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| The DC Universe Begins |
One of the most pivotal early events in superhero comics was
the debut of the Justice Society in All
Star Comics #3. This not only introduced an important staple of comics, the
superhero team, but it also helped define the medium in revolutionary ways that
current readers may not appreciate because the changes it ushered in have
become so pervasive. It is informative to note how the title All Star transformed from issue #1
through #4 and onward, and how creative and influential All Star #3 was.
Background
From the debut of the comic book medium through early 1939,
comic books contained many short features, unrelated to one another in plot and
theme, ranging from one panel to a few pages. It was taken for granted that
each feature in an issue inhabited its own fictional world, the same way that we
may take for granted that two novels written by two different authors inhabit
two different fictional worlds unless it is specifically brought to our
attention that the novels share a single fictional world. Comic book features
might continue in subsequent issues of the same title, but there was no single
fictional world shared by any two features until 1940 when Marvel Mystery Comics #8 brought the Human Torch and the
Sub-Mariner together in a crossover story. But before and besides that story,
we might presume that a stack of ten comic books told us of not one, nor two,
nor merely ten fictional worlds, but potentially dozens. All of these title characters
– clowns, cowboys, tough guys, warlords, and mystics – lived in their own world
with their own cast of subordinate characters, and they all shared a title with
numerous other features.
Until Superman.
About a year after the runaway success of the Superman feature in the title Action Comics, the title Superman (I use italics carefully to
distinguish the title from the character) was launched to exploit the
character’s popularity by giving readers a single title full of Superman
stories. What is important to note here is not the creative significance –
there was none; Superman stories in Superman
read just like those in Action – but the
marketing significance. This was a move to play up the commercial aspects of a
popular character in order to drive more sales. And it worked. Superman now had
a second title, so his dedicated fans could follow him in two titles.
A commercial strategy
This idea was too good (that is, too profitable) to apply
only in the case of Superman. All American and National publication companies
looked for other features popular enough to merit a second venue. The idea of Superman was copied to the most popular
character from Detective Comics, and
so in early 1940 the title Batman was
launched, less than a year after the Caped Crusader had debuted in Detective #27. But even before this, the
idea of giving popular features a second venue sprang out of 1939’s New York World’s Fair Comics, a one-shot issue that rapidly evolved into World’s Finest Comics. This title, which
many years later hosted a monthly team-up feature starring Superman and Batman,
began as an anthology of features which had, for the most part, proven their
popularity in another title first. It was a sort of dream team of features,
giving Superman his third title and many other characters, including Batman,
their second. (And note that the title’s wording is not a reference to Superman
and Batman being the world’s greatest heroes, but is telling the readers that
its features were the world’s best features… while retaining the wording of the
now-long-since-complete World’s Fair.) Like Superman,
it was a strong commercial strategy, and DC soon sought to exploit it further
by creating another best-of title.
All Star Comics
Enter All Star Comics.
DC now examined its lineup for another set of features popular enough to merit
a second title, searching among the features that already appeared in Adventure Comics, Flash Comics, All American
Comics, and More Fun Comics. The
first two issues included appearances of a tough guy named Biff Bronson, a U.S.
military team named Red, White, and Blue, and a costumed hero named Ultra-Man,
whose adventures were set in the year 2240 AD. The balance of those first two
issues’ stories, however, featured characters who would go on to be known as
the Justice Society, but as of All Star
#2, they still inhabited their own fictional worlds. It wasn’t that the Flash
operated on “Earth Two” in a different city than Green Lantern, Batman, etc. It
was that they all operated in their own separate worlds. Aside from the Human
Torch–Submariner crossover in Marvel
Mystery Comics, every feature was set in its own fictional world.
The editors of All
Star had, at this point, a challenge. They wanted to select the features
popular enough to merit being in the All
Star lineup, but they had no specific information as to which features were
popular. Editorial ads in All Star
asked readers to send in letters telling them which features they liked best,
and these letter campaigns were used to help determine the lineup. Based on
these letters and/or their intuitions, the editors tuned the lineup from issue
to issue, and a few common characteristics began to emerge. The features in All Star #3, for the most part, had a lot
of characteristics in common with Superman and Batman. Most of them wore flashy
costumes. Most of them had catchy action names that was distinct from their
secret identity. Most of them fought evildoers.
What had happened, quite subtly, by the time of All Star #3, was that the superhero
genre had been defined without anybody really planning it with an order from
on-high. Instead, the readers, by explicitly and implicitly voting for their
favorite characters, had selected a lineup for All Star that looked a bit like a team. This wasn’t Stan Lee and
Jack Kirby staring at their storyboards and drafting a team by concept. This
was a disconnected process involving many creators, many editors, two
initially-separate publishing companies, and untold readers shaping the lineup
of All Star Comics, and then editor
Sheldon Mayer and writer Gardner Fox had an inspiration.
