1940s MARVEL SUPERHEROINES

This weekend’s escapist, light-hearted superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at the neglected superheroines of Marvel Comics, known in the 1940s as Timely Comics.

SILVER SCORPION 

Secret Identity: Betty Barstow

First Appearance:  Daring Mystery Comics #7 (April 1941) Her final Golden Age appearance came in 1942.

Origin: Betty Barstow, a feisty secretary for private investigator Dan Hurley, donned a costume and investigated a case her boss was refusing to look into, a case involving unusual activity at a graveyard. She wound up capturing a ring of counterfeiters and resolved to continue fighting crime as the Silver Scorpion.

Powers: The Silver Scorpion was in peak physical condition and excelled at jiu-jitsu and other martial arts. In addition, she was as agile as an acrobat. 

Comment: Since the only things “silver” on the Silver Scorpion’s costume were her wristlets, boots and the scorpion logo on her cape, I think they should have made her wristlets into revolving bracelets which fired long silver needles coated in scorpion venom. Non-fatal scorpion venom, of course, but painful and inducing temporary paralysis.

NAMORA 

Secret Identity: Aquaria Nautica Neptunia

First Appearance:  Marvel Mystery Comics #82 (May 1947) Her final Golden Age appearance came in 1955.

Origin: Namora was the cousin of Atlantis’ Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner (who pre-dated Aquaman). She was the sole survivor of a surface world attack on an Atlantean settlement and, like Namor, had a love-hate relationship with us surface dwellers. Inevitably she would protect humanity despite her distrust.

Powers: Like the Sub-Mariner, Namora could lift nearly 100 tons, could fly, could breathe in or out of the water and could swim at hundreds of miles per hour. She also had a degree of invulnerability.

Comment: Namora is sometimes confused with the 1970s female figure Namorita, who was much younger but still part of the Sub-Mariner family. A forgotten 1940s member of that family was Subbie, the nephew and teen version of the Sub-Mariner, who had a lesser version of Namor’s strength but could not fly.   

BLACK WIDOW

Secret Identity: Claire Voyant (really)

First Appearance:  Mystic Comics #4 (July 1940) Her final Golden Age appearance came in 1943.

Origin: The psychic and medium Claire Voyant was murdered by a crazed client and found herself in Hell. Satan – apparently with God’s permission – began using Claire under the alias Black Widow to kill evildoers that were past redemption or were at the appointed time for their death. She started with her own murderer and continued her posthumous career from there. And this was decades before Faust AND Spawn!

Powers: The Black Widow could kill with the touch of her hand(s) or with a kiss and was bullet-proof as well as immune to other human attempts to harm her. Sometimes she would display other, “cheat” superpowers out of nowhere if the writers got lazy. After toying with and then killing her targets, the Black Widow would, in psychopomp fashion, take their souls to Hell.

Comment: This superheroine’s adventures were fairly dark for 1940s comic books. Satan proudly displayed suffering souls to her and she took a certain satisfaction from the punishments her “sire” inflicted on evildoers in the afterlife. Obviously this Earth Two Golden Age Black Widow should not be confused with Marvel’s Natasha Romanov Black Widow who was introduced in the 1960s.

ZARA OF THE JUNGLE

Secret Identity: None

First Appearance: Mystic Comics #2 (April 1940) Her final Golden Age appearance came later that same year. 

Origin: When Zara was a child, her father grew tired of how crime-ridden so-called “civilization” was, so he took her with him to live in the jungles of Africa. He taught her jungle survival skills and how to fight and when he died he charged her with fighting any evil that ventured into her jungle home.

Powers: Zara was in peak physical condition and was much more agile than any acrobat. She excelled at unarmed combat but was also proficient with a bow & arrows. She had acquired immunity to the bites of the insects and snakes of the jungle and had a rapport with the other animals.

Comment: Zara battled menaces like Muslim slavers and evil white interlopers trying to stir up war among the jungle tribes.

BLONDE PHANTOM

Secret Identity: Louise Grant

First Appearance: All-Select Comics #11 (September 1946) Her final Golden Age appearance came in 1949.

Origin: Wanting to fight crime and foreign spies without endangering the lives of people close to her, Louise Grant, secretary for private investigator and former OSS man Mark Mason, donned a costume and fought the forces of evil as the Blonde Phantom.

Powers: The Blonde Phantom was in peak human condition and was more agile than an Olympic gymnast. She was a master of unarmed combat and was also incredibly proficient with her .45 handgun. In addition, this heroine was an expert investigator.

Comment: Louise Grant’s boss Mark Mason had the hots for the Blonde Phantom but overlooked his secretary Louise, who downplayed her beauty in her secret identity.

MISS AMERICA

Secret Identity: Madeline Joyce

First Appearance:  Marvel Mystery Comics #49 (November 1943) Her final Golden Age appearance came in 1948.

Origin: Sixteen year old Madeline Joyce was the ward of railroad magnate James Bennett. He showed her one of the outside projects that he financed, an electrical research center set up in what had formerly been a lighthouse. That night, during a violent thunderstorm, the fascinated Madeline snuck back to the laboratory to more closely examine the equipment.

