PAT PATRIOT – Last time around I examined the forgotten Golden Age superheroine Fantomah. Since Liberals and Conservatives have to inject their bickering into everything my look at Fantomah prompted Conservatives to accuse me of secretly being a Liberal because, after all, only ONE of Fantomah’s villains was non-white. For my look at Pat Patriot I’m sure Liberals will stage an “AHA” moment and accuse me of being a Conservative because of the heroine’s all-American, red white and blue nature.
Introduced in Daredevil Comics in August of 1941 Pat Patriot – “America’s Joan of Arc” – was, in reality, Pat Patrios, a Greek-American woman who by day worked on an assembly-line. By night she pursued her dream of show-biz stardom by appearing in a minor stage musical, costumed like a female Uncle Sam for a patriotic song and dance. One night Pat was walking home after the show with her boyfriend Mike Brown (no relation to the thuggish robber of convenience stores).
The pair stumbled across a plot by “European” conspirators (America had not entered the global war yet so even though the villains were clearly supposed to be German they weren’t openly identified as such) to steal airplane motors and smuggle them to the Axis Powers. Still clad in her stage outfit Pat used her fists and some brutal high kicks to thwart the evil plan. The press mistook her name for “Pat Patriot”, but our heroine happily embraced that as her nom de guerre. Continue reading
Balladeer’s Blog presents the first in my new series about neglected comic book superheroes and heroines of the distant past. With superhero movies and television shows being so popular right now it put me in the mood for some of the obscure and forgotten figures from the Golden Age. Here are my pithy story-by-story takes on our debut figure.
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