Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities All-Star Squadron... a series review.

The Golden Age came up on another thread. It was mentioned that a number of items in it came from Thomas' All Star Squadron.

One quick search later ...

Enjoyed your reviews Rick.

Just wanted to mention that I'm currently reading Young All-Stars for the first time.

I'm not going to do much of a review, but man is it a frustrating series.

EDE, I didn't last beyond the 6th's issue of "Young All-Stars." I'll be interested to know if it gets any better or just worse.

I'm just glad I have Roy Thomas's All-Star Companion Volume 3, so I was able to find out what happened during the rest of the series in a fairly painless way.

Look forward to your comments on that EDE.

I didn't read the tail end of the All Star Squadron. It was running out of steam before Crisis for some reason. I only got much later issues of Infinity Inc. So, my next Roy Thomas after Squadron was Young All Stars. I had more than a few and less than several back issues of it Off the top of my head I remember:-

The art was distinctive enough that I'd buy a back issue when I saw it. Was it Michael Bair?
The artist put made the fight scenes quite graphic compared to other super-slugfests. I remember Baron Blitzkrieg in a brutal fight.
The storylines could be fairly mature. I think there was a STD one.
I vaguely remember some of them to be a bit overinvolved in minutia o

Having been deprived of big Golden Age characters, Thomas brought in thematic replacements. He picks one of the Siegal/Schuster inspirations in connecting a character to Wylie's Gladiator: Hugo Danner. Fury has a much more violent connection to Greek myth than Wonder Woman. I got the feeling that Flying Bat and Tigress doubled up to give a Batman while Tsunami and Neptune Perkins did the same for Aquaman. Why Thomas was bothered about Aquaman is a mystery, since he was barely seen in Squadron. Perhaps just the principle of not being able to use him after Crisis. Tigress also uses a crossbow which could fill in for a Green Arrow/Speedy character, who Thomas couldn't use either.

There was a standard early character death, which is seen as a way to shock readers enough to bring them into the book. The thing to do if you can't blow up planets in #1 >yawn<

I'm at about #15, and I'm sure I would have dropped by now if I were reading it "live". I picked up the whole series awhile back on Comixology though, so I'm going to try to make it through the whole thing.

I have such a visceral dislike for Iron Munro as a character though.

And so many of these characters are so badly written, that it's hard to believe this is by the guy who made me fall in love with them in the first place.

I was going to say that you've not long to go. but I just read there are 31 issues. Good luck. I picked up more from a bargain bin catalogue at some point, but I doubt I've got all of them. I don't think my interest in it was enough for me to hunt them down. I do have the annual though.

As another big A*S fan, I've been vacillating about buying this series in back-issues for ages, so I'm very interested to read these opinions and hope you expand upon them as you get through the series.

It's funny that you dislike Iron Munro so much because, even though I've never read him do anything more impactful in a comic than stand in the background of a crowd scene, I also have a visceral dislike for him. I've always thought it was one of those irrational, unfair snap judgments based on appearance alone and so felt sort of guilty about it (although, it is a really boring design) so it's so interesting to me that there might actually be a valid reason to dislike the character!

Seriously, I don't know how long it's been since I've read a protagonist that I'm supposed to like that I'm disliking this much.

I'll post a summary when I finish it up (probably this weekend).

It's been a long time since I've read it but I got the feeling that the central character in Gladiator was lacking in this department also. I wonder if Thomas was channelling that a bit. He might have done that well only to end up with someone the readers couldn't take to.

^^I've never read Gladiator, but based on the one issue that was basically a Classics Illustrated version of Gladiator, that sounds right.

I don't know. Maybe other people find this guy appealing. I mean... every freakin' female in the book (not to mention Dan the Dyna-Mite) seems to be in love with him, so...

I am that one person in the world who liked Arn Munroe. He was a dog, and totally selfish and superficial, and I love me some heroes with their priorities all out of whack (like Booster Gold, in the beginning), particularly if they get turned around hard by a reality that is less glamorous and fun than they had thought. The Young All-Stars just didn't last long enough for Arn to learn 'nuthin,' and I'm not entirely certain the writer was going in that direction anyway, and that Arn wasn't just a male power-fantasy, like Sterling Archer, who is kind of a selfish ass, and never learns to rise above that, no matter how many lessons are dropped on his head...

As for the rest,

Dan the Dyna-Twerp annoyed me, with his whining, until he finally turned it around. (He at least seemed to learn a lesson. For awhile there, I was wishing he'd been the one to die, and his older mentor had lived...)

Neptune Perkins was a huge waste, to me, since anything he could do, Tsunami, could do better. (Much like Aquaman and Mera, actually, in which she's always been the heavier-hitter, it seems. Neptune had the added downside of being super-boring, and visually bleh.)

