All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever

DC’s mid-seventies revival of the Justice Society of America (the very first super-hero team ever, dating back to 1941), as collected here, is most notable nowadays for containing the last substantial run of mainstream comics work by the great artist Wally Wood, and, within that, the introduction of Power Girl. Wood being a notorious perv, PG herself resembles an exceptionally pneumatic ‘50s movie star and to emphasise this she has a big hole in her top, which is slightly perplexing as she was created as a feminist variant on Supergirl. Ah, comic books.Anyhoo, Wood inks the first 6 stories here (originally published in All-Star Comics #58-63), which are pencilled by Ric Estrada (2) and a very young Keith Giffen (4), and then does full pencil and ink art on #64-65, before pretty much departing the industry. Needless to say, his art is wonderful. His inking on Estrada and Giffen is so powerful and distinctive the only thing that stops you from thinking he also did the pencils is looking at the two stories where he did the full art and his pencilling skills shine through too. One of Wood’s early triumphs was the great parody “Superduperman”, a story in an early issue of MAD which has sometimes been hailed as the story that single-handedly turned MAD from a commercial disaster area into the long-running sales titan it became. Nearly 25 years later, he finally gets to draw Supes for real and it’s an absolute joy. Yes, he’s probably helped out by a small army of assistants. Yes, he’s probably swiping a lot – in fact, on the penultimate page of #65, he swipes himself (fans of Tower Comics will sigh with pleasure on seeing said swipe) – but it matters not a jot. This is beautiful work from one of the masters of comic book art and on its own justifies the four star rating for the book.The rest of the book is a mixed bag. The other art is by Joe Staton, who, if Wood is a Champions’ League contender, is probably a Championship-Premiership yoyo club. So still pretty good. Staton’s art is sometimes criticised by superhero fans for being too “cartoony”, because obviously nothing screams “realism” more than people in tights punching each other through walls. Staton’s work here is actually vibrant, energetic and exemplary in the clarity of its storytelling, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s let down on a couple of stories by dismal inking from Joe Giella, which is so slapdash you’d think Staton can’t draw at all, but it looks great when it’s inked properly by the likes of Bob Layton, Dick Giordano and Staton himself.The stories are, well, variable. The first two are by Gerry Conway. Conway gets a lot of unjustifiable criticism from comics fans but while there’s a lot of very good, under-rated work in his CV, it’s also true that there’s a lot of hackwork, and his contributions here exemplify mid-seventies superhero comics writing at its very worst. These two stories are so inept in terms of narrative structure and logic they become almost dizzyingly enjoyable in their sheer ineptitude. The rest of the book is written by an extremely young Paul Levitz and are, in that context, pretty decent. They remind me of Roy Thomas’s early run on X-Men, ten years earlier. You can see Levitz getting to grips with the elements with the elements by which Thomas created the model for superhero team book writing to this very day. So he gets to grip with sub-plots, foreshadowing, continuity, giving each character exposure and, to a limited extent, characterisation (this being mid-seventies DC, most of the characters don’t have anything resembling a personality).Levitz’s writing here also echoes the big flaw of Thomas’s early X-Men work: there’s no real sense of overall purpose to the series. The idea that later served DC very well – the JSA as team of mentors, helping younger heroes to achieve their potential – is there in an embryonic form, but doesn’t really get the exposure it needs. And Levitz does fall back on recurring devices (several characters end up at death’s door in hospital, Dr. Fate keeps on making mysterious exits, Wildcat and Power Girl insult each other). Nevertheless, you can see Levitz picking up the skills that would serve him (and aforementioned Giffen) so well a few years later when they made Legion of Super-Heroes into one of the best mainstream comics of the eighties. And a few significant things happen along the way: as noted, Power Girl arrives, a Batman actually dies (it’s not the real Batman, except it is, thanks to the parallel worlds that defined DC superhero titles of the era), and the Huntress comes onto the scene.The book is let down somewhat by the recurring sloppiness of DC’s archive books. Over at Marvel, archive series editor Cory Sedmeier does an exemplary job in maintaining quality control by virtue of thorough presentation and interesting back-up features. DC’s work is shoddy in comparison. This book lacks a contents page, and there’s no interstitial material other than reproductions of the cover art (Brian Bolland, excellent) from the two paperback volumes this material was last presented in, about 15 years ago. Those two paperbacks included some baffling rewrites of a few captions from the original comics, which are reproduced whole here and are even more baffling now. One caption, which states “Continued in the second volume”, exemplifies the sloppy editing here. Also, while the entire 1970s JSA series from All-Star and Adventure Comics is included here, along with a one-off “secret origin” story (rubbish, but in an enjoyable way), a number of additional stories, which would help this book make sense, are missing, namely the three-issue Power Girl series from Showcase and the origin of the Huntress from DC Superstars. The most egregious oversight is the introduction of Mr Terrific in the final page of one story, with his funeral taking place in the second page of the following one! The off-screen death occurred in two issues of Justice League of America which took place between the two stories, but if you didn’t already know that, you’d never work it out, as no explanation is offered here. Okay, including another six full-length stories would make this book pretty hefty, but if you’re going to do the job, do it properly, especially as it’s clearly aimed at a niche audience who would want and expect the extra material, and be happy to pay for it.Overall, the book is probably a bit better than three stars but too inconsistent and flawed for four… until you bring Wallace Wood into the equation, because his work is an easy five. So four it is, but be aware of its imperfections.PS not long after creating Power Girl, a feminist variation on an established male hero with a parallel-world counterpart named Danvers, Gerry Conway went over to Marvel to create Ms Marvel, a feminist variation on an established male hero, whose name actually IS Danvers. His writing may be patchy, but what a happier world this would be if we shared Conway’s devotion to recycling.

