Back in June, 1973, there was very little chance that my fifteen-year-old self, upon seeing Justice League of America #107 in the spinner rack, would have passed on buying the book. For one thing, I was following the series regularly during this era (although I’d somehow managed to miss the previous issue, #106); for another, I’d been partaking of the annual summer get-togethers between the JLA and their Earth-Two counterparts, the Justice Society of America since 1966’s iteration, and I wasn’t about to stop now. (Indeed, I’d continue to follow the JLA-JSA team-ups even through periods when I was otherwise ignoring the JLA title, all the way up to the last one in 1985, when Crisis on Infinite Earths rang down the curtain on the tradition.)
But even if neither of those had been true, how could any true-blue superhero comics fan of 1973 have taken a look at JLA #107’s cover by Nick Cardy and said, “Nah, I’m good”? Before the book dropped, it had been hard to imagine how DC Comics could match, let alone top, the previous summer’s extravaganza, which had marked the double-milestone occasion of Justice League of America‘s 100th issue and the 10th annual Justice League/Justice Society shindig with a blowout that spanned three issues (rather than the usual two), featured every hero who’d ever been a member of the JLA, and resurrected a long-lost third superhero team — the Seven Soldiers of Victory, the majority of whose members hadn’t been seen since the mid-Fifties.
But the cover to #107 made it clear that DC was hardly done with digging up and dusting off old heroes that many of their current readers (your humble blogger included) had never even heard of. True, we were getting the return of “only” six “Golden Age Greats” this time around, as opposed to the previous year’s seven — but from the looks of things, none of the “new” characters had pre-existing DC doppelgängers (a la the SSoV’s Green Arrow, Speedy, and Vigilante) this time, either, making for a net increase in fresh faces from 1972 to 1973.
All this, plus a new alternate Earth where the Nazis won World War II? Take my twenty cents, please!
In his introduction to DC’s 2004 Crisis on Multiple Earths, Vol. 3, writer Len Wein described his initial reaction when his editor, Julius Schwartz, came to him in 1973 to tell him it was time for the next JLA-JSA team-up, and to ask him who he planned “to add to the mix this time”:
“B-but that was the book’s 100th anniversary issue,” I stammer, “It was supposed to be special. I never intended to –”
“Sorry,” says Julie, “last year’s crossover sold like a sunuvagun and the readers loved it. Go top yourself.”
I was tempted to tell Julie to go top himself, but he was my boss and I loved him. Besides, I loved a challenge more.
As a collector, I had always been a fan of the old Quality Comics line, publishers of Plastic Man and Blackhawk and G.I. Combat and many other favorites from the 1940s until the early 1950s. When Quality folded, DC had acquired the rights to their titles and continued publishing several of them, especially the ones I just mentioned. The Quality characters seemed the next likely choice for revival.
I went through the list of Quality characters and settled on the six you’re about to meet… But since the Quality characters had known their heyday mostly during the Second World War, I contrived a way to set my story in a world where that war had ended very differently…
The idea of bringing back a group of World War II-era superheroes in a present-day context in which that war had never ended seems so obvious in retrospect that one is almost surprised that no one had done it yet, even in 1973. And DC had already established its multiverse concept (even if it rarely if ever used that particular word) — at least so far as the titles edited by Schwartz was concerned — so imagining a parallel Earth in which such was the case was an easy step. But why call it Earth-X, rather than follow the convention they’d used more-or-less consistently to date, and call it Earth-Four?*
In his Crisis intro, Wein explained that his original designation for the Quality heroes’ Earth was neither a number nor a letter, but a symbol:
I titled this year’s extravaganza “Crisis on Earth-((swastika symbol))” and turned the script in to Julie. He loved it…
…With one small exception.
Having lived through WWII, Julie had a rightly understandable antipathy toward the symbol of Nazi tyranny.
“No story I ever edit will include that symbol in the title,” he told me, even as he scratched it out.
“But after Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth- Three and all the others, it seemed the perfect choice,” I argued. “If we can’t use the swastika, what do we call the world?”
Julie thought about it for a moment, then used his pencil to erase each of the crossbars on the swastika.
“There,” he said proudly. “Earth-X is as good a name as any.”
The veteran editor was probably right; besides the potential for offending some readers, “Earth-((swastika symbol))” would have become dated immediately after this story’s conclusion in JLA #108. And “Earth-X”, while being as arbitrary in its own way as “Earth-Four” would have been, did manage to convey a sense of difference about this particular parallel Earth, suggesting that history had gone really, really wrong on this world. (Or that’s how I see it, anyway.)
The Flash’s remark about how, up until this point, the two teams have only been able to get together “at certain times of year” works OK as a metafictional nod to the otherwise odd fact that these events only seem to take place in the summer… but it doesn’t make a whole lot of story-sense, frankly. For one thing, it’s never come up as being an issue before; for another, individual JLAers and JSAers have crossed the dimensional barrier on any number of occasions — and at all times of the year — for one-on-one team-up stories in Flash, Green Lantern, and Atom.
