In August, 1973, the second half of the 11th annual team-up event between the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America led off with a cover (by Nick Cardy) that clearly called back to a particular predecessor — namely, the cover that had graced the second half of the 5th such summertime event, way back in July, 1967. And why not? That Carmine Infantino-Murphy Anderson number is an all-time classic, which, aside from its own individual excellence, arguably established the motif of “two line-ups of superheroes charging each other” that has been a staple of super-team comic book covers ever since.
That said, it rankled me just a bit at the time — and, what the hell, I guess it still does — that to make the idea work in the context of JLA #108’s story by writer Len Wein and artists Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano, editor Julius Schwartz had to fudge the cover copy a bit. After all, there aren’t just “two different Earths” represented among the eight costumed stalwarts heading towards blows whom we see on the cover above — there are three. The JLA’s Earth-One, the JSA’s Earth-Two, and — as had been introduced to DC Comics’ readers just one issue before — Earth-X. A world inhabited by yet another team of heroes, newly dubbed “the Freedom Fighters”, who had been published during the Golden Age of Comic Books by DC’s now-defunct rival, Quality Comics… and also a world where the Nazis had won World War II.
So, yeah, the cover would have been considerably more accurate (and less irksome to nit-pickers like your humble blogger) if Schwartz had found a way to convey that we have a pair of Earths represented in the left-hand line of super-doers, versus just one on the right. But y’know what? It’s still a solid graphic, and I suspect it did the job it was intended to, fifty years ago — which was to persuade any still-undecided prospective buyer to go ahead and fork over their twenty cents and take this puppy home. After all, DC didn’t need to do a sales job on my sixteen-year-old self, who’d been buying the JLA-JSA team-ups ever since 1966, and who would have snapped this up even if Nick Cardy had drawn a single wilting leaf of lettuce as the cover image.
All things considered, maybe it would be best if, after half a century, I let this go. So why don’t we just go ahead and turn to this comic’s first page…
With all due respect to Uncle Sam, we’re going to skip his one-page recap of JLA #107 (if you need a refresher on what’s happened previously, the preceding link awaits), and get right to the action… joining the second of the three mini-teams our thirteen heroes split into last issue as they prepare to take on (and out) one of the Nazis’ nefarious mind-controlling machines:
One question that the previous issue had left unaddressed was: if Nazi Germany was the victor of the Second World War, what happened to the other Axis powers — Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy? Here we have the answer, at least as regards one of Germany’s allies (and I’d say it’s more than likely that the Earth X versions of Mussolini and company didn’t fare much, if any, better than did that world’s Tojo and other Japanese leaders).
Unsurprisingly, the four superheroes overpower the Nazi guards in no time at all…
Like its Paris-based counterpart in the preceding issue, the Fujiyama mind-control station is a talkative contraption; and so, as they advance, the heroes overhear it musing to itself about how its sibling device fell to another set of “abnormal” “humanoids” with “superior capacities” (that would be Batman, Doctor Fate, the Ray, and the Human Bomb to you and me) — which means “a more basic means of restraint” is called for…
As we noted in our discussion of JLA #107 back in June, this two-part storyline represents the first time that anyone at DC had ever portrayed the Earth-Two Superman as being in any way different from his Earth-One counterpart. As shown in this sequence, the differences extend beyond the merely visual (i.e., some white hair at Supes’ temples, and a simpler version of his “S” shield design), as Wein’s script presents a somewhat more brash and impulsive Man of Tomorrow than readers were used to in 1973. It’s a subtle but welcome nod to how DC’s flagship hero was generally characterized in the early years of the Golden Age. (Green Arrow’s mildly sarcastic response to the results of Superman’s hasty actions in the panel that follows is another nice touch.)
It takes a couple of moments, but the fruits of Doll Man’s whispered plan soon become evident, as the mind-control machine announces that it’s suffered an internal malfunction, causing it to lose control of its actions…
Last issue, Batman and crew had experienced a similar result after their “victory” in Paris — so there’s definitely a pattern here.
It may or may not be a coincidence, but five months after this issue came out, the 109th issue of Marvel Comics’ Daredevil (written by Steve Gerber, with art by Bob Brown and Don Heck) had a similar bit with Adolf Hitler’s face having been added to Mount Rushmore. (Just FYI, Dr. Seuss appears to have had the idea first, per a cartoon published just five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.)
