Retro Review: All Star Comics #3

The DC Universe Begins

One of the most pivotal early events in superhero comics was the debut of the Justice Society in All Star Comics #3. This not only introduced an important staple of comics, the superhero team, but it also helped define the medium in revolutionary ways that current readers may not appreciate because the changes it ushered in have become so pervasive. It is informative to note how the title All Star transformed from issue #1 through #4 and onward, and how creative and influential All Star #3 was.

Background

From the debut of the comic book medium through early 1939, comic books contained many short features, unrelated to one another in plot and theme, ranging from one panel to a few pages. It was taken for granted that each feature in an issue inhabited its own fictional world, the same way that we may take for granted that two novels written by two different authors inhabit two different fictional worlds unless it is specifically brought to our attention that the novels share a single fictional world. Comic book features might continue in subsequent issues of the same title, but there was no single fictional world shared by any two features until 1940 when Marvel Mystery Comics #8 brought the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner together in a crossover story. But before and besides that story, we might presume that a stack of ten comic books told us of not one, nor two, nor merely ten fictional worlds, but potentially dozens. All of these title characters – clowns, cowboys, tough guys, warlords, and mystics – lived in their own world with their own cast of subordinate characters, and they all shared a title with numerous other features.

Until Superman. About a year after the runaway success of the Superman feature in the title Action Comics, the title Superman (I use italics carefully to distinguish the title from the character) was launched to exploit the character’s popularity by giving readers a single title full of Superman stories. What is important to note here is not the creative significance – there was none; Superman stories in Supermanread just like those in Action – but the marketing significance. This was a move to play up the commercial aspects of a popular character in order to drive more sales. And it worked. Superman now had a second title, so his dedicated fans could follow him in two titles.

A commercial strategy

This idea was too good (that is, too profitable) to apply only in the case of Superman. All American and National publication companies looked for other features popular enough to merit a second venue. The idea of Superman was copied to the most popular character from Detective Comics, and so in early 1940 the title Batman was launched, less than a year after the Caped Crusader had debuted in Detective #27. But even before this, the idea of giving popular features a second venue sprang out of 1939’s New York World’s Fair Comics, a one-shot issue that rapidly evolved into World’s Finest Comics. This title, which many years later hosted a monthly team-up feature starring Superman and Batman, began as an anthology of features which had, for the most part, proven their popularity in another title first. It was a sort of dream team of features, giving Superman his third title and many other characters, including Batman, their second. (And note that the title’s wording is not a reference to Superman and Batman being the world’s greatest heroes, but is telling the readers that its features were the world’s best features… while retaining the wording of the now-long-since-complete World’s Fair.) Like Superman, it was a strong commercial strategy, and DC soon sought to exploit it further by creating another best-of title.

All Star Comics

Enter All Star Comics. DC now examined its lineup for another set of features popular enough to merit a second title, searching among the features that already appeared in Adventure Comics, Flash Comics, All American Comics, and More Fun Comics. The first two issues included appearances of a tough guy named Biff Bronson, a U.S. military team named Red, White, and Blue, and a costumed hero named Ultra-Man, whose adventures were set in the year 2240 AD. The balance of those first two issues’ stories, however, featured characters who would go on to be known as the Justice Society, but as of All Star#2, they still inhabited their own fictional worlds. It wasn’t that the Flash operated on “Earth Two” in a different city than Green Lantern, Batman, etc. It was that they all operated in their own separate worlds. Aside from the Human Torch–Submariner crossover in Marvel Mystery Comics, every feature was set in its own fictional world.

The editors of All Star had, at this point, a challenge. They wanted to select the features popular enough to merit being in the All Star lineup, but they had no specific information as to which features were popular. Editorial ads in All Starasked readers to send in letters telling them which features they liked best, and these letter campaigns were used to help determine the lineup. Based on these letters and/or their intuitions, the editors tuned the lineup from issue to issue, and a few common characteristics began to emerge. The features in All Star #3, for the most part, had a lot of characteristics in common with Superman and Batman. Most of them wore flashy costumes. Most of them had catchy action names that was distinct from their secret identity. Most of them fought evildoers.

What had happened, quite subtly, by the time of All Star #3, was that the superhero genre had been defined without anybody really planning it with an order from on-high. Instead, the readers, by explicitly and implicitly voting for their favorite characters, had selected a lineup for All Star that looked a bit like a team. This wasn’t Stan Lee and Jack Kirby staring at their storyboards and drafting a team by concept. This was a disconnected process involving many creators, many editors, two initially-separate publishing companies, and untold readers shaping the lineup of All Star Comics, and then editor Sheldon Mayer and writer Gardner Fox had an inspiration.