Something else worth noting on this page: for the first time, the Superman of Earth-Two (the “original” Man of Steel, if you will) is being visualized in a way that distinguishes him from his Earth-One counterpart (“our” Superman), via the adding of gray hair at his temples; in his two previous JLA-JSA team-up appearances (in JLA #73–74 and #91–92), the two Last Sons of Krypton were depicted as identical.
As regular readers of this blog will recall, the Red Tornado — up until very recently a resident of Earth-Two, and a member of the Justice Society, to boot — had apparently perished in the climax of the last joint JLA-JSA adventure, heroically sacrificing himself to save his world in the closing pages of JLA #102… only to show up hale and hearty on Earth-One at the very end of #105. (Just how he’d survived was a question that wasn’t answered until #106 — which left my younger self out of luck, since, as I’ve already mentioned, I missed that issue [though you can read about it here, nevertheless].)
The three selected heroes of each team step into their respective “transmatter” machines, and then…
I realize that the amount of “DC time” that’s passed since Reddy’s rejoining the living is doubtless supposed to be considerably less than the two-month span between the publication dates of JLA #106 and #107 — but, even so, you’d think that somebody on Earth-One would have bothered to let the JSA know that their android colleague had survived the events of #102, especially considering that the two teams have obviously been in regular contact while setting up their transmitter experiment.
But, anyway… as Batman says, now’s not the time to go into all that. For the present, everyone is focused on Reddy’s explanation of how, desperate to return home, he stowed away by “whirling at near-invisible speeds” — a rash act which “upset the mechanism’s delicate balance” — and evidently affected the Earth-Two side of the operation, as well as Earth-One’s.
Of course, that explanation doesn’t solve the riddle of just where our seven heroes have ended up… although, as Doctor Fate points out, a better question might be when they’ve ended up, based on what the heroes soon spy headed their way…
Dr. Fate’s inability to control his magic powers on this particular parallel Earth is never explained within the story; in the “real world”, of course, it can be explained fairly easily as a way for Wein to largely sideline one of the JSA’s most powerful members, who otherwise could make fairly short work of most of the threats our heroes will encounter in this two-part story (the fact that the same ploy also temporarily incapacitates another of the most powerful JSAers, Superman, is an added bonus).
That said, no sooner are Fate and Supes out of the fight than their fellow, less-powerful heroes step into the breach — and for a few moments, it seems likely that they’ll triumph over their “Ratzi” foes. But then…
The preceding one-and-a-third page sequence introduces the Freedom Fighters in a very efficient manner, providing us with a quick impression of their respective abilities as we see them in action.
This page, with its brief cameos by the Blackhawks and Plastic Man, was very mysterious to me back in June, 1973. After all, I knew that DC had published comics featuring these characters not all that long ago — and as far as I knew, none of them were dead. Assuming, then, that these were previously unknown Earth-X versions of the heroes with which I was familiar, what was the link between them and the Freedom Fighters, none of whom I’d heard of before? Unlike Len Wein in his earlier fannish days, I had no idea that Blackhawk and Plastic Man had been published by Quality Comics prior to DC acquiring their trademarks in 1956, or that Uncle Sam and company were originally Quality characters as well. And with the word “Quality” not appearing anywhere in this comic book — not even on the letters page — I was left to wonder. Which was OK, actually; I kind of liked the idea that I still had a lot to learn about the history (both fictional and real-world) of the comic-book universes I loved.
But just because I wouldn’t learn the background of these six superheroes for years to come, there’s no reason for you not to have that information (and, yes, you could just Google their names, but let your humble blogger have his fun, OK?). And so, in the same order in which their origins are recapped here on page 11, these are your Freedom Fighters (note: all illustrations are taken from the characters’ first appearances unless stated otherwise):
The Human Bomb was created by Paul Gustavson, who wrote and drew his debut/origin story in Police Comics #1 (Aug., 1941), and who appears to have continued to craft Roy Lincoln’s adventures through much of the feature’s subsequent five-year run — an unbroken tenure in Police Comics which ended with issue #58 (Sep., 1946).
Doll Man debuted in Feature Comics #27 (Dec., 1939), making him the first shrinking superhero in American comics. The creation of writer-artist Will Eisner, Darrell Dane’s diminutive alter ego battled crime through the next 112 issues of that title, as well as for 47 issues of his own series, which ran from 1941 to 1953; in addition to Eisner, Lou Fine, Reed Crandall, and other artists contributed to the feature. (In his first appearance, Darrell did his thing clad only in a pair of blue trunks; he didn’t get a proper costume until Feature Comics #28, from which the panel shown at right — drawn by either Fine [who designed said costume] or Eisner, or maybe both — is taken.)
The Ray first appeared in Smash Comics #14 (Sep., 1940), in an origin story scripted by Eisner and drawn by Fine. His run in that title lasted for roughly two-and-a-half years, ending in issue #40, with the majority of episodes being drawn by Fine. (While “Happy” Terrill’s costumed identity was colored to appear bare-legged in his premiere outing, per the panel shown at left, the hero sported his more familiar head-to-toe yellow bodysuit in subsequent appearances.)