“By Juniper, that man is a peculiar sort’a fella…” More peculiar than your old comrade Plastic Man, Sam? Really?
Once again, the Nazi soldiers provide only a few panels’ worth of exercise for our heroic foursome before the show’s over. “Okay,” says the Elongated Man. “What do we do for an encore?”
But hitting it again… and again… and again still isn’t enough to put as much as a dent in the mind-control machine. This mystery sets EM’s nose to twitching, as such mysteries are wont to do — and before long, the Ductile Detective arrives at a solution:
The Red Tornado at first watches in stunned disbelief as his JLA and JSA colleagues begin slugging it out with their erstwhile allies in the Freedom Fighters, but then he realizes what must actually be happening here…
Hitler tries to convince Reddy that his cause is already lost; within moments, his comrades will have killed each other, and he’ll be alone. “But I sense in you a kindred spirit,” the Führer continues, “one who will consider this one chance I offer you…”
It’s a clever as well as an unexpected twist (well, I at least didn’t see it coming, back in 1973) that the Nazis, having won the war, ultimately were losers themselves, with their “Master Race” having been supplanted by an artificial intelligence of their own design.
These android Nazis don’t fare any better against the Red Tornado solo than their flesh-and-blood compatriots did against the three groups of heroes earlier in our tale. (Or have all the Nazi soldiers we’ve seen throughout this story been androids? It’s not entirely clear.) Reddy takes them out with a few whirlwind punches, and then it’s back to the matter at hand…
Yeah, it seems a pretty large leap to assume that technology allowing its users to “communicate… over great distances” on a single Earth could be tweaked to enable communications across the dimensional barriers between multiple Earths, but what do I know? I’m not a comic-book physicist. And, anyway, how else are we going to get our guys home with less than a page of story left to work with?
And so ends 1973’s Justice League-Justice Society team-up event. If it doesn’t feel as epic as the previous year’s — well, you can hardly expect it would, considering that for that one, Wein and Dillin had a whole extra issue (not to mention an additional twenty heroes) to work/play with. It’s still a highly enjoyable super-team adventure; and for my money, it actually has it all over its predecessor in terms of the efficiency and coherence of its plotting. As ever, your mileage may vary.
The concluding panels of JLA #108 suggest that the Freedom Fighters will meet the JLA and JSA again one day, and I feel fairly sure that most fans at the time (myself included) assumed that, having taken the Quality Comics toys out of the box, DC was hardly going to put them away again to molder for another couple of decades. Surely, the Freedom Fighters would return; the only real questions were, 1) when; and 2) how it would be accomplished, seeing as how they were based on an alternate Earth that was (or at least felt like it was) even more remote from the DC Universe’s mainstream than the Justice Society’s Earth-Two.*
The answer to the first question turned out to be December, 1975 — that being the year that DC released the first issue of Freedom Fighters — while the answer to the second was simple (though difficult to swallow, at least for this then-eighteen-year-old fan); the six Quality heroes simply pulled up stakes and relocated from Earth-X to Earth-One. Apparently, all of the challenges of rebuilding civil society following their triumph over the Nazi AI in 1973 had been met, and the heroes were now “bored”. That never made sense to me; nor did it seem likely that five of the six characters (we’ll make an exception for Uncle Sam, who’s supposed to be the living personification of the American spirit, or whatever) had no family or other personal ties that would induce them to stay at home (to say nothing of the legal nightmare involved in establishing an official identity on a whole new Earth where you didn’t exist). Between those concerns, and the fact that I wasn’t particularly excited about any of the creators assigned to the new title, I was disinclined to pick up Freedom Fighters when it came out; to this day, I have yet to read a single issue. (If you’re reading this and feel that I’ve been missing out all these years, please feel free to take me to school in the comments section below).
