| MISS AMERICA (Joan Dale Trevor) | BIOGRAPHY |
| Created by ? and Arthur Peddy |
 |
PERSONAL DATA
Real Name: Joan Dale Trevor
Aliases: Miss Cosmos
Occupation: Former secretary and reporter, now retired
Marital Status: widowed
Known Relatives: Derek Trevor (husband, deceased), Hippolyta "Lyta" Trevor Hall (adopted daughter, no longer on this plane of existence), Hector Hall (son-in-law, no longer on this plane of existence), Dream (grandson, transmogrified)
Base of Operation: New York, NY, later Washington DC
Group Affiliation(s): Freedom Fighters, All-Star Squadron, Justice Society of America
Gender: Female
Height: 5' 7"
Weight: 123 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Black, now Brown
First Appearance: Military Comics #1/5 (August 1941) [Quality]
Creators: ? and Arthur Peddy
OVERVIEW
Reporter Joan Dale received the power to transmute any substance into another simply by focusing on it mentally shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The powers were seemingly the combined result of a shady scientific experiment and the influence of the spirit of America. Miss America was a heroine during the 1940s and is the second Fury's adoptive mother.
HISTORY
In May, 1941, recent college graduate Joan Dale was eager to prove herself a capable reporter. Responding to an anonymous tip, she waited for her informant at the base of the Statue of Liberty. While waiting in the warm afternoon sun, she began to swoon and soon imagined that the Spirit of Liberty was speaking to her. It told her that she was to become the protector of freedom and was granted great powers to accomplish her goals.
What Joan did not know, at that same moment, she was drugged by an agent of a secret US government project, Project M. Taken to the Project's labs, the head of the project, Professor Mazursky, chided the agent for bringing a woman instead of a man for the experiments he wished to perform. With much at stake and with the processes ready to go anyway, they performed the experiments, to create super-human abilities, on Joan anyway. When nothing happened, they deemed the experiment a failure and returned the unconscious Joan back to her park bench, unaware that anything had occurred.
On the way back from Liberty Island, Joan Dale fended off attackers by unconsciously using matter-rearranging abilities accidentally granted by the experimentation process. Over the next several months, Joan used these abilities finding the limits of her powers. On one occasion, stopping spies, she subconsciously created a costume for herself, and called herself Miss America. ( Due to either a lack of memory or concentration or a woman's prerogative to change her clothes, her costume details varied slightly each time she created it ).
Just a few months after beginning her career, she was asked to join other mystery-men by Uncle Sam in halting an upcoming attack on the American Navy at Pearl Harbor. The mission was a failure, and she and the other Freedom Fighters were believed killed. Miss America, however, was thrown into a death-like coma and retrieved by Project M personnel. She was placed in stasis for nearly six months, hovering between life and death, until she was accidentally revived. Aiding the Young All-Stars, she was brought into the All-Star Squadron and made a recording secretary for the Justice Society of America, not taking a very active role in many cases. It is believed that she served as a liaison between the group and the FBI during the war years, and kept the Bureau abreast of the activities of the mystery-men.
Early in February, 1945, the Justice Society saved a Navy Officer named Derek Trevor, on an island in the south Pacific. When Miss America stayed behind to nurse him back to health, the two fell in love, and after the retirement of the Justice Society, were married, as Joan retired her secret identity.
Nearly thirty years ago, the childless Trevors were sought out by a pregnant Helena Kosmatos, and given her infant child, which she named after Wonder Woman, Hippolyta (or Lyta for short). The young girl soon demonstrated super-strength, and limited invulnerability like her mother. When Lyta reached adulthood, she took on the secret identity of Fury, after her biological mother.
The Trevors lived in retirement outside of Washington DC., and have little contact with their former friends in the super-hero community. Unknown to anyone else, Joan was faking her power loss and aging, secretly still maintaining her youthful looks and vitality for more than five decades. After the death of her husband, she shed her matronly looks and rejoined the most recent version of the Freedom Fighters.
On a recent mission, however, she took a powerful nuclear device into space as it exploded and had to reform herself out of the materials found in space. Feeling herself reborn, she now calls herself Miss Cosmos, reflecting her new-found sphere of influence and protection to be the whole universe instead of just the United States.
As the days and weeks wore on, however, she returned to her previous power levels, with added strength and the ability to fly.
POWERS AND WEAPONS
Miss America had the powers of transmutation on a molecular level. Her own inexperience with the physical sciences curtailed her use of the powers, usually using it for simple changes that were not permanent. There appeared to be an upper limit to the size of matter, and the duration of its transmutation, but this was not ever made specific.
CHRONOLOGY
For a definitive list of appearances of Miss America in chronological order click here
PROFILE REFERENCES
Who's Who Update '88 #2 (September 1988)