The Black Condor was another creation of Eisner and Fine, whose strip ran in Crack Comics from issue #1 (May, 1940) through #31 (Oct., 1943). As with the Ray, most of his exploits were illustrated by Fine. (Also like the Ray — and Doll Man, too — his look took a couple of issues to settle into its final shape, since in his debut appearance, the costume of the Black Condor was inexplicably colored red, as you can see in the panel shown at right.) The character’s origin (which you might have noticed Wein’s script rather glosses over) was one of the more implausible of any superhero’s, even by Golden Age standards, as young Richard Grey, Jr. (who would later take on yet a third identity, that of murdered U.S. Senator Thomas Wright) gained the power of flight by watching and imitating the wild condors who took him in as an orphan and raised him. (Yes, Will Eisner was a genius, but that doesn’t mean every idea he ever had was solid gold.)
The Phantom Lady was a product of the same Will Eisner-Jerry Iger studio that developed Doll Man, the Ray, and the Black Condor for Quality, though Eisner isn’t known to have worked directly on her feature himself. Like the Human Bomb (and Plastic Man, too, for that matter), she first appeared in Police Comics #1 (Aug., 1941); in her initial story, drawn by Arthur Peddy, she’s not given an origin, but rather is presented as an already established costumed crimefighter, whose real identity is Sandra Knight, the daughter of a U.S. Senator (the Eisner & Iger folks seem to have had a thing for senators, for some reason). She’d continue to appear in Police Comics through issue #23 (Oct., 1943), after which her publication history took a bizarre (and complicated) turn. Evidently, Jerry Iger decided that his studio — Eisner had left by this time — had as much right to the character as Quality did, and he took her to a rival publisher, Fox Feature Syndicate, where she’d star in eleven issues of Phantom Lady from 1947 to 1949; those stories, most of which were drawn by Matt Baker, are arguably the best remembered of her Golden Age exploits. Later, after Fox folded, another company (Ajax-Farrell Publications) published yet another four issues of a Phantom Lady title in 1954 and 1955; and even later than that, in 1958 and 1963, some unauthorized reprints of the Fox material were brought out by I.W. Publications. Whew!
Uncle Sam — or, at least, the comic-book superhero version of that familiar national icon — made his four-color debut in the aptly named National Comics #1 (Jul., 1940). He was the creation of — who else? — Will Eisner, who both wrote and inked his premiere adventure, though the pencils appear to have been by Dave Berg (yes, the Mad magazine “Lighter Side” guy). Uncle Sam’s crusade for liberty would continue through the next four-and-a-half years in National as well as through eight issues of Uncle Sam Quarterly, with the hero’s last Golden Age appearance coming in National Comics #45 (Dec., 1944).
And there you have your Freedom Fighters, folks… though we should probably note that, until this issue of Justice League of America, these six characters had never appeared together under that name — in fact, they’d never appeared together en masse at all, as Quality never got into the super-team thing. The closest thing to such an assemblage that I’ve been able to come up with in 
my admittedly limited research is a single story that appeared in Uncle Sam Quarterly #2 [Winter, 1941], entitled “The Villains Revolt, or, Who Swiped My Comic Book???” . In this whimsical yarn, written [perhaps by Eisner] completely in verse, and drawn by Berg, an unnamed Villain leads his peers in breaking out from the comic-book page and going on strike. They then proceed to outlaw all superheroes — including (but not limited to) the Black Condor and the Ray — and threaten cartoonists with death if they do so much as draw a handsome face. It’s a bleak situation for America (or at least for Quality Comics readers) until Uncle Sam steps in to save the day (as shown at left). This one’s probably best considered non-canonical as far as any semi-plausible iteration of DC Comics continuity goes (although that status doesn’t prevent it from being entertaining, of course) — but if you want to consider it the first appearance of a prototype version of the Freedom Fighters, go right ahead.
In any event, that’s probably enough about eighty-or-so-year-old comic books, at least for now. We now return to our regularly scheduled fifty-year-old comic book, where, as you’ll remember, there’s a Crisis goin’ on…
At this point, there’s a brief hiccup in the heroic camaraderie, as Black Condor — not without good reason, when you stop to think about it — expresses distrust of these seven strangers who’ve shown up out of nowhere offering to help. “For all we know, you might all be Nazi agents — sent to infiltrate and destroy us!” he tells Doctor Fate. “Why should we trust you?”
“Because I trust them, Condor — that’s why!” retorts Uncle Sam. “Because I have looked into their eyes and seen sincerity there — and a love of freedom as burning as our own!” And that settles the matter; obviously, no one argues with Uncle Sam. And thus, all thirteen heroes quickly and affirmatively respond when Fate asks then to join hands in a circle around the crystal ball:
For the JSA and JLA to continue to sideline the Red Tornado even after the events of JLA #102 is, in the context of the story, pretty unconscionable. But, as you might imagine, it will ultimately serve a purpose in Len Wein’s overall narrative, even more than did his similar sidelining of the then de-powered Wonder Woman of Earth-One, Diana Prince, in last year’s team-up.