Freedom Fighters lasted for fifteen bi-monthly issues before succumbing to low sales in 1978. Outside of a single team-up with Superman in DC Comics Presents #62 (Oct., 1983), their next port of call was All-Star Squadron, Roy Thomas’ series set on Earth-Two in the 1940s, featuring just about every single costumed hero that DC presently had the rights to publish (with the notable exception of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel and company). That included the Quality characters, which didn’t strike my younger self as a problem at first, since the DC multiverse already had any number of doppelgängers scattered across its various Earths. But then a 1983-84 storyline that ran from issues #31 to #35 (with a follow-up in 1985’s #50) revealed that, no, these Earth-Two versions of Uncle Sam, Phantom Lady, and company were the same ones previously believed to have been natural-born Earth-Xers — that, in fact, the heroes we knew as the Freedom Fighters had emigrated from Earth-Two to Earth-X to fight the Axis, following Sam’s discovery that that world had no superdoers of its own. Okay, so maybe that was a better reason for swapping worlds than boredom, but my other objections to the Freedom Fighters’ previous (or future, depending on your perspective) relocation to Earth-One still applied. Not to mention that this continuity implant contradicted the handling of the group in JLA #107 and #108, where Superman, Dr. Fate, and Sandman clearly didn’t know these folks from Adam. For this reader, at least, it all served to make the Freedom Fighters’ history even more of a convoluted mess — and for no reason that I could see, except that Golden Age megafan Roy Thomas really, really wanted to play with all the toys in that particular box.
And, of course, it all turned out to be a moot point, as DC’s 1985-86 Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries ended by mashing all the company’s multiple Earths together, eradicating the decades-long-war aspect of the Freedom Fighters that made their history unique — and that gave these particular six heroes a reason to have come together as a team in the first place. Unsurprisingly, most post-Crisis appearances of the Freedom Fighters over the next decade or so didn’t deal much with them as a team at all, as DC introduced new versions of the Black Condor, Phantom Lady, and the Ray that had little connection with each other. The most memorable “solo” Freedom Fighters-related project was probably 1997’s two-issue Uncle Sam miniseries by Steve Darnall (co-plotter and scripter) and Alex Ross (co-plotter and painter) — though since that project was produced under the Vertigo imprint and made no reference to the larger DC Universe continuity, you could make the argument that this wasn’t the same Uncle Sam at all (it wasn’t as though Will Eisner had created that patriotic icon out of whole cloth back in 1940, right?).
The most fully realized treatment of the Freedom Fighters as a team concept to be published by DC between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Flashpoint (2011) was likely that introduced in the pages of the 2006-07 eight-issue miniseries Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters. “Based on ideas and concepts developed by Grant Morrison”, written by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, and drawn by Daniel Acuña, this take gave us an entirely new set of folks inheriting the identities of the previous team (with the predictable exception of Uncle Sam, naturally). Originally a black ops unit of the secret U.S. military organization S.H.A.D.E. (whose acronym was very much on the nose), the team was eventually recruited by Sam to serve a higher calling. Their initial miniseries was followed by a second (2007-08), also eight issues, and then by nine issues of an ongoing series, entitled simply Freedom Fighters. But then, in 2011, both the title and the team were both swept away by Flashpoint (along with roughly 95% of the rest of DC continuity). A few of the FF heroes resurfaced in the rebooted DC universe that followed, but don’t seem to have made much of a splash before sinking back into limbo (as with the 1970s Freedom Fighters series, your humble blogger didn’t read any of these “New 52”-branded efforts, and thus can’t speak to their quality).
Of course, much of what was presumably lost forever in the tidal wave of Flashpoint has been slowly drifting back ever since 2016’s “Rebirth” initiative, and it’s anyone’s guess as to the status of any of the heroes collectively known as the Freedom Fighters in what passes for DC Universe continuity these days — as far as the main “Prime Earth” reality is concerned, at any rate. Intriguingly, most of the team’s current juice seems to be centered on a reconstituted Earth-X — or, as it’s generally referred to these days, “Earth-10”. Again, Grant Morrison has taken the lead as “ideas and concepts” person here. Building on a notion they’d first introduced at the end of DC’s 2006-07 limited series 52 (and then developed somewhat further in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond [2008-09), in 2015’s The Multiversity: Mastermen Morrison gave us a darker, grimmer version of Earth-X than we’d ever seen before — one where the single most critical event was the arrival of a Kryptonian rocketship in the German-occupied Sudentenland of 1938. Nazi scientists had adapted that ship’s advanced alien technology to help the Axis win the war, and the vessel’s lone occupant, the infant Kal-L, had grown up to ensure the Nazis’ continuing dominance as Overman, the leader of a whole group of Justice League analogues called the New Reichsmen. That made for a considerably more daunting challenge for Earth-10’s Freedom Fighters than the Nazi soldiers (whether androids or humans) and even the mind-controlling AI their pre-Crisis counterparts had had to deal with — and one that you have to imagine would (or at least should) have taken the FF and their JLA and JSA allies more than just a couple of issues to overcome, had they had to face such, back in the summer of ’73.