All Star Comics #3
Whereas All Star
#2 and all comic books before it, besides Superman,
contained many separate features given a few pages each, All Star #3 had a framing story, placing the starring characters
into a rather pedestrian dinner banquet, during which, each character told the
others of a previous action story. The solo stories, besides Johnny Thunder’s,
are illustrated and several pages each, almost exactly like the solo features
seen in All Star #1 and #2, and in
all of the other comic magazines before them. The difference is the framing
story that occupies 3 pages at the beginning of the issue, 1 page in the
middle, 2 pages at the end, and 1 to 4 panels at each transition when one
hero’s story has ended and the next is about to begin. Therefore, there is a
framing story of about 7 pages which is, arguably, the beginning of shared
continuity in DC comics. The events in that story are as follows:
• Johnny Thunder sees comic books for sale and wishes that
he could attend the meeting of the Justice Society that is about to begin.
• That wish and several others are granted, giving him a
disruptive presence at the Justice Society meeting.
• It is explained that Superman, Batman, and Robin
cannot attend because they are particularly busy while the Justice Society
meets.
• Johnny Thunder proposes that each of the heroes in
attendence tells a story about one of his past adventures.
• In the middle of the nine stories, the Red Tornado crashes
the meeting, then leaves because her pants are torn.
• A message from the FBI arrives. Flash runs to Washington
to learn more. He returns with a request for the whole Justice Society to go to
Washington to receive an assignment. This becomes the basis of a shared story
in All Star #4.
The nine stories that make up 90% of the issue are
themselves unremarkable. It’s the 10% of the issue that makes up the framing
story that changed comics by creating a shared universe for what had previously
been twelve separate features. However, continuity established in All Star #3 is different in many ways
from DC continuity as it has come to be known:
1) Action scenes are solo, just as in previous comics.
Shared scenes are conversation-only. This remained true for most issues of All Star.
2) Shared scenes have a distinctly humorous and childlike
tone, aimed at child readers, like Johnny Thunder's solo features and
completely unlike Spectre or Hawkman stories.
3) Continuity did not extend to solo features. Justice
Society stories were ignored by, and contradicted by, other features until the
Sixties.
4) Fourth wall narration, especially in All Star #3.
Indeed, the characters thrown together in the Justice
Society just barely make sense as a unit. How do the Spectre, a grim avenging
angel with almost limitless powers, and the Atom, a college sophomore with a
weightlifter's body and a knack for running into crime fit into the same team?
They don't. Johnny Thunder, despite the awesome powers at his disposal, was
purely a joke character, stumbling in and out of misadventures because he was
unaware how his thunderbolt worked. These continuities don't fit together, so
it made sense that nobody took them very seriously as a shared fictional
universe. Later in the series' run, when the characters were placed into action
stories together, the tone became simplistic and campy, and not long
afterwards, the entire line of characters went out of publication. It wasn't
until the Seventies, with considerable reimagining of the original material,
that the JSA became a lineup of characters that fit into a shared universe in
the modern sense. The Golden Age Justice Society was entertainment with very
little consistency in plot, continuity, or characterization. It was written for
kids and provided a decade of entertainment for kids.
Because Justice Society membership was a commercial
consideration to give popular characters more exposure, the Justice Society –
after only 3 issues – had a "rule" that whenever a character gained
their own solo title, they would become only an honorary member of the Society.
This removed the Flash and Green Lantern from the lineup, just as Superman and
Batman made only rare and cameo appearances, because characters with other
titles didn't need the extra exposure of a place in All Star. This sort of consideration followed Superman and Batman,
twenty years later, to the Justice League, with those two characters often
missing adventures for the actual reason that those characters already had
enough exposure in other titles.
It should be noted that a feature referenced another feature
one time before this: Ma Hunkel decided to become the Red Tornado after being
told by kids about the Green Lantern. That appeared a couple of months before All Star #3, but because the kids were
aware of Green Lantern's secret identity, they were referring to Green Lantern
as a comic book character they read about, not a superhero in their own world.
Over a year later, Wildcat was also inspired to become a costumed hero because
kids told him about Green Lantern, but in that case, also, the kids were
referring to a comic book. An early Batman story referred to Superman as a
fictional character in their world. A single DC continuity that was shared
across all of the major solo titles would not appear until the Sixties. Not
until 1977 would the Justice Society get its first origin story, a classic by
Paul Levitz in DC Special #29. It is
perhaps less apt to say that All Star
#3 brought a shared universe into being than that it planted the seed of a
shared DC Universe. Many years and many changes later, that seed had grown into
something greater. When we consider the billions of dollars of revenues that
the genre has generated and the deep societal role that the superhero genre has
grown into, we can look back at All Star
Comics #3 as a place where this tremendous thing started to grow.
