Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for Stargirl season 1, episode 10, "Brainwave Jr."
The latest episode of DC Universe's Stargirl confirmed the existence of Gimmick Girl, aka Merry, The Girl of 1000 Gimmicks. While the series had somewhat hinted at the character's subsistence by proxy, "Brainwave Jr." gave a name to the woman who married the villain Brainwave and gave birth to his son, before dying under mysterious circumstances.
The only clue to Merry King's existence in the early episodes of Stargirl was a photo in the same secret room where Dr. Henry King Sr. kept his Brainwave costume. This room was recently discovered by Henry King Jr. along with a collection of video tapes on which his father had recorded his experiences from when he first discovered the telepathic powers that his son inherited. The video tapes confirmed what many comic readers had guessed; Merry King had once been Merry Pemberton, the sister of Sylvester "Starman" Pemberton and a superhero in her own right, before she fought Brainwave and fell in love with the "Terrible Telepath."
Gimmick Girl's creation coincided with a boom in the comics market in the latter days of the Golden Age that saw more girls and young women reading comics and DC Comics introducing more superheroines into their line-up to bring new blood into the slowly-dying superhero genre. Merry Pemberton first appeared in Star Spangled Comics #81 in June 1948, where she was adopted by the Pemberton family and quickly deduced that her new brother was the Star-Spangled Kid. After Sylvester rejected her offers to help him with his crime-fighting, the high-spirited Merry decided to strike out on her own as Merry, The Girl of 1,000 Gimmicks to prove that a girl could be just as good at catching crooks as any boy. Much like Black Canary in the pages of Johnny Thunder, Merry proved to be an instant hit and swiftly replaced the male hero that was meant to be her partner. Within three issues, the Star-Spangled Kid's regular feature in Star Spangled Comics was cancelled in favor of a Gimmick Girl series.
Despite hear early popularity, Merry fell into obscurity along with most of DC Comics' Golden Age heroes, until it was revealed in the 1981 All-Star Squadron series that she was the mother of newbie hero Brainwave Jr. Precisely how Merry Pemberton came to be involved with Brainwave varied from story to story, but all accounts agreed that she suffered a mental breakdown after her husband returned to crime and left her to raise their son alone. Some accounts said that she died of a broken heart. Others said she committed suicide, with one particularly depressing story suggesting that Merry's relationship with Brainwave had not been consensual and that she died from shock after finally breaking free of his mind control. Strangely enough, all of this was eventually retconned by the Young Justice series, which revealed that Merry had gone underground after faking her death, presumably to get away from her super-villain husband.
It remains to be seen if Gimmick Girl will be more than a footnote as the Stargirl series continues. There is a remote chance that we could see Gimmick Girl's legacy continue, as the comics later revealed that Merry Pemberton had a daughter named Jacqueline she kept hidden from her husband and son, who later took up her mother's arsenal of crime-fighting gadgets as the hero Gimmix. Even if that doesn't come to pass, the revelation that his mother was once a crime-fighter will surely push Henry King Jr. to make a fateful choice regarding where he stands with his villainous father.
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