Morrison’s ideas clearly provided a great deal of inspiration for The CW television network’s 2017 “Arrowverse” crossover, “Crisis on Earth-X” (the four-part event’s having lifted its umbrella title directly from JLA #107 notwithstanding), which found the heroic leads of Supergirl, Arrow, Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow going up against the likes of Overgirl and Dark Arrow (see promotional art by Phil Jimenez at right) — and allying with a group of Freedom Fighters centered around the Ray (who also appeared in the animated spinoff webseries, Freedom Fighters: The Ray). Not long after that, back in the comics
, Morrison’s Earth-10 provided the setting for 2019-20’s Freedom Fighters, a 12-issue miniseries written by Robert Venditti and drawn by Eddy Barrows. This story of the modern-day battle of a “new” team of Freedom Fighters against the Nazis who won World War II ended with the heroes victorious; whether that triumph represents the end of their story remains to be seen.
It’s interesting to speculate on the reasons for the current popularity of the “Earth-X” concept in comics and ancillary media. Is it simply that the familiar trope of superheroes punching Nazis never really goes out of style? Or does the theme of resistance to fascism on American soil resonate more in our present era than it might have twenty or thirty years ago? Whatever the case, it seems likely that the Freedom Fighters will keep on punching, for a long time to come.
*Of course, being stuck on an alternate Earth probably wouldn’t have given pause to Brave and the Bold editor Murray Boltinoff, or to that title’s primary writer, Bob Haney, both of whom thought nothing of pairing the JLA’s Batman with JSAers like Wildcat or the Spectre within its pages, without ever bothering to explain how they could be sharing an adventure on the same Earth. Given enough time, the Freedom Fighters might well have eventually turned up on “Earth-B” — though things ultimately didn’t turn out that way, for various reasons.
I had almost forgotten about Alex Ross’ work on U.S. After the mega hits Marvels and Kingdom Come, U.S. seemed to be a misfire, much like Frank Miller’s Give Me Liberty with Martha Washington, following his string of successes. I guess Americana isn’t a big seller.
I like the cover for JLA #108, but super team books didn’t interest me unless a stellar artist like Neal Adams – or Alex Ross – were working on it.
I definitely think we’ve come to take Nazis more seriously. Looking back, the Red Skull in the Silver Age (for example) didn’t care about Nazi ideology much; Steve Englehart portrayed him as a true believer which looked nuts at the time — how could anyone still believe in that Nazi bullshit? Siiiigh.
No, you didn’t miss a thing with the Freedom Fighters. I bought every issue but even then I could sense it wasn’t playing on the same level as the best stuff of the era (https://frasersherman.com/2017/01/31/mediocre-comics-of-my-youth-the-freedom-fighters-sfwapro/). For the record, Roy Thomas in his brief Wonder Woman run with Gene Colan sent them back to Earth-X, which had collapsed into fresh warfare and anarchy.
I’m totally cool with Roy getting to have all the heroes on Earth-2 but I hated his idea nobody else had them (except Earth-S for the Marvels). It wasn’t necessary and it mangled continuity and it took some of the novelty out of Earth Prime, the World Without Heroes. Plastic Man’s Silver/Bronze Age continuity was already a mess and Thomas made it murkier (https://atomicjunkshop.com/it-is-easier-for-a-camel-to-pass-through-the-eye-of-a-needle-than-to-untangle-the-continuity-of-plastic-man/)
They came to Earth One as superheroes, with no secret identities to speak of on their new Earth, so their superhero lives were their whole lives. This meant their stories were almost completely wall-to-wall superhero action. As a little kid I loved this, and these happy memories likely color my judgment today. So it’s hard for me to objectively say how “great” their comics were, but I’d guess it should still be fun reading (or at least inoffensive reading) for anyone who’s curious.
Makes you wonder why the FF left Earth X to go to Earth 1 instead of back home to Earth 2.
I also liked the idea of Condor gaining some telepathic powers and Doll Man gaining telekinetic powers due to crossing over to Earth 1, which I believe was the original explanation for Black Canary’s powers when she came to Earth 1, if I recall correctly.
