August 1959: Behold ze Battle Doll

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.

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 war features like Haunted Tank.