All Star Comics #3

Whereas All Star#2 and all comic books before it, besides Superman, contained many separate features given a few pages each, All Star #3 had a framing story, placing the starring characters into a rather pedestrian dinner banquet, during which, each character told the others of a previous action story. The solo stories, besides Johnny Thunder’s, are illustrated and several pages each, almost exactly like the solo features seen in All Star #1 and #2, and in all of the other comic magazines before them. The difference is the framing story that occupies 3 pages at the beginning of the issue, 1 page in the middle, 2 pages at the end, and 1 to 4 panels at each transition when one hero’s story has ended and the next is about to begin. Therefore, there is a framing story of about 7 pages which is, arguably, the beginning of shared continuity in DC comics. The events in that story are as follows:

• Johnny Thunder sees comic books for sale and wishes that he could attend the meeting of the Justice Society that is about to begin.

• That wish and several others are granted, giving him a disruptive presence at the Justice Society meeting.

• It is explained that Superman, Batman, and Robin cannot attend because they are particularly busy while the Justice Society meets.

• Johnny Thunder proposes that each of the heroes in attendence tells a story about one of his past adventures.

• In the middle of the nine stories, the Red Tornado crashes the meeting, then leaves because her pants are torn.

• A message from the FBI arrives. Flash runs to Washington to learn more. He returns with a request for the whole Justice Society to go to Washington to receive an assignment. This becomes the basis of a shared story in All Star #4.

The nine stories that make up 90% of the issue are themselves unremarkable. It’s the 10% of the issue that makes up the framing story that changed comics by creating a shared universe for what had previously been twelve separate features. However, continuity established in All Star #3 is different in many ways from DC continuity as it has come to be known:

1) Action scenes are solo, just as in previous comics. Shared scenes are conversation-only. This remained true for most issues of All Star.

2) Shared scenes have a distinctly humorous and childlike tone, aimed at child readers, like Johnny Thunder's solo features and completely unlike Spectre or Hawkman stories.

3) Continuity did not extend to solo features. Justice Society stories were ignored by, and contradicted by, other features until the Sixties.

4) Fourth wall narration, especially in All Star #3.

Indeed, the characters thrown together in the Justice Society just barely make sense as a unit. How do the Spectre, a grim avenging angel with almost limitless powers, and the Atom, a college sophomore with a weightlifter's body and a knack for running into crime fit into the same team? They don't. Johnny Thunder, despite the awesome powers at his disposal, was purely a joke character, stumbling in and out of misadventures because he was unaware how his thunderbolt worked. These continuities don't fit together, so it made sense that nobody took them very seriously as a shared fictional universe. Later in the series' run, when the characters were placed into action stories together, the tone became simplistic and campy, and not long afterwards, the entire line of characters went out of publication. It wasn't until the Seventies, with considerable reimagining of the original material, that the JSA became a lineup of characters that fit into a shared universe in the modern sense. The Golden Age Justice Society was entertainment with very little consistency in plot, continuity, or characterization. It was written for kids and provided a decade of entertainment for kids.

Because Justice Society membership was a commercial consideration to give popular characters more exposure, the Justice Society – after only 3 issues – had a "rule" that whenever a character gained their own solo title, they would become only an honorary member of the Society. This removed the Flash and Green Lantern from the lineup, just as Superman and Batman made only rare and cameo appearances, because characters with other titles didn't need the extra exposure of a place in All Star. This sort of consideration followed Superman and Batman, twenty years later, to the Justice League, with those two characters often missing adventures for the actual reason that those characters already had enough exposure in other titles.

It should be noted that a feature referenced another feature one time before this: Ma Hunkel decided to become the Red Tornado after being told by kids about the Green Lantern. That appeared a couple of months before All Star #3, but because the kids were aware of Green Lantern's secret identity, they were referring to Green Lantern as a comic book character they read about, not a superhero in their own world. Over a year later, Wildcat was also inspired to become a costumed hero because kids told him about Green Lantern, but in that case, also, the kids were referring to a comic book. An early Batman story referred to Superman as a fictional character in their world. A single DC continuity that was shared across all of the major solo titles would not appear until the Sixties. Not until 1977 would the Justice Society get its first origin story, a classic by Paul Levitz in DC Special #29. It is perhaps less apt to say that All Star#3 brought a shared universe into being than that it planted the seed of a shared DC Universe. Many years and many changes later, that seed had grown into something greater. When we consider the billions of dollars of revenues that the genre has generated and the deep societal role that the superhero genre has grown into, we can look back at All Star Comics #3 as a place where this tremendous thing started to grow.