I don’t think Wein gets enough credit–at at time when “comics logic” was still very much a thing–for coming up with these wild, grandiose stories featuring up to twenty wild grandiose heroes and making them make sense. He didn’t have to; in 1973 we were still in a place where most comics could hand-wave any deus-ex-machina it wanted or needed to make a particular story work and their editors would just shrug and say, “OK.” Sure, the bit with the terrestrial communications device suddenly being able to cross dimensional space was a reach, but at least Wein tried to explain it. A lesser writer would have simply made such a thing happen, and usually in a way that left you asking, “then why didn’t they do that at the very beginning of the story?”
Dillin and Giordano do a nice job on the art, though Giordano is such a “heavy” inker that it’s really difficult to know just what the original pencils looked like in the first place. I was also surprised that the JLA/JSA/FF managed to completely defeat the Nazi’s of Earth-X in their first meeting. I guess nobody figured at the time that Earth-X had any staying power and that any other writers would want to revisit it, which is a ridiculous idea because there’s never been a concept developed by one writer that another writer can’t come along and totally improve or completely screw up.
Thanks, Alan. I wasn’t a huge FF fan back in the day, but I’d check in on them from time to time and it’s nice to go back to where it all started. I had this book when it came out, but it’s been a loooong time since I read it.
I always thought Julie Schwartz had a good idea for Uncle Sam, as used here and in the 1976 Strange Sports Stories Superneroes/Supervillans Basball game story. Uncle Sam as a decent, honorable . . . and fairly eccentric (and fairly powerful) , , , old gent.
I also liked how they used the Human Bomb in that Wonder Woman “Our World at War” story about 20 years ago: a tough old guy who had been living with his powers and limitations for decades and was used to them.
The rest are more “blank slates,” Who is the Black Condor as a person: did he become the Senator he posed as, given his background as someone raised by Condors and Monks(!!)?
I also thought Marty Pasko was getting ready to take the Freedom Fighters into a direction Marvel would start to explore in the mid-1980s: what are superheroes like in smaller markets (Steve Skeates touched on it with his character the Crusader in Detroit in the last issue of Aquaman in 1970)?
I also always wondered how Doll Man and the Atom and Plastic Man and the Elongated Man and Black Condor and Hawkman might interact and relate? For example, could Doll Man’s power to shrink (that was apparently inherant to him) help Ray Palmer understand why he alone could shrink using the White Dwarf Star matter lense without blowing up?
I think these are characters with vast potential that people are still figuring out how to use.
On seeing the cover of this issue I also thought of JLA 56, one of the first comics I ever bought. I had been intrigued by the individual Freedom Fighters since I first encountered them in the Super-Spectaculars of the previous year and so I was very happy to see them brought into the the current DC fold. I was delighted when the appeared in their own comic but agree that, with hindsight, the series was nothing much to write home about. One point worth mentioning is their unofficial crossover with The Invaders in early 1977. They appeared as The Crusaders in the Roy Thomas written stories in Invaders 14 & 15 and then the Invaders returned the compliment by appearing also as The Crusaders in the Bob Rozakis written stories in Freedom Fighters 8 & 9.
The team hold a special place in my heart and I have picked up every issue of both their solo titles and the various iterations of their team books over the years.
I have a complete run of The Invaders, so I’d like to pick up those two issues of Freedom Fighters for the other half of the stealth crossover.
Roy Thomas also gave us a Golden Age Aquaman because he was determined to play with as many superhero toys as possible, something RT himself would later concede was a foolish idea.
This JSA team-up is number 7, btw, on my own all-time countdown (cheap plug): https://crustymud.paradoxcomics.com/the-all-time-jla-jsa-team-up-countdown/3/
Plug away, crustymud! 🙂
He mentioned later in Young All-Stars that Neptune Perkins’ origin — involving Arthur Gordon Pym and Captain Nemo — would have gone to the Golden Age Aquaman to make him stand out more from Earth-One’s.
Not sure what you mean by Thomas giving us a Golden Age Aquaman. He already existed with a totally different origen.
Aquaman had stories that were published during the Golden Age, but there was never an Earth-2 version of the character. Aquaman was always considered strictly an Earth-1 character until Thomas referenced an Earth-2 version in All-Star Squadron a quarter century after the establishment of Earth-2.
True, but it was based on the Golden Age origin — scientist using Atlantean technology to let his son breathe water — so thinking of it as the Earth-2 version is hardly a quantum leap.