I wanted more from Flying Fox, and if there's one thing about Arn Monroe I *didn't* like is that he stole so much focus from the others, who ended up feeling less-developed or characterized, as a result. For awhile there is was, 'Okay, he can fly, which makes him a big ass useless target to men with guns...' and it wasn't until later (too late, IMO) that stuff like his illusion powers got revealed (and never really developed adequately, IMO).

I really wanted to like Fury, but then she 'lost control of her powers' as powerful women so often seem to do in comic books (see Jean Grey or Wanda Maximoff, for examples), and I got salty about that. If anyone needs to 'lose control' or have their powers taken away or have the team 'keep an eye on them,' it should be a dude. I'm so over the 'women can't handle power without going crazy and having to be depowered/killed for their own good' trope.

Yeah, that's the thing. I wouldn't mind it so bad if he was flawed and it seemed like he was headed towards some redemption arc, but what gets me is that he's kind of a jerk, and yet everyone seems to worship him, even while acknowledging that he's flawed. There's definitely something very Gary Stu-ish or male power-fantasy about him for me, which is massively turning me off. I thought at first that Fury was going was going to be cool and call him on his crap, but then it just turned into the rivalry-turns-to-romance cliche, where she just becomes the ultimate girl for him to conquer because she didn't immediately put out for him. Though it did boost my faith in the utter heroism of Dr. Mid-Nite, who manages to call just in time to prevent them from having sex by informing Arn that he has an std. Which, of course, once Fury finds out that's why they didn't have sex, she's perfectly okay with.

All Star Squadron was one of the earliest books I ever read before I started regularly buying comics. I must've been the only 8 or 9 year old in the 90s who had any idea who Firebrand and Amazing Man were.

I knew there was something I liked about you!

I've always loved the Golden Age characters even if I don't own or read that much about them right now. I knew more about the All-Star Squadron and Freedom Fighters than I did the JSA at the time.

I am a fan of Neptune Perkins, and proud of it. It was his present-day appearances during Peter David's mid-1990s Aquaman run which really cemented my affection for him. He'd kept his hair long, even as he let it go white, and as a politician for the American gov't, he was in a unique position to deal with the complexities of life among both the sea-dwellers and the land-dwellers.

I like Nep as well, and his actual Golden Age credentials probably help with that. I'm not a fan of the convoluted backstory RT gives him, though, and I'm kind of inclined to agree with Set that he's a bit redundant on a team with Tsunami, even with giving him a "talks to dolphins" power to make him more Aquaman-esque.

Yeah, EDE, I guess I feel about the same as you about the faults in Roy's portrayal of Nep. But that's one reason I'd recommend the first 25 issues (26 if you count the Post Zero Hour "primer" issue) of Peter David's Aquaman to you and all Nep fans. Especially the final stretch of that long arc, because I think PAD succeeded better than any other writer I can think of at assembling all of the DCU aquatic heroines & heroes to fight together in a rousing battle with a memorable coda. Too many people seem to nitpick about superficial things from that Aquaman era (the harpoon-hand, the beard, the bad attitude,) but the way I look at it it's their loss if they're gonna let such little details turn them off.

Extra incentive -- two of the early issues of that run have Aquaman battling no less than Jack Kirby's Deep Six!

Okay, so having finished Young All-Stars, I will say that I'm glad to have actually read it, even though it wasn't that great.

Overall, the shift from "Hey, let's link a bunch of obscure comic continuity together" that was the focus of the original All-Star Squadron to the heavy reliance on bringing in literary forebearers of comics was less than successful. I usually enjoy that kind of thing, but it just didn't work in the context of the All-Star Squadron.

I've said what I wanted to say about Iron Munro, so I won't go into any more details about him.

I was really looking forward to reading Dan the Dyna-mite, as he's always intrigued me as a character, but, man, was he disappointing. His "hero-worship" of Iron Munro, which really reads much more like a boyish crush (and the constant barrage of horribly inappropriate comments about wanting to see the girls in the shower read as massive overcompensation), gets really annoying. I'm suddenly much less annoyed about what happens to him in the Golden Age.

As I said, I like Neptune Perkins, but the storyline revealing his origin that somehow combines Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym with Verne's Captain Nemo and a whole bunch of concepts from theosophy got really tiring. It did have a slightly intriguing appearance by Frankenstein's Monster that apparently would've eventually been followed up on if the series had continued, though.

Tsunami was actually my favorite of the Young All-Stars, and her outrage at the internment of her fellow Japanese Americans made for interesting plot. There's a really dramatic scene early on where she quits the Young All-Stars and decides to be locked up herself. However, after a couple of issues later when the YAS's convince her to leave the internment camp and help them, there's not really a whole lot of development for her, though the Japanese discrimination theme is mentioned every couple of issues. There's an intriguing bit late in the series where she and Neptune Perkins end up on the run after they fight some soldiers with anti-Jap attitudes, but this gets dropped pretty quickly with the series ending.