While we’ve paused, this is probably as good a time as any to make the observation that if this story were being told today, there’d almost certain be at least a little lip service paid to the question of whether it’s a good idea for the JLA and JSA to interfere so drastically in the affairs of another world before they charge into action — but in 1973, such thoughts never occur to our heroes (and if I’m going to be honest, they probably didn’t occur to me then as a reader, either).
The quartet of super-folk assume (rightly) that the most logical place for the mind-control station is the top of the tower — but how can they get there wihout alerting every single Nazi soldier in the area? “Give me thirty seconds,” says the Ray, “then follow my lead!”
While I’m always confident of artist Dick Dillin’s storytelling abilities whenever I pick up a comic he’s drawn, I don’t generally expect to be so arrested by a particular image that I have to pause in my reading to admire it for a few extra moments. But such is the case with the half-page splash panel at the bottom of page 16; it’s terrific. (Obviously, some credit should also accrue to inker Dick Giordano, who can always be depended on to bring the atmospheric goods when it comes to Batman, as well as to the colorist [Glynis Oliver, according to the Grand Comics Database] who’s made some very effective choices here.)
Once Batman makes the top of the tower, he’s quickly joined by the Human Bomb and by Dr. Fate, and they make short work of the guards, rescuing the Ray in the process. Of course, that still leaves them with the main job they’ve come to do in the first place…
Ah, yes, the old “change partners” bit. If you’ve been reading super-team comic books for any time at all, it’s as comfortable as a favorite old shoe…
“…we completed our mission by reflex action more than anything else!” Upon re-reading this comic for the first time in years some days ago, I was sure that there must be more to it than that. I mean, I can buy that each of the four heroes might individually overcome the Mind-Machine’s influence, but why would they march in lockstep to the device, then raise their arms in unison to smash it? Surely something else must be going on here… but having gone ahead and re-read JLA #108 prior to writing this post, I’m afraid I have to tell you that if Len Wein did have anything else in mind in regards to this resolution, he forgot about it when it came time to script the next issue’s follow-up.
As a connoisseur of the JLA-JSA team-ups, I have to say that as part-one-ending cliffhangers go, this year’s model is pretty underwhelming. After all, we know full well that the missing JLAers and JSAers arent “dead” — heck, at the moment none of them are even in imminent danger — so Green Lantern’s dramatic declaration falls flat. Ah, for the days when Gardner Fox would end such an issue with as many as five cliffhangers, just so an eight-year-old reader could suffer in quiet desperation for the longest six weeks of his life before he was able to find out how the Justice League and Justice Society were possibly going to get out of all those jams.
On the other hand, none of that is likely to have occurred to me back in the summer of ’73 — and even if it did, it didn’t keep me from snatching up Justice League of America #108 when it turned up in spinner racks. Which, as it happens, was a whopping eight weeks later — the longest span yet between chapters of a JLA-JSA team-up extravaganza, due to the title having dropped down to a bi-monthly publication schedule after issue #105, back in February.
Obviously, that means that it’ll also be eight weeks (roughly speaking) before this blog will be covering “Thirteen Against the Earth”. So, you might want to go ahead and mark your calendars now for August 2, 2023; after all, I’d hate for you to miss it.
*Probably no one reading this post needs to have this explained, but just in case: in DC’s pre-Crisis continuity, circa 1973, the JLA lived on Earth-One, the JSA lived on Earth-Two, and the Crime Syndicate (evil counterparts to the Justice League) lived on Earth-Three (see JLA #29-30). There had also been — very briefly — an Earth-A, where the JLA had never come to be, prior to Earth-One’s reality being set aright by the efforts of the JSA (see JLA #37-38). And Flash #179 (May 1968) had introduced Earth-Prime — “our” Earth, where all these folks were just fictional comic-book characters — but hadn’t officially named it.
This is about where I came in. I didn’t buy JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #107 when it came out–my first issue was #109 a few months later. But its cover made such a strong impression on my six-year-old self that I can recall seeing it on the spinner rack and passing it up in favor of SUPERMAN #268 as the very first comic book I ever bought.
Roy Thomas has a great bit on Condor’s origin in All-Star Squadron:
Hawkman: Condor, you look aerodynamically unsound. How do you do it?
BC: Would you believe I was raised by condors in outer Mongolia?
Hawkgirl: See, Hawkman? Ask a silly question …
Thomas’ Secret Origins take a few years later had a radioactive meteor land near the condor flock as a sort-of explanation. He skipped over the fact that Mongolian condors are not a thing.
Uncle Sam got an origin in Secret Origins too, expanded on by John Ostrander in his 1990s Spectre.
Len Wein’s love of Plastic Man is why he made a point of him being dead: it was his response to DC’s Silver Age revival, which Wein hated (this according to one of Twomorrows’ JSA Companions).