Golden Age Review

Even though the first run of the Justice Society finished before my Dad entered high school, some of the earliest comics I bought featured the JSA. DC enthusiastically reprinted Golden Age stories in the Seventies, and though I often found the art to be smudgier and less fun than Silver Age artwork, I was familiar with the Justice Society, and yet I felt like an outsider to their world. With new Justice League comics coming out every month, I knew the names, home cities, and powers of the JLA members by heart, while the limited volume of JSA stories coming my way left many of the Golden Agers a bit foreign to me.

Newer stories of the JSA (Seventies Revival and onward, including many Elseworlds of high quality) gave me more and more to read about them, but the original was still strange to me -- until lately. In the last few months, I have read the great proportion of all DC superhero stories from the very beginning up through early 1941. Armed with this new familiarity, I'd like to review the original JSAers, from their debuts up through the first two JSA stories.

Sandman: With a debut barely after Batman's, millionaire Wesley Dodds was one of the original masked crimefighters in comic books. The Sandman character obviously did not have the endurance that Batman has enjoyed (no billion-dollar movies lately). With the benefit of hindsight, it is probable that the awkward suits worn by the Sandman and the even-earlier Crimson Avenger were a creative mistake in the eyes of readers. Indeed, both the Crimson and Sandman switched to colorful tights a few years later, but by that time, there was no catching up to the popularity of the Caped Crusader. And yet, the early Sandman stories were marked by a cinematic flair, with the last panel often showing panache and humor not easy to find in comics of the era. Another part of the winning formula of Batman that was not utilized by Sandman was the character-flawed secret identity. While Bruce Wayne was famously vapid and without focus in life, Wesley Dodds was gallant in his own skin, and often began or finished cases out of costume. His galpal Dian Belmont was a fixture in his stories, creating a Girl Friday formula that never caught on for the most successful superheroes, but added style to the Sandman. His adventures started off as standard detective fare, but soon after he became the oldest charter member of the JSA (debuting 6 months before any of the rest), he was involved in science fiction plots, in one story saving the planet from destruction, a feat that neither Superman nor Batman had on their resumes at that point in time.

The Flash: DC's second superhero with science-based powers was the first to be revived when Barry Allen visited him in 1961. Jay Garrick was also the third-most popular DC character in the early going, winning a solo title that ran over 100 issues. The Flash's stories were more light-hearted than that of most superheroes -- if one sets aside the pure slapstick of the Red Tornado and Johnny Thunder. And yet, many early Flash villains die at story's end, and Jay Garrick is not always without blame. Ironically, the Flash is the first superhero to be regarded as law-abiding, buddying up with the police when his four antecedents were all vigilantes who often (but easily) evaded arrest. Barry Allen's costume fixed the conceptual flaw of giving a character that runs really fast a loose helmet.

Hawkman: The combination of reincarnation, anti-gravity, shirtlessness, and ancient weapons are four facets I might never have thought to combine. But Hawkman, arguably the first flying superhero, got the job done with brutal efficiency. Executing his opponents left and right, Carter Hall differed from Batman in always setting out on a case with just one weapon instead of a beltful, and yet he always chose correctly. (If you're going to get a good whack at an opponent's head, a scimitar does just as good a job as a mace, I think.) The suggestion of a sex life with Shiera was pretty close to the surface, so overall, Hawkman was a pretty raucous series featuring a lot of action and drama with very little humor.

Johnny Thunder: Although he was possibly the most powerful "hero" to date, Johnny Thunder was pure comic relief, because he didn't know that he had power at first, and didn't know how to control it when he figured it out. While he fights crime at times, he more often is trying to win over his erstwhile girlfriend Daisy Darling, and wins a boxing championship along the way. The slapstick tone would arguably disqualify him (as well as Ma Hunkel's Red Tornado) from consideration as a superhero, but by landing a spot on the JSA (which thereby acquired his slapstick nature, at first), he is remembered that way.

Spectre: It's worth noting that Jerry Siegel followed up Superman by creating, less than two years later, a character who was even more powerful! When a policeman was killed and returned to life (yes, this was before Will Eisner's Spirit) comics got a hero so powerful that they hardly knew what to do with him. His stories usually lack drama as to whether or not he will succeed and more about taking you into the psychological terror of the criminals who earn his unstoppable wrath. I was as pleasantly shocked as any contemporary reader when one of his cases facing mortal mobsters suddenly threw him face to face with Zor, a wizard who was nearly his equal (and much more comfortable with his powers). I knew Zor from the opposite end of DC history, Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers, which banishes Zor to an unenviable fate after he'd earlier tangled with Zatanna. When the Spectre encounters yet more supernatural foes who give him a challenge, he acquires (from God?) the Ring of Life, and easily one-ups them. As an indication of the weak sense of continuity of the time, he actually acquires the Ring of Life in two different stories, both times as though it were for the first time. Oddly enough, Jim Corrigan tailored his "uniform" with physical materials in its first appearance although it was later shown that he was easily capable of doing just about anything at will.

Hourman: I always thought Hourman was a great concept, especially the look of the character. Indeed, he was one of the spotlight characters in the JSA revival decades later. But he was unheralded in his first run and essentially kicked off the team (given a "leave of absence") for one simple, regretable reason: The early Hourman stories weren't very good. The continuity was jaw-droppingly inconsistent (Rex Tyler's own boss was revealed as a master criminal in one issue, but was back as though nothing had happened in the next). The sense of aesthetics, aside from the art, was terribly flawed: Hourman called himself publicly the incredibly un-heroic name 'Tick Tock Tyler' even though it was supposed to be a secret that he was Rex Tyler. I cannot explain the logic of revealing one's last name while trying to maintain a secret identity. Of course, it's even less logical that you would choose a name that reveals your one weakness. And as what was likely the death blow for the character, he became the head of an army of boy assistants, the Minute Men of America. Sounded like a good idea at the time? Hourman debuted the same month as Robin, the Boy Wonder, so sidekicks were in vogue. But he lost popularity quickly, and I think it's for the reasons I have listed.

Doctor Fate: Although a cool concept, Doctor Fate started off as a poor man's Spectre, appearing in the same magazine (More Fun Comics) with fewer pages per issue. Although he was a magician, he often used magic to produce science (eg, nuclear radiation). Unlike the Spectre, he always matched up against enemies whose power rivaled his own, who usually attacked him first and put him on the defensive. Every story involved his platonic female associate Inza, who was defined as the embodiment of real-world existence countering Doctor Fate's purely aethereal operations out of a tower in Salem, Massachusetts. While the Kent Nelson identity came later, he was said early on to be "not human... never a child", having been a creation of the elder gods. I'm glad the elder gods liked primary color uniforms.

Green Lantern: Alan Scott, soon to be the fourth hero to win a solo title, launched a concept that has stood the test of time. The atrocious costume (justified in his first story as something no one could forget) was an inevitable casualty of the Silver Age reboot. But the Green Lantern, whose power came mysteriously from outer space by way of China and an insane asylum definitely looked powerful. Charging into fights with his broad chest and throwing punches that were apparently powered by the ring, the first Green Lantern didn't create artistic constructs to fight with -- he just blasted injustice away. He also vied with Hourman as the first hero to have his signature weakness overused as a plot device. I don't know how many gangsters in the real world would try to use a wooden club on the head of a guy who was bullet-proof, but in GL's world, the idea seemed to come naturally. He was the first superhero to appear unambiguously by name ("a superman" may be a common noun) in the pages of another's story (providing the inspiration for the Red Tornado, who appeared in the same title, All American Comics).

Atom: There's never been a faster track to the top. Al Pratt only appeared in costume the month before he was included in the first meeting of the Justice Society. The first Atom story is not in any sense a superhero story: It is simply the story of a small college student who trains his physique and is rewarded by humiliating those who teased him. In summary, the Charles Atlas ad drawn out to six pages. But he begins to fight crime with a mask one issue later and goes about his task with determination -- after all, he's trying to impress a girl.

I always hated to come into a story late. Getting to know the JSA from their original stories gives me the feeling of at last being an insider to a great lineup of heroes who appeared in some of the first comics I ever owned.

A fan's not a fan if he's not giving opinions, so to list my favorite JSAers, on the basis of these original stories alone, I would name the Spectre, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and Sandman -- probably in that order. While Green Lantern is perhaps the most like modern superheroes in his manner of operating, the other three capture some of the cinematic elements of their time -- noir, adventure, romance. These stories can come alive today and take the reader on a trip back in time to the era that first needed, and therefore created, superheroes -- and lots of them.