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Official Site: Marvel

Songbird (Melissa Joan Gold), formerly known as Screaming Mimi, is a fiction character, a superheroine and former supervillain in the Marvel Comics Universe.

The character first appeared as Screaming Mimi in Marvel Two-in-One #54 (August, 1979), and was created by Mark Gruenwald, Ralph Macchio, and John Byrne.

Melissa Gold was a troubled runaway from an alcoholic father and incarcerated mother. In order to survive on the streets, Melissa developed a hard edge to her personality, referring to herself as "Mimi." She was eventually imprisoned, where she met Poundcakes, a female wrestler who invited her to join the Grapplers under the name Screaming Mimi, alongside Titania and Letha. The Grapplers became renowned for their colorful personalities and ringside antics, but the wrestling federation denied them the opportunity to make the amount of money their male counterparts made. Instead, the group agreed to earn supplementary income by performing a covert operation for the Roxxon Oil Company. Roxxon gave the Grapplers special paraphernalia to assist them in their mission; Mimi received an apparatus that converted her voice to high-frequency sonics for various effects. The Grapplers tested these powers by fighting Thundra in a wrestling ring. On their mission, Thundra led them into Project Pegasus to smuggle in the Nth Projector for Roxxon. The mission failed when they were defeated by the heroes Quasar and Giant-Man. The Grapplers were tried and jailed for their misdeeds. Alongside the Grapplers, she victimized Dazzler while she was in Ryker's Island prison with them. When the Grapplers were finally paroled, they discovered that the women's wrestling movement had lost its momentum without them, so they continued to perform crimes to support themselves and working as professional criminals. Alongside the Grapplers, Mimi attempted to attack the Thing while he was in the hospital, and battled Captain America. Later, the Grapplers set their sights on a women's division of the superpowered Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation. Their manager, Auntie Freeze, arranged for the women to augment their natural abilities with artificial powers created by the agency Power Broker, Inc. While the other Grapplers received superhuman strength, Mimi instead had her vocal enhancements internalized as a throat implant; it was once believed that Mimi had also gained superhuman strength, but it was established after the fact in the Thunderbolts series ( ) that this was not the case. The all-new Grapplers made a legitimate professional comeback that proved short-lived. When Titania was murdered by the vigilante Scourge, Mimi was among the female wrestlers of the Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation who participated in a mass attack upon the Thing, blaming him for Titania's death. After Letha was later also killed by Scourge, the Grapplers broke up.

Mimi was later contacted by the criminal Baron Helmut Zemo to join his version of the Masters of Evil. Her first assignment was to help bust the female Yellowjacket out of prison, but Mimi was captured in the subsequent battle with the Wasp, Black Knight, and Paladin. Later, she formed a romantic and criminal partnership with the similarly-empowered Angar the Screamer, at one point battling the Avengers Hawkeye and Mockingbird. The pair impersonated Hawkeye and Mockingbird, but battled them and were defeated. Mimi was also seen among the various female superhumans aboard Superia's cruiseship, where she battled Captain America and Paladin. Angar was eventually mortally wounded by a gunshot during a robbery attempt that went sour, and died in Mimi's arms after they escaped. Mad with grief, Mimi screamed, burning out her power. Immediately afterward, she was contacted by Baron Zemo once more, and she accepted his offer to join a formative Masters of Evil. Zemo allowed Mimi to be nursed back to health, and his accomplice, the Fixer, gave her new powers via a voice-augmenting harness and high-tech implants in her neck based on technology from the villain Klaw. With her newly-transformed powers, she resumed the use of her given name Melissa, and adopted the identity of Songbird as a member of the Thunderbolts, a new Masters of Evil group posing as superheroes to win the world's trust while secretly plotting world conquest under Zemo's direction. However, Melissa and most of the other Thunderbolts grew to like their heroic roles. In particular, Melissa began to truly grow into her own and even began a romance with her teammate Abner Jenkins, alias MACH-1, formerly the Beetle. Ultimately, the Thunderbolts turned against Zemo, foiling his attempt at world domination and rescuing the Avengers in the process. Melissa continued to serve with the team, who operated as a team of outlaw superheroes.

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