All that said, I thoroughly loved this story and that striking Batman panel. I can’t see any reason they’d hesitate to get involved today, though — Nazi Ruled Earth is an open invitation to start hitting things.
All-Star Squadron complicated continuity by making Earth-Two the only world with Golden Age DC heroes (the Fawcett crew still stayed on Earth-S) so Earth-X and Earth-One’s heroes all crossed over at some point. I never liked that idea. And it implies Plastic Man’s death on Earth-X somehow bounced him to Earth-One before he eventually sired the Silver Age Plastic Man.
I’d already seen Black Condor, Ray and Doll Man in DC reprints so I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with this crew. I’d heard of Phantom Lady somewhere, mostly in discussions of her revealing outfit. I didn’t know she’d made the jump to Fox which explains why she showed up in a Fox superheroes anthology.
Just remembered to mention, Star Spangled War Stories #129 has an even more outrageous feral-child tale from “the War that Time Forgot”, an orphan raised by a flock of pterodactyls. Years later, when it looks the Japanese are going to wipe out his battle group, he summons help from “My Brothers With Wings.” I’m quite fond of it.
I remember that story. Great Russ Heath art. Don’t remember how I wound up with that issue, I wasn’t yet buying comics so someone must have given it to me a few years after it was published.
I remember reading somewhere that Scwartz didn’t know DC owned the Quality heroes, which would explain there being no Earth-One counterparts. It also explains Elongated Man’s ridiculous name, though in that case the name eventually suited. Would Ralph have been a more serious hero with a different name?
And Scwartz’s declaration there now be a third team of heroes made these team ups increasingly messy. They took up too many months on the schedule now, were too overstuffed to get meaningful character interactions, and sometimes scraped the bottom of the barrel.
That said, I understand completely how this team up led to a Freedom Fighters solo book. I don’t understand at all why they took the direction they did. They had a world to rebuild do they skipped out for ineffectual and meaningless actions on an alternate Earth?
Oh and an aside: With Ant Man and Atom never even achieving second tier success with a long-term ongoing or feature, I decided once to see if any shrinking character ever had real success in comics. That’s how I learned Doll Man is the only one. Probably an Eisner thing and that they often (according now to the reprints I’ve seen) did what Stan Lee had said they should have done with Ant Man and showcased Doll Man surrounded by usually small items that are enlarged in comparison to him.
It just occurred to me too that it wasn’t necessarily Reddy’s being in the transmitter that effed it up. It was the vibrations he used to hide because the JLA was so routinely dicks to him. Had they treated him better ever this might never have happened.
The only time they had more than a two-issue run was the Earth-S crossover so it didn’t overload the schedule that month.
In a Wonder Woman three-parter by Roy Thomas, the Freedom Fighters are now back on Earth-X where post-Nazi recovery isn’t going smoothly.
Do you recall the issue numbers? I thought I read Thomas’ whole run (I bought even things I didn’t like back then) but I don’t recall this.
WW 291-293. I also like Thomas’ take on “cosmic being shows up to judge if Earth deserves to survive.”
Thanks for the info. I’ll have to look for those issues.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that the Earth-1 Atom was based on Doll Man, which kind of makes sense since he had nothing in common with the Earth-2 Atom other than the name. I may be mis-remembering or read someone’s unproven theory, so if anyone knows …
The first Showcase collection of the Atom’s stories includes the text page from his debut. It says they simply followed the practice of updating Golden Age heroes a la Flash, GL, Hawkman, but as “small guy who’s really strong” was out of date, they gave him new powers to fit the Atom name.
Doesn’t prove Doll Man wasn’t an influence but it seems like a plausible backstory
I don’t remember reading this one when it first came out, which is weird, because I was an avid fan of the JLA/JSA team-up’s back in the day. I do remember reading it a couple of years later in re-print form and enjoying it quite a bit.
I only have two real questions about this issue: Was the creation of the matter transmitter and the dimensional vibrations that keep the JLA and JSA from crossing over to see one another willy-nilly simply an over-wrought plot device to keep the bulk of the two teams from crossing over? Did Wein have any plans to use it in future issues or was it just a one-trick pony? Surely, there were easier ways of limiting the size of the team that didn’t involve dimensional physics, I’m just saying.
Secondly, why have the Earth 2 Superman join in on this little field trip if you were only going to sideline him the moment he got there? I have no memories of part two of this story, so maybe he has a role to play in #108, but it seems weird.
Oh, and I hope the JLA/JSA medical plan paid for Red Tornado’s eventual therapy. What an inferiority complex! I remember thinking back then that if this was DC’s way of giving super-heroes problems like Marvel did, they should just stick to the old way of doing things, because this was pretty ridiculous.
Nit-picks aside, Wein checked all the boxes here and delivered a quality (see what I did there?) installment of an annual tradition. Thanks, Alan.
In addition to the grey hairs this was also the first appearance of Superman`s altered chest shield to further distinguish him from the Earth 1 version
I was just finishing up junior high that year (no such thing as “middle school” in those days), and I loved these team-ups. This one was another really good one. I was among those who got the subsequent series (1976 until the DC Implosion in 1978), but it definitely wasn’t the same. They had one final appearance in DC Comics Presents #62 in 1983.
