YEAR 1941: MISS AMERICA (I)

One of two Goklen Age heroines named "Miss America," the first one appeared only the first seven issues of Quality's MILITARY COMICS, and then disappeared until she was revived by DC Comics.

The most interesting aspect of the first Miss America was the means by which she gained her powers. During the chaos of World War II, ordinary woman Joan Dale was visited by the Statue of Liberty itself-- or more likely, some "spirit of liberty" dwelling within the statue.  The Statue gave Joan extraordinary transformation powers, and for her short career she used those powers against criminals and WWII saboteurs.  She began her adventures wearing ordinary clothes but later donned a costume whose details were far from consistent.

A number of other heroes of the period gained fabulous powers from spirits of liberty or ancestors dating back to the American Revolution.

YEAR 1941: SILK SATIN

The Black Queen might have been the Spirit's first female foe, but arguably Silk Satin was the best, with the possible exception of P'Gell.

Silk begins as a crook,  but thanks to falling in love with the Spirit, she eventually reforms and begins working as an insurance investigator.  Despite her reformation, she frequently finds ways to outwit the brawny hero.  This was perhaps compensation, as it was strongly implied that being a "shady lady" she had no real chance in being the Spirit's one-and-only; that Silk would always come off second-best to the bland "girl-next-door" Ellen Dolan.

Silk Satin was not martially skilled, but as the above scene shows, she was an above average roughhouser.

YEAR 1941: NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL

The early 1940s saw a very short-lived smattering of female-centric adventure-serials, and the only one that enjoyed a second iteration-- itself a rare event in the serial world-- was the "Nyoka" franchise, ostensibly derived from an Edgar Rice Burroughs entitled "Jungle Girl."  In truth neither of the two Nyoka serials shared any elements of the Burroughs story.

The 1941 JUNGLE GIRL was a good basic serial, starring Frances Gifford as Nyoka Meredith, daughter of a jungle-dwelling doctor who gets mixed up with evil treasure-hunters.  Evidently the serial made enough money to spawn a second in the series the very next year, though the writers rechristened her "Nyoka Gordon" and made her the daughter of an archaeologist working in North Africa.

PERILS OF NYOKA, as noted here, remains one of the best serials of the period.  I observed that "director William Witney-- admittedly working with the highest budget Republic ever gave to a serial-- consistently keeps the action pumping at a high pace.  Characters never walk when they can run, never run when they can leap, and so on."  Nyoka herself is not a deep character, but she's one of the few kickass heroines of the 1940s,  both in fights with male adversaries and her delectable foe Vultura.  This version would seem to be the template from which Fawcett adapted their moderately successful comic-book feature.

YEAR 1941 : WONDER WOMAN

1941's actually a pretty good year for femmes formidables, but there's no question that WONDER WOMAN rises to the top of the heap.

Though she was not the first costumed superheroine-- even if one disincluded types like SHEENA and FANTOMAH-- she seems to have been the first coherent "femme formidable" response to Superman.  Her original name in William Moulton Marston's proposal was "Suprema," which sounds fairly close to the name of the Siegel-Schuster creation, while two years later Marston remarked upon the resemblance in an issue of THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR:

Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

Patently Wonder Woman did allow Marston to elucidate a concept of woman as a "best of all possible female characteristics," allowing her to show evidence of tenderness and what Marston often calls "lovingkindness" even when she's also demonstrating "force, strength and power."  This might be a very loose critique of the "tough guy" ethic embodied by the early Superman and most of his imitators.  Since Marston was executing an adventure comic book aimed at children, he must have known that most of them would be drawn to the selling-point of amazing feats of power.  What distinguishes Marston's hero from most others is that Marston's scripts (quirkily but winningly executed by artist Harry G. Peter) consistently emphasize the need to build a new society of equals following the defeat of the forces of evil.

Marston's conceptualiztion of the Amazon's "dominance-and-submission" society has been the topic of much heated discussion on contemporary message boards.  It's easy to poke holes in many of Marston's concepts, but whatever its failings, WONDER WOMAN stands as the first American comic book to evince any sort of philosophical stance.  Even comic books and comic strips which critics judge to be superior in terms of script and art (such as Will Eisner's SPIRIT) usually have no philosophical underpinnings as such.

One small hole I can't resist poking myself is that despite all of the Amazon's lip-service to the nobility of submission, Wonder Woman isn't often seen in a submissive posture.  Occasionally she's put in bondage and makes some mental comment about enjoying it, but my perception of the emotional appeal of bondage (speaking as an outsider) is that one *can't* get out of it; that one has to make some mental adjustment in order to submit with grace.  Largely Wonder Woman doesn't walk her own walk; it's always someone ELSE who has to submit, not her.

That said, Marston's insight into the interdependence of those qualities that Socrates called "valor" and "temperance" is little short of inspired.  In an ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE essay I wrote:

The action-heroine is a better symbol of the Schopenhaurean Will than the male action-hero.

If I had to choose a particular heroine to embody that symbol, no other would be even close.