At age 6, my only problem with Mlle. Marie was that I had no idea how to pronounce her name.
“Mlle.?” What might that mean and how do you say it? “Milly,” I guessed.
“Whenever I first saw a comic with her in it I didn’t realize what ‘Mlle.’ meant and thought her name was Milly Marie,” Ron Pehr said.
So I wasn’t alone!
With her pencil skirt, beret, submachine gun and inability to pronounce the word “the,” Mlle. Marie was a breath of perfumed Parisian air in DC’s male-dominated war comics.
Created by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Jerry Grandenetti for Star Spangled War Stories 84 (Aug. 1959), this French Resistance “Battle Doll” veered as close to romance as any war comic dared.
“Raised on a farm in France … Marie and her father join the Resistance when Germany invades France during World War II,” noted comics historian Jeff Rovin. “After her father dies, she is acknowledged to be the most dangerous resistance fighter of them all, especially by her arch-foe Commander Von Ekt. Right before the liberation of France, Marie is shot by a Nazi spy, Roget, and falls into the St. Joan River.”
But she apparently survived to have a daughter with Alfred Pennyworth (!).
In 1959, she seemed an odd choice for a comic genre read almost exclusively by boys. “However, Kanigher was also writing and editing Wonder Woman, and had created Black Canary (1947) and Wonder Girl (1958) before Mlle. Marie, so he was also well aware of the potential of female heroes,” observed popular culture historian Ensley F. Guffey.
“(W)hile Marie’s wasn’t quite the first of DC’s war series to be introduced (that would be Sgt. Rock, who had started four months earlier, followed by Gunner & Sarge a month after that), it was the first dropped,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “Star Spangled 90 introduced The War that Time Forgot, and that was the beginning of the end. Before long, the visceral thrill of pitting World War II soldiers against dinosaurs crowded Marie completely out.”
She returned as an occasional guest star in other DC war features like Haunted Tank and Unknown Soldier.
“I was quite fond of the ‘Petite Partisan’ (my own created appellation for her) and regularly looked forward to her adventures,” recalled Johnny Williams.
“I think I have one comic with Mlle. Marie, a reprint in a giant comic,” Burns Duncan said. “I wish there had been more stories about her. It seems that the best war characters appeared only sporadically.”
“Among DC war comics series, Mlle. Marie was the ‘failure’ that never went away,” Ed Wilson observed.
“In 1959, DC had five war titles, all of them being interchangeable anthologies. Now that I’m looking for issues from that period, it’s interesting to me to see how they were feeling around for regular series to feature in each title.”
About Author