By the way, Phantom Lady also appeared in All Top Comics #8-17 during the Ajax years, and in Wonder Boy #17-18 during the Farrell years.
Middle School depended on where you lived. Hull, MA, used the middle school system back then.
Not being a DC reader during the ’70s, I missed this little epic, although I recall seeing covers for the Freedom Fighters in later years and have read enough about the Golden Age superheroes to be familiar with all 6 of the “new” superheroes Wein reintroduced to comicdom herein. The Black Condor wins the award for silliest comics origin ever for a mainstream superhero, beating the original Whizzer’s mongoose-bite origin. I wonder if Stan Lee took some perhaps unconscious inspiration in his equally silly origin for the Spidey-baddie Kangaroo. “Hey, I just lived with kangaroos and ate what they ate and that gave me kangaroo jumping powers!” Eisner & Lee both writing with a 4-year-old magical mentality. Eisner was clearly knocking these things out without much deep thought and apparently aiming them at a young, not terribly discriminating audience. Have no idea what Lee may have been thinking, but the quality of his writing during his last few years before moving up to publisher wavered wildly, occasionally showing aspects of inspiration of old, but mostly either recycling old yarns or coming up with rather ridiculous ideas without much thought at all. Easy to understand why Wein chose to brush aside the Black Condor’s Golden Age origin as he understood he was writing for an at least somewhat more sophisticated audience than that Eisner aimed his writing at. I am much more familiar with Phantom Lady’s past as exquisitely drawn by Matt Baker. Sad that he died so relatively young.
Couldn’t help in reading this post to compare Wein’s reviving of G.A. heroes with that of Roy Thomas. Seems Wein had to be more goaded to use them in creating special stories as demanded by his immediate boss, editor Julius Schwartz, while Thomas was practically a G.A. superhero-junkie, eager to make use of them whenever he could without any prodding from Lee or anyone else, although he wouldn’t go all out until he started writing the Invaders a few years later. This tale seemed entertaining enough, although seems to me there’s not a whole lot of depth to any of the characters, although that was all too typical of many stories of the era with so many characters involved.
This tale also brings to my mind Alan Moore’s take on Golden and Silver Age characters from another comics company adopted by DC and set in an alternate reality. Of course, Moore was required to make changes to the characters as what he planned to do to them would render them mostly unusable for future stories within the DC universe. And by that time, Wein himself was the editor of what would become perhaps the most famous superhero comics epic of all time. And Silk Spectre – the mother and the daughter – was at least as much if not more inspired by Phantom Lady as Charlton’s Nightshade.
BTW, I’d think Schwartz’s unwillingness to use the Swastika symbol as the name for the fictional world of the old Quality heroes likely had more to do with his Jewish heritage rather than having lived through WWII. The Nazi Swastika was not just the symbol of any enemy combatant but of an attempt to exterminate everyone who shared his particular heritage — and if there had been a Julius Schwartz counterpart on this alternate Earth in which the Nazis conquered the U.S., that Schwartz would have been killed in one of the death camps, along with Lee, Kirby, Eisner, Simon, Siegel, Schuster and every other American Jew the Nazis could capture. Easily understandable why he wouldn’t want this version of Earth given a name that included a symbol of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
As several industry professionals have observed over the years, origins didn’t use to be that big a deal. Black Condor’s origin is nuts but once the story was told — and probably never brought up again — what difference did it make. Especially with Lou Fine glorious art on the strip.
In All Star Squadron in the 80s pre crisis Roy Thomas established that the Freedom Fighters were originally Earth 2 heroes who crossed over to Earth X.
A couple of thoughts:
—I read this as a grammer school kid, who had seen some Quality comics reprints. I liked this a lot. I would have liked to have seen the Blackhawks used, as Dillin drew that book for years at Quality and then DC.
—I wounder if Wein did not use the Blackhawks since David Cockrum apparently had an idea for using thewm in the LSH at around this time?
—Wein later edited a fine version of Plastic Man in Adventure Comics, done by Pasko and Staton. That, and the post-Gerry Conway, John Albano/Ramona Fradon version were the only attempts to do that strip I thought worked after Jack Cole left.
—The Atom was a top-selling book, up to about 1966, at which point, it just seized, Fox ran out of ideas, Kane left, O’Neil was not very interested. Earlier, in 1973, Maggin and Murphy Anderson did a very clever”Time Pool” Atom story in Detective Comics and Maggin did a good World’s Finest story using The Atom in 1972. Around the time this book hit the stands, Maggin and Dillin did a good Atom/Chonos back-up in Action, However, Maggin passed the strip offf to Marty Pasko, who seemed less interested in that strip than he usually was.
—I’ve read that Schwartz was not aware that DC owned Dollman or Plastic Man. Gil Kane came up with the Atom character in part, based on Dollman, because the Rex the Wonder Dog book and Johnny Thunder (the Western hero from Wesetren Comics) were being cancelled in 1960-”61. The Atom was also based on a Rex the Wonder Dog story Kane did with John Broome where Rex was shrunk to a sub-atomic world.
