THE DESTRUCTION OF MADELINE JOYCE
I just discovered an aspect of Marvel history that is downright diabolical. It is not to do with their business practices, but with the mistreatment of a major character.
Madeline Joyce, Miss America, was one of Timely Comics' leading characters, supporting her own titles for several years in addition to taking part in the All-Winners Squad. (Honestly, one of Stan Lee's contributions to mythology must have been to come up with a team name that did not sound like an idiot's imitation of a marketing slogan."Avengers" may not have to do with the actual story of the Avengers, but at least it is properly dramatic and heroic.)
As Wikipedia sums up her origin, socially aware teenage heiress Madeline Joyce was born in Washington, D.C., and was the niece and ward of radio mogul James Bennet, who was sponsoring a Professor Lawson, a scientist claiming to have gotten superpowers through a device that had been struck by lightning. Joyce, secretly tampering with the contraption during a thunderstorm that night, herself gained the ability to fly and great strength after lightning similarly struck, knocking her unconscious (she originally had x-ray vision, as well as other powers, but after her few early appearances they were retconned). The panicky scientist, seeing the apparently dead young woman, destroyed the device and then killed himself. Joyce survived to fight crime as the patriotically garbed Miss America,
You can see that Miss America is in no way a female copy of Steve Rogers. Her powers are far more extensive, and the way they are described is interesting and shows that some thought has been given as to how they work. "Madeline Joyce... possesses the "Strength of a Thousand Men," allowing her to lift weights far heavier than a normal human would be capable of lifting. Her superhuman durability makes her resistant to different forms of damage. She has the ability to levitate herself through psionic means. By using her levitation ability in connection with carefully planned leaps, Miss America could use her power to fly. She could attain any height at which she could still breathe (approximately 20,000 feet). Fatigue poisons accumulate much slower in Madeline Joyce's body than that of a normal human, giving her a heightened "vitality." " (Please note that this "vitality" could have been used to make her immortal, or at least as long-lived as the Sub-Mariner.)
One pleasing feature about the character is that she wears an actual costume. She was designed and drawn by a woman, Pauline Loth, and, while beautiful and indubitably sexy, has none of the brutal half-naked allure of contemporary comic successes Wonder Woman and Sheena (or, for that matter, of the other character called Miss America, created by Quality Comics and later acquired by DC, who wore barely more than Wonder Woman.) And in spite of the absence of stripper allure, she still was a quite succesful character, featuring in several years of her own titles as well as in group titles.
You could never imagine any of that by the way Marvel treated her since. When Stan Lee began to resurrect characters from the forties, he brought back Captain America and The Sub-Mariner, the latter in a curiously negative character that made its creator Bill Everett complain that "he had never thought he was God Almighty, as he does now." Lee and Kirby also briefly resurrected the android Human Torch, beginning what was to be a remarkably messy and poorly conceived Marvel Age career. Later, Roy Thomas consecrated this version of the Timely Comics forties, making Captain America, the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch into the three central figures of the forties team, the Invaders (a group name as bad as the All-Winners Squad; perhaps Thomas had not reflected on the implications of the concept of invasion.) Timely's leading female heroine was excluded from the picture, only for an invented British heroine, Spitfire, to appear as the first female in the Thomas-retconned Golden Age.
Indeed, what Thomas did to Madeline was worse. She was relegated to the distinctly second-string team the Liberty Legion, and her powers were apparently reduced to flight, Thomas also gave her a bickering sentimental relationship with the speedster Whizzer, which eventually resulted in marriage. And here begins the tale of deliberate abuse inflicted on the character for no visible reason. Because she and the Whizzer had both been exposed to radiation, their first child was the radioactive mutant Nuklo, a dangerous monster that eventually died; and then Madeline died in childbirth along with her second child, again because of those same radiations. (To me, this conflicts with having "enhanced vitality" as a power.)
There is much that needs criticism here. Thomas' Miss America has had her powers and visibility reduced. She is not, as she should be, the powerhouse of the Legion, and indeed she should not be in the Legion, but in the Invaders, along with three "leading" characters who had not sold more books than she had. The only thing we see her do is fly, and it is strongly implied that if the fist of one of the Nazi villains connected, they could do her damage. Strength of a thousand men, enhanced vitality, and diminished vulnerability, are all never to be seen. And he treats her with no respect. In a story set in 1946, when she has been a full-time heroine for at least four years in the midst of a world war, and an adult for rather longer, he has her exchanging infantile taunts with the teen-ager Fred Phelps, barely induced into the team. And her marriage with The Whizzer and middle-class life in upstate New York state conflicts with her origin as a rich heiress and niece of a media tycoon.
However, that is nothing compared with what other writers were to do. Miss America returned from the dead for 24 hours in the 2006 miniseries X-Statix Presents: Dead Girl, where she was revealed to be spending an eternity in Hell. Maybe the pointless and arbitrary cruelty of this shook someone, because, in the All-New Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A-Z, select entries of characters featured in that miniseries, including that of the Ancient One, state that the characters in hell were impostors. But we are not actually told that about Madeline Joyce. And at any rate, we have not yet reached the depth of abjection reserved for the character. For a few years later, Miss America's reanimated corpse appears as a cyborg resident of the Core, a subterranean city populated by advanced robots, where it does battle with Miss America's former teammate, the Human Torch, and attempts to lull him into a false sense of security. The Torch however, realizes that the cyborg is not really his old friend, merely a puppet using her body. Not, of course, that we are told anything to justify, or explain, let alone avenge, this hideous violation.
The gruesome treatment of Madeline Joyce is too consistent and too pointless not to stink of company culture. It is, in this way, the reverse and twin of the obsession with promoting and re-promoting the various incarnations of Carol Danvers, a character who has been pointlessly, repeatedly and obstinately manipulated into being a lead figure in the Marvel Universe without having the potential and background to be. One suspects, in both cases, a persistent prejudice passed down from editor to editor. But whatever the case, Marvel's treatment of Madeline Joyce is consistently diabolical and hideous. If anyone wants to make it a case of woman-bashing and cruel male prejudice, I will not object.