For me, it was no leap at all. I read the first Aquaman story when it was reprinted in Secret Origins #7 back in 1974. Since it was a Golden Age story and Aquaman had a different origin, it was, to me, clearly the Earth 2 Aquaman. Since he was not a member of the JSA, we simply hadn’t seen him in the Silver Age or later.
This two-part story is a good demonstration of both Dick Dillin’s strengths and weaknesses. Dillin was extremely good at laying out clear pages with action that flowed smoothly, even when numerous characters were present in a scene. However, he did not have any particular aptitude for designing characters, costumes & technology, as seen by the fact that, just like every other robot & computer he ever drew during his stint on JLA, the Earth-X Nazi mind control machines look a lot like giant box-y wind-up toy robots. (Gene Colan had a similar problem, with all of his robots looking basically the same.) It does give me more of an appreciation for individuals such as Kirby, Ditko, Cockrum and Perez, as each of them were very talented storytellers *and* character designers.
I’ve never read the Freedom Fighters series that came out in the mid-1970s, but most of the people who have commented on it in the past have not spoken about it in favorable terms. The general consensus seems to be that moving the FF from Earth-X, where they could have been show in the unique role of helping rebuild a world that had been ravaged by three and a half decades of continuous warfare, to Earth-One, where they were just another superhero team on a world that was already teaming with superheroes, was a baffling choice, and squandered the potential for the series to actually tell different stories and have its own unique identity. In interviews, Ramona Frandon, who was the first regular penciler on Freedom Fighters, has stated that it was the only assignment in her very lengthy career that she flat-out told the editor that she wanted to be taken off of, because she couldn’t stand working on it. Not exactly stellar praise.
Following the exodus of the Freedom fighters from Earth-Two to Earth-X in All-Star Squadron #50, Roy Thomas eventually conceded in the letters pages of that series that he probably would have been better off never using the Quality heroes in the first place.
There were three miniseries during the New 52 period featuring The Ray, Phantom Lady and Doll Man, and Human Bomb. All of them were written by Gray & Palmiotti, who seemingly wanted to set up a New 52 version of the Freedom Fighters, but I don’t know if they ever actually had the opportunity to seal the deal and assemble the characters as a team. Human Bomb had incredible artwork by Jerry Ordway. I reviewed it on my blog when it first came out:
https://benjaminherman.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/comic-book-reviews-human-bomb/
I have always thought that Gerry Conway, just launched it when he became an editor at DC when team books were big. He probably did not have a clear idea of how to do it and probably got his chnce to go back to Marvel as EIC around that time.
For all of that, I thought Pasko or Isabella could have done something interesting with it, if they sayed on the book,
Regarding the Batman team-ups with Earth-2 heroes in The Brave and the Bold. My friends and I always presumed that was the Earth-2 Batman. The reason he had the circle on his uniform in those stories was artistic license, and so DC didn’t receive a million or so letters pointing out the error in Batman’s uniform if they left it out.
When I read the Spectre and Wildcat stories in Brave and the Bold in the 70s I just assumed they were the Earth One counterparts. I believe a later Justice League/Justice Society story (the one that retconned Black Canary as her own daughter) said the Spectre was possessing the Earth One Jim Corrigan.
I don’t think he was possessing as much as taking Corrigan’s shape — unlike the Silver Age Spectre stories, Corrigan in the Fleischer stories has no physical form separate from the Ghostly Guardian.
America vs. the Justice Society confirmed that it was the Earth-2 Spectre operating on Earth-One.
It occurs to me that perhaps Len Wein may have been influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that film Hal the AI computer decides that “he” or “it” if you prefer can operate the spaceship more efficiently by eliminating the humans.
it’s a common trope though. It could as easily have been Colossus: The Forbin Project or the Legion’s battle against Computo.
It seems that “life” imitates art with some of the current problems of A.I. efficiently dealing with human problems.
I was just 7 years old when this team-up came out. I look back fondly at JLA # 107, which I got at the time, and yet I don’t have the same feeling about JLA # 108, which I didn’t read until several years later. It’s only now that I think I understand why. For me, all of the special elements had been about the set-up in the first part: the Transmatter Devices, Red Tornado as a stowaway who got both teams over to Earth-X, the Quality heroes, and the alternate history of FDR’s premature death leading to the Nazi victory in World War Two. To me, the three sections on the mini-teams lacked all of the suspense that I thought was so exciting in the 1972 team-up with the Seven Soldiers of Victory. I did enjoy the Freedom Fighters themselves; they were colorful and had neat powers. I began picking up their own series with the Crusaders team-up, and simultaneously did the same with the Invaders. I was very disappointed that more wasn’t done with Hourman and Starman, who I mentioned in Alan’s blog about the previous issue have always been my favorite JSAers. Lastly, in a reverse situation from some of you others: I found the cover to # 108 to be quite striking, so I was really intrigued several years later when I first laid eyes on # 56. Great job, Alan! It feels great to finally join the club with the rest of you!