—Elongated Man started out in John Broome’s initial conception as a bad guy who was less a criminal than an attention seeker, He and Schwartz came up with the twist of making him an attention seeking good guy, Wein had restarted Elongated Man solo stories in the Flash and (later) Detective, He made The Elongated Man, flashy (no pun intended) and attention seeking but also a point-of-view hero, someone more normal. I had the idea Wein wanted EM in the JLA as a point of view character but got bored with him and used RT instead. Old letter cols talking about RT, saw him less as DC’s answer to (say) Spider-Man and more DC’s Charlie Brown.
—I think Marty Pasko’s departure ruined the Freedom Fighters book. I think what Conway and Pasko wanted to do was superheroes on the run in small towns in “Fly-Over Country,” I think Tony Isabella was going there when he was the story-editor. Bob Rozakis did not seem to know how to do that kind of “supergero version of The Fugitive.” Marvel has played with the concept of “smaller market superheroes, but I think Freedom Fighters might have been the place for DC to really play with the idea.
—I think the Transmitters were used in the 1974 and the 1977 JLA-JSA Team-ups.
—I would NOT be amazed if the Avengers-Defenders Clash was Marvel’s attempt to top DC’s 1972 JLA/JSA Crossover.
Another influence on the Atom was Ray Palmer, an SF writer who’d done a subatomic world story back in the pulp days.
I reread the Freedom Fighters a few years ago. Can’t say even Pasko’s work added up to much (https://frasersherman.com/2017/01/31/mediocre-comics-of-my-youth-the-freedom-fighters-sfwapro/)
Good blog post. I appreciated you detailing the origins & histories of the Quality Comics heroes, since I really wasn’t familiar with most of their backgrounds.
I read this story a few weeks ago when I bought the Crisis on Multiple Earths Volume 2: Crisis Crossed collection. Some thoughts:
I enjoyed this story, but I wish it could have been an issue longer. There was so much going on and so many characters that it really needed more room to breathe. I guess that’s true of several JLA-JSA team-ups from the 1970s, though. Once DC added a third team to the mix each year, the ones that were three issues long just seemed to read better. But as you say, at this point in time Justice League of America had become a bi-monthly title, so a three-part story would have eaten up half the year, and as explained by Wein in his 2004 introduction, he and Schwartz didn’t want to do that.
The idea that Wein posits, that the United States and Nazi Germany simultaneously developing the atomic bomb would have prolonged World War II for decades because neither side would have wanted to risk wiping out all life on Earth, struck me as extremely implausible. Hitler very likely suffered from both a narcissistic personality disorder and a borderline personality disorder. He demonstrated time and again that he was a reckless egomaniac, and that he was ready to burn Germany to the ground to further his own ambitions. If Hitler had acquired the atomic bomb, he would almost certainly have used it, not giving a damn about the risk to Germany or the rest of the world.
As Mike comments above, Roy Thomas established in All-Star Squadron that the “Quality” heroes originated on Earth-Two. Thomas used them throughout the first four years of the series, and then in issue #50 they migrated en masse to Earth X. I feel like Thomas made things unnecessarily complicated this way. It’s likely that he really wanted to use the Freedom Fighters, and that’s why he did it that way. But it’s strange that Thomas, who was really good at remembering continuity details, seemingly forgot that when Doctor Fate and the other JSA members meet the Freedom Fighters in JLA #107, they don’t have the slightest clue who they are, which would seem to rule out them having met and fought side-by-side on Earth-Two thirty years earlier.
Oh, yeah, I wonder if that chamber housing the giant computer that’s “countless times larger than it appeared from outside” was another of Wein’s weird ideas that never gets explained, or if he scripted Batman making that observation to cover for the fact that Dillin drew an impossibly-immense room located at the top of the Eifel Tower. We’ll probably never know.
I have some other thoughts, but I’ll share them in a couple of months when you do your blog post about JSA #108.
While this didn’t occur to me as a teen, I think the alt.timeline is even more off than that: the atom bomb didn’t affect our victory in Europe at all and the Axis wasn’t anywhere close to developing one by D-Day. Possibly Uncle Sam is just wrong about where the timelines diverged.
While it’s true GL and Flash can cross at any time, it doesn’t follow most of the League can do it. Even Superman doesn’t have Flash’s vibratory skills for instance. When the two Atoms team up, Ray specifically mentions using a special dimensional vibrator to reach Earth-Two; maybe that’s the basis that eventually became these transmitter cubes.
I just assumed they were using them in a lot of the later crossover, particularly when we see the heroes just hanging out in the JLA Satellite.
Good points about the one-on-one team-ups and individual heroes’ limitations, but since the “only at certain times of the year” business had never come up in any of the previous full-team crossover events (“hey, aren’t we lucky this crisis is happening in June?”), I’m going to stick with thinking of it as a contrivance. 😉
Yes, that’s a fair point.
