310 – Miss America enters the Atomic Age

The header for "The Atom and You" story from Miss America v3 #6, March 1946
The header for “The Atom and You” story from Miss America v3 #6, March 1946

By the mid-1940s, Miss America from Timely (Marvel) had transitioned from a comic book into a “magazine” with lots of ads targeting young women and articles/stories seeking to shape young girls minds into proper “American ideals”. I love how every article consists of the the first page and then a “continued on some later page” statement, forcing their readers to flip through a bunch of pages filled with advertisements to actually finish reading. Miss America did still feature a Patsy Walker comic, but mostly it had become an early example of a teen magazine like “Seventeen”. Oddly Wikipedia does not have a page or even mention the “Miss America” magazine.

Anyway, Miss America vol. 3 #6 (March 1946) had a well-written piece by Dr. Elias Lieberman called “The Atom and You”. It is an example of how it took some time for the general public to understand that the end of World War II had brought a new terror upon the world, one that could truly mean the end of civilization altogether.