This is a beautiful complete collection of the 1970s revival of All-Star Comics, featuring the return of the Justice Society of America and the introduction of legacy characters Power Girl and the Huntress. It is, however, a complete travesty that the great Wally Wood, one of the great comic creators of the 1950s to 1970s, doesn’t get a single credit anywhere on the cover. Wood’s beautiful art on issues 58 to 65 is the high point of this collection, and (for me, anyway) Wood’s one-page transformation of Clark Kent into Superman in issue 62 - page 92 in this volume - is one of the best-designed pages of comic art ever created. But, despite DC’s lack of respect for Wood, this edition is well worth owning for anyone interested in the classic DC heroes.

So pleased DC has re-printed this All-Star Comics series from the 70s featuring the Justice Society of America. This is the series that really introduced Power Girl and The Huntress to the world. All-Star ran from issue 58 to 74, but it isn't until issue 66 when the legendary Joe Staton comes onboard that this series starts to fly. He then went on to pencil the rest of the series and the concluding stories in Adventure Comics and Staton really made, for me as a kid, the Justice Society his own. I loved the JSA as they were always relegated as second best, but they are well-worth reading and this short series from the 70s has certainly stood the test of time.

“All-Star Comics – Only Legends Live Forever” collects ALL-STAR COMICS #58-74, ADVENTURE COMICS #461-466 and DC SPECIAL #29.I was ordered to get rid of my comic collection in the late 1960s by my mother and read ‘proper’ books instead – despite the fact that I was reading a book a day from the local library anyway. Then one day, when I grew up and left school, I started work in the local steel works (which still existed back then, though fortunately, local libraries still do), and in a newsagents just outside, I saw some comics… and one of them was one of the All-Star Comics collected here the one set in King Arthur’s “England” (being Welsh, I am obliged to use quotation marks there – go to your local library to find out why) and with Wally Wood as the artist.Back in the 1960s I had read “Flash of Two Worlds” and the successive stories that brought the Justice Society of America back from retirement on Earth Two, which gave me a lifelong fascination with the Golden Age of comics. I also read “Wally Wood’s” THUNDER Agents back then too, which imprinted his artistic style on my