At one point a lightning bolt struck the lab and Madeline, destroying the equipment but granting her superpowers. Adopting the nom de guerre Miss America, she donned a costume and went into action.

Powers: Miss America possessed Superman/ Wonder Woman levels of strength. She could also fly and had x-ray vision. In addition she had a large degree of invulnerability.

Comment: For a time in the 1970s, Miss America was, according to Marvel Comics canon, the mother of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. The Whizzer was their father. That has since been retconned.

SUN GIRL

Secret Identity: Mary Mitchell

First Appearance:  Sun Girl #1 (August 1948) Her final Golden Age appearance came in 1950.

Origin: Never revealed. Her very first story made it apparent that she had been active for years.

Powers: Sun Girl was slightly stronger than any adult male. She was extraordinarily skilled at unarmed combat and was more agile than an acrobat. She wielded a Sunbeam Ray Gun and a wrist-weapon which shot solar light and heat. Her emergency pouch contained the cable/ lariat which she used to swing around the city like Spider-Man or Daredevil. 

Comment: Marvel still hasn’t clarified if Sun Girl was a human or was an alien using the name Mary Mitchell as an alias. She sometimes fought crime alongside the original (android) Human Torch in the late 1940s.

VENUS

Secret Identity: Vikki Starr

First Appearance:  Venus #1 (August 1948) Her final Golden Age appearance came in 1952.

Origin: The Earth Two Golden Age Venus was the alien ruler of the planet Venus. For centuries she ruled over a planetary paradise protected from human eyes by the perpetual cloud cover of that planet. Wearying of being revered, adored and obeyed she decided to start dividing her time between her homeworld and Earth, where she hoped to try leading a simpler but more challenging life.

She teleported to the Earth, where her beauty made her such a sensation that she was hired as a model and editor for Whitney Hammond’s fashion publication called Beauty Magazine. Venus had a series of adventures ranging from mild fantasy to world-saving as she learned Earth ways and battled sci-fi and horror menaces.

Powers: Venus could teleport at will between Earth and her home planet. She could levitate, walk through solid objects and could transport herself into photographs or paintings to observe things without her presence being suspected. She could psionically understand any language. This heroine was immune to all diseases and could heal from almost any injury. She was stronger than any Earth woman and could run at 60 miles per hour.

Comment: Venus ruled her home planet from her castle on Mount Lustre. Many of the other inhabitants of Venus had names that paralleled figures from Earth lore (Cleopatra, Samson, Apollo, etc) but in the Golden Age those were simply pseudonyms used by those figures to approximate their identities in Earth terms. This was similar to the way in Iron Fist stories the inhabitants of K’un-Lun are not gods but use the names of Chinese deities like Yu-Ti, Lei Kung the Thunderer and others.

In the Bronze Age onward, Marvel created a mess of this comparative simplicity, with needlessly complicated explanations saying Venus really was the Roman goddess Venus and the Greek goddess Aphrodite, and also claiming she had temporarily taken over rule of the gods and moved them from Mount Olympus to the planet Venus.

GOLDEN GIRL

Secret Identity: Betsy Ross

First Appearance: As Betsy Ross – Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941) As Golden Girl – Captain America Comics #66 (April 1948) Her final Golden Age appearance came in 1949.

Origin: After years of working off and on with Captain America in her capacity as a federal agent, Betsy Ross adopted the costumed identity of Golden Girl in 1948 to serve as Cap’s new partner when Bucky was out of commission after suffering injuries at the hands of the supervillainess called Lavender.

Powers: Golden Girl was in peak physical condition and excelled at unarmed combat. She was more agile than an acrobat and wore a bulletproof cape which she could wrap around herself or innocent bystanders as needed.

Comment: In the 1960s, Marvel retconned events to claim that the original Captain America and Bucky were MIA after their 1945 mission to thwart Baron Zemo’s rocket attacks on England. From then on it was canon that Captain America stories after the end of World War Two and into the 1950s featured replacement Captain Americas who simply wore the costume while the original was frozen in suspended animation in the far north.

In this context, Golden Girl would have been serving as a sidekick to one of Steve Rogers’ successors in the costume of Captain America. In 1964 the Avengers found the original Captain America, who resumed serving as that hero.

MISS PATRIOT

Secret Identity: Mary Morgan

First Appearance: As Mary Morgan – Human Torch #4 (April 1941). As Miss Patriot – Marvel Mystery Comics #50 (December 1943)   

Origin: Dr. Groitzig, a Nazi scientist covertly operating out of abandoned Horror Lighthouse with an Italian agent of Mussolini, was kidnapping Americans at random and using them as human guinea pigs in experiments to provide the Axis Nations with superpowered operatives.

Reporter Mary Morgan was one such abductee. The chemical treatments that the villains subjected her to granted her super powers and she used them as Miss Patriot to help the established hero the Patriot to defeat the Axis agents and destroy their submarine and its crew. 

Powers: Miss Patriot was skilled at unarmed combat and had gained x-ray vision, telescopic vision and super-hearing from Dr. Groitzig’s experiment on her.

Comment: Mary Morgan’s boyfriend was fellow reporter Jeff Mace, the secret identity of the Patriot, whom she partnered up with as Miss Patriot.