

“The story (from Jimmy Olsen 89, Dec. 1965) starts with Jimmy and Lucy on a date to see a movie featuring ‘Jamison Baird, Agent .003.’ As was common in the DC universe, things were changed just enough to avoid lawsuits, although it seems a bit odd in this case. DC had published a story featuring James Bond only a few years earlier (Showcase 43).” Agent Double-Five (the number of letters in his name) returned in Jimmy Olsen 92, along with his seemingly superfluous gadgets. After all, Jimmy had long possessed the one special device that would be the envy of any secret agent — his Superman signal watch.

Meet Bob Phantom, Just a Regular Guy and the Scourge of the Underworld

I always suspected that Bob Phantom, an early MLJ superhero, added the friendly, aw-shucks “Bob” just so he wouldn't seem too fancy.

 “However silly his name might be, Bob Phantom debuted in Blue Ribbon Comics 2 (Dec. 1939), only a year and a half after Superman had founded the superhero genre in comic books, and just a few months after others had started populating the newsstands,” Don Markstein observed.

“In fact, he was the very first long underwear guy published by MLJ Comics. (The Wizard would have tied Bob, but the Wiz's original superhero suit consisted of a tuxedo. Other very early ones, such as The Shield, The Comet and Steel Sterling, didn’t reach the public until the first couple of months of 1940.)

“The publisher demonstrated its lack of practice at crafting super-powered crime fighters by not explaining how Bob managed to do what he did. In his first 6-page story, which was probably written by Harry Shorten (Tippy Teen, There Oughta Be a Law) and definitely drawn by Irv Novick (Captain Storm, Batman), he demonstrated an ability to appear out of (or disappear into) nowhere, survive a gunfire attack unharmed, and know things he had no way of learning.”

“Bob” was secretly Broadway columnist Walt Whitney, who goaded the police to arrest criminals. So he was Walter Winchell as a superhero? I must say, the mind reels.

Actually, it seems likely that Bob got his silly name simply because people had run out of variations on the evocative mysterioso term “Phantom.” By the late 1930s, you had Lee Falk’s comic strip superhero the Phantom, the pulp magazine superhero Phantom Detective, Gene Autry’s Phantom Empire movie serial and so forth. Even in the current Mickey Mouse newspaper comic strip story (running from May 20 to Sept. 9, 1939), the redoubtable rodent was busy battling the Phantom Blot.