The annual JLA/JSA team up was the high light of the comic buying year for me. I bought this when it came out , but for me the team ups had lost the spark when FOX and Sekowsky left after the 1967 adventure. Dillin was ok when inked by Sid Greene , but when he left I never quite enjoyed the JLA as much and stopped buying JLA in the late seventies.
I have fond memories of this three team crossover and have reread it more times than I can count. When DC revived the Quality characters I at least had familiarity with some of them thanks to DC’s early ’70s practice of reprinting a lot of Golden Age stories:
https://www.comics.org/issue/25175/cover/4/
https://www.comics.org/issue/25809/cover/4/
To me, JLA 107-108 was a letdown from the previous Justice Society teamups I had read to that point (Gardner Fox’s grand finale with issues 64-65, the death of Larry Lance/Black Canary leaving for Earth-1 in issues 73-74, the Spectre saving Earths 1-2 in issues 82-83, the two Robins starring in issues 92-93 and of course Wein’s debut with issues 100-102). As it turned out, it would be several years before I enjoyed another JLA-JSA story (Shazam in 135-137).
I loved the upcoming Sandy -centric story but the Earth-Prime crossover wasn’t so hot. Though I did enjoy Elliot Maggin’s put-down “I love your writing as much as i like having an incontinent yak sit on my lunch.”
Superheroes punching Nazis in the face never gets old. #7 on my all-time countdown, btw—cheap plug: https://crustymud.paradoxcomics.com/the-all-time-jla-jsa-team-up-countdown/3/
I read the second part of this story right about the same time that I bought and read Steranko’s History of Comics, so I was primed to see the Quality characters in action.
and I have to chime in that the Phil Foglio/Hilary Barta Plastic Man mini was very well done, as was the Kyle Baker version. Foglio has been about the only writer in the past few decades able to regularly and successfully pull off the whimsical DC characters like Angel and the Ape and Stanly and his Monster.
Loved his Angel and the Ape, particularly for its use of DC’s worst (IMHO) character, the Green Glob. Stanley and His Monster was a hoot too. Didn’t know he’d done Plas but I’ll check it out.
Hi Alan & the rest,
I only found out about this wonderful site several months ago, and I’ve been racing through the previous posts chronologically in order to jump on at this point. I was born in 1966, so my first memories of comic books were from the ones that my older brothers had bought in 1970 and 1971. The first comic book that I remember buying by myself was JLA # 102 in 1972, which introduced me to so many super-heroes right off the bat, as well as the triple-team concept. As a 6-year-old, my brothers explained to me why there was a second Green Lantern and Wonder Woman, as well as a Robin, wearing different costumes. I found the Earth-One/Earth-Two concept to be fairly easy to understand, and I sympathize with Roy Thomas’s dismay about the concept’s demise at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths.
I missed the next two issues, but then I picked up issue #’s 105 and 106, with the JLA taking on Elongated Man and the Red Tornado as back-to-back new members. JLA # 107 was very memorable with the re-introduction of the Freedom Fighters, but for some reason, I didn’t buy the next issue. My favorite JSA member was Hourman, so I was disappointed that he only made a minor appearance, and the Sandman was terrific. My favorite Freedom Fighters were the Black Condor and Phantom Lady, and I was pleased several years later when the team got its own book. I’ve always been curious about Len’s implication that FDR having a fatal heart attack in 1944 likely resulted in that year’s presidential election going to the Republicans with the outcome that the Nazis won World War Two.
Len Wein will always be my favorite JLA writer, as his run was filled with so many fabulous super-heroes, the return of super-villains, characterization, and continuity. Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano did solid work on the art, setting my standards of how DC’s heroes should be drawn. Lastly, Nick Cardy’s artwork evokes an air of nostalgia for me for DC’s covers in the early 1970’s.
This was my golden age of the JLA!
Welcome aboard, Doctor Jay! Glad to have you.
This one should have been in the shops in August in Scotland as, at that time, it took about two months for comics to be shipped across the Atlantic. Being August, it was school holiday time, I was at home on the farm so I wasn’t able to go out at lunch time to check out if the new comics for that month had arrived yet. I had to wait until my mum decided she needed to go shopping in one of the nearby villages that I knew sold comics to be able to tag along and get my monthly fix. Sadly I couldn’t find a copy of this one (I did manage to get a copy years later) which was galling as I was able to get a copy of every other superhero comic that DC published that month (going by Mike’s Amazing World). I think I knew that the issue would contain the Quality comics heroes, maybe from an advert in JLA 106 or a comment in that issue’s letter page. I was so disappointed to miss it as I had really enjoyed the reprints of Phantom Lady, the Ray, the Black Condon and the Dollman that had appeared in the Super-Spectaculars and in Wanted. Re-reading it again here brings back happy memories of the first time I read it once I had it tracked down. Wien, Dillon and Giordano were all on the top of their game.
This is a very minor glitch, but you may want to correct it. You have the word “sincerity” in boldface, except for the last letter.
Thanks, Pat.