Number 2208: Here she is...Miss America!

Besides being the name of a beauty pageant, Miss America was a superheroine for Timely Comics in the 1940s. You can read her origin story by clicking on the link below. This Miss America was created by Otto Binder and Al Gabriele. As drawn, she was a cute young woman, and I assume meant to bring female readers to Marvel Mystery Comics, where she first appeared.

You can read more about Miss America in Don Markstein’s Toonopedia.

Since I have nothing better to do than sit around and think of stuff like this, at the time Otto Binder was writing scripts for Fawcett Publications, turning out a steady stream of stories about Captain Marvel and the rest of the cast of that comics universe. I have always wondered if, when going from publisher to publisher to turn in scripts, someone would give Otto a nudge and ask about the competition. Perhaps Otto thought of the wartime poster, “Loose Lips Sink Ships!” But then, people are apt to gossip in work settings, and I think it would be at least one way to keep up with what the other guys were doing. Call it an early and primitive form of hacking to steal trade secrets.

Written by Otto Binder, drawn by Charles Nicholas. From Marvel Mystery Comics #54 (1944).

The origin of Miss America. Just click on the thumbnail.

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