Madeline Joyce is visiting an old lighthouse that has been converted into a laboratory for secret experiments in electricity. Madeline gets accidentally jolted with thousands of volts of electricity when the equipment overloads due to a freak thunderstorm, but she miraculously survives! When she awakens, a week later, she finds herself possessed with amazing powers. Madeline Joyce can now fly and has great strength, x-ray vision, and a vast intellect! Realizing these gifts should be used for the benefit of mankind, Madeline puts her newfound abilities to good use as Miss America, champion of the people. Making herself a patriotic costume, Miss America begins her war on all the evil perpetrators who would harm America's citizens and the war effort that the country is engaged in. After the war is over, Miss America and other heroes band together to form the All Winners Squad, a force for good in an uncertain world. However, the group is short-lived, and Miss America's career comes to an end a few years afterwards.
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Miss America was perhaps Timely’s most successful female hero with five issues of her own book, a long-running strip in Marvel Mystery Comics, and a spot in the All Winners Squad. Her inspiration was probably Mary Marvel, a successful girl hero who had similar powers, though Madeline were later scaled back to simply flight. Otto Binder, a long-time Captain Marvel scripter and Charles Nicholas wrote and drew the strip in Marvel Mystery Comics. Ken Bald and Sid Greene handled the art for Miss America's own comic.
Though other companies joined in with the trend to attract female readers, Timely went the farthest-Martin Goodman was not one to avoid a trend. Thus Timely readers had Miss America, Venus, Sun Girl, Golden Girl and Namora, not to mention newspaper reprints of Miss Fury, all in the mid to late 1940s; Trina Robbins calls it the superhero slumber party. But it was only a trend that the company was following, not a new vision.
Miss America fought the Flaming Hate, Blackbeard and his air pirates, the Fox and the Vixen, the Fencing Master, the Ghoul, King Cobra and a “soft spoken, icy-nerved youth” known as the Cherub. Miss America ended her run at Marvel Mystery Comics with a ten-part serial, a rare event at Timely.
Miss America reappeared in the Marvel Universe in 1974 as the deceased wife of the Whizzer and the mother of the atomic menace Nuklo. According to the retcon, Madeline Joyce and the Whizzer married and gave up their identities as superheroes. Her only appearances since then have been flashbacks, in which she served in the Liberty Legion, the Invaders, and the All Winners Squad.
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