Happy to have you, Jay!
I was 8 when this hit the stands and had to read a friend’s copy as I could never find it on the racks. It hit all the right buttons for me at that age, chock full of colorful super-characters and revolving around the concept of a Nazi-dominated Earth (there seemed to be a glut of films and fiction at that time dealing with WW2 and/or a modern resurgence of Nazism).
I was excited to buy FF#1 as I liked the characters and it was a relatively rare thing in those days to be able to get in on the ground floor of a book at DC. But I never made it past the first couple of issues because I found the writing and art unappealing and without Nazi-bashing as their raison d’etre, there seemed no good reason for these guys to exist, especially on an Earth that was already overloaded with heroes.
A couple of years ago I was able to finally track down the entire run and I can tell you, you didn’t miss a thing. It’s another clumsy example of DC trying to ape Marvel with hand-wringing and self-doubting heroes constantly being misunderstood and unfairly accused of crimes; the hole keeps getting deeper and the series ends without resolution. That sort of grafted-on pseudo-Marvel stuff was a pox on 70s DC in general but it was especially inappropriate for a group of Golden Age characters, including no less a personage than Uncle Sam himself, the living embodiment of the American spirit. I like Ramona Fradon a lot, but she’s ill-served by the inks here and she was right to bail asap.
Now, the raison d’etre for the trip to Earth-X is because the Red Tornado wants to return to Earth-Two, which is understandable. (Just because you’re John Smith now and have met Kathy Sutton, you spent several years on that world.)
Yet he returns to Earth-One with the Justice Leaguers at the end of the 1973 crossover and in the remaining issues I read (#109-115: I don’t know why I stopped reading the title, but I did), he never again mentions (or thinks) of going back to the world occupying the same space but vibrating at a different speed.
Has anyone ever accounted for this? It didn’t upset me as much as the Black Knight deciding to remain in the 12th Century after the Avengers and Defenders warred (er, CLASHED!), but someone should have had Reddy muse that while Earth-Two was a good place to be from, Earth-One was now his home.
(Pasko sending the Freedom Fighters to Earth-One seems reminiscent of Mike Baron discarding the lovely Nanda-Parbat-folks-in-our world set-up the 1980s *Deadman* limited series gave us when he wrote the character in *Action Comics Weekly.* To rewrite Charles Evans Hughes, it is true that we have a continuity, but the continuity is what the current scripter says it is.)
I hope John Smith eventually found a better job than being Bruce Gordon’s lab assistant…
I agree that it seems odd that Reddy simply gave up on returning to Earth-Two without any mention of it in the story. If it was addressed later, I’m not aware of it.
I was thinking of that after Sparrow made his comment. You’re right, they just ignored it.
Along those lines, I always thought it strange that Black Canary didn’t make a point to be around for the JSA crossovers. She was an Earth-2 native and these were people she knew for years. Then again, DC she seemed to ignore her Earth-2 origins and her late husband fairly quickly after joining the JLA.
Of course DC later did a retcon on her and we discovered that she was in fact the daughter of the original Black Canary and Larry Lance.
But she had no memory of that and believed herself the original, so I think Marcus’ point holds.
I wasn’t really disagreeing with Marcus, though the mind is a weird and wonderful thing so who knew what was in her subconscious that never came to the fore. Given that the members of both groups had lives outside the League/Society it may simply be a case of being busy with other things. Besides we probably didn’t want to see the same heroes over and over again, and there were now simply too many for one story, even if it was spread out over two issues (at least).
I guess you could argue that Canary didn’t want to be around JSAers because they reminded her of the loss of her husband, memories she wanted to avoid which is why she moved to Earth 1. Still, they were her friends, not people she knew through Larry, so I find it kind of odd.
Like I said before, it just seems strange that, as far as I remember, except for a couple of issues after she made the move to Earth 1, her history was simply forgotten.