Flying Fox was pretty much the generic Native American character with vague mystic powers. Often he served mostly to move the plot along ("my mystic senses detect what we need to do next!" kind of stuff), but he doesn't get a whole lot of development either.

Fury showed some potential early on, but then her story became mostly about containing the beast within and her romance with Iron Munro, and she got pretty boring, except when she was teamed with Phantasmo, whom she should clearly be in a romance with instead of Full-of-himself Munro.

Tigress showed up at a latecomer to the series, filled the role of the "bad girl" on the team, didn't really do a whole lot other than lust after Iron Munro and provide a bit of love triangle drama, got herself killed, was brought back to life which apparently turned her evil (which I'm pretty sure could have been explained without that sequence), and was pretty pointless overall.

I really liked The Young Allies, and the storyline in which they showed up, "Atom and Evil", was actually my favorite of the series. Given that it was the next to last, I was starting to think that the series was going to majorly pick up near the end, but then the last story became all about Arn's search his father, and blah. But, yeah, the Young All-Stars teaming up with the Young Allies and splitting into different teams to stop Baron Blitzkrieg, Sumo, and Axis Amerika from kidnapping America's atomic scientists was actually pretty cool.

I was thinking what would've been even cooler was that if each of the allied countries had their own super-teams, and we could have gone some grandiose teamup between the All-Star Squadron and the super-teams from various Allied countries. I suspect something like that might have happened if the regular AS-S title had continued.

For the most part, the adult Squadron members are relegated to the background, and mostly fill the function of having to be saved by the "junior" members or balling them out for disobeying orders. There's this weird thing where Amazing Man's powers are changed to magnetism, which seems really pointless.

Project M (for Monster) is a pretty cool idea, and shows some of the potential for incorporating ideas from the previously-set-on-Earth-1 war comics into the same universe as the All-Star Squadron. More of that actually would've been welcome.

So, yeah, as a huge fan of the original AS-S series, I can't say this was anywhere near a worthy successor, and it's not something I'd recommend anyone rushing out and reading, but if you find a good deal on it in the bargain bin... well, you could do worse.

I dug out the first issue of this. Released only a month after Justice League and Suicide Squad, it could have been a way to define the Golden Age characters for a post-crisis world.

Thomas seems to be a fan of sequences that involve the slaughter of most of his cast. There was the one with the Brainwave, then there was the Last Days of the JSA and here with Mekanique as the villain.

I'd forgotten there was a connection between Fury and Johnny Quick. I'd forgotten she has precognitive dreams too. Any Dream Girl connections?

It's 10 pages in before we shift to another member of the cast.

The dialogue is a bit clunky and comes with numerous infodumps.

Iron Munro was a fast mover with the girls right from the start. He has plenty of proto-Superman about his actions. Action Comics car stopping for a start.

Tsunami gets an extended sequence. She's trying to kill herself when we first meet her. I wonder if this is explored along with the moral points that her arc will have.

Flying Fox is seen, but doesn't contribute anything to the plot.

Gudra is one of the villains, but she's also one of the group that takes away the souls of fallen heroes. An icky fate for them.

There's a nice nod to the cover of All Star Squadron #1 in the last page.

Fury's preog dreams kind of disappear and are never really explained. I think somebody else has a random precog dream later on 8n the series.

I forgot that the covers were a big plus. They reminded me of full figure versions of the JLA/ All Star Squadron crossovers. Thomas' letter col for #3 also reminded me that Axis Amerika were also derived from the Golden Age characters he could no longer use.

So Young All Stars mines old archetypes like Metropolis (for Mekanique), Hugo Danner (for Iron Munro), Vril/ Nemo/ Pym (for Neptune Perkins) as well as the use of Frankenstein and other things. It looks as though Roy Thomas was putting some serious effort into fictional DC backdrop using other non-DC sources.

Just the sort of thing Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neil have been having great fun and success doing with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, free from having to worry about DC.

Hugo Danner makes an appearance in Tempest #3 for example. It's an action packed scene but the words of some characters throughout the issue show the limitations of being bound in the DCU.

Hellboy is another series that makes use of similar themes.

I suppose they all ultimately owe a debt to Philip Jose Farmer.

It wasn't a bad idea, in principle, but given how messy DC continuity was post-Crisis anyway, trying to fit all these literary sources in as well just seemed a bit too much. I guess with the rug being pulled out from under him with what he could and couldn't use from the Golden Age (or from the Silver Age for that matter), Roy started going for the kind of thing Moore/O'Neil would eventually do, but with a lot of extra baggage.

The thing with Wold Newton is that I'm sure there must be earlier examples of it out there. Perhaps without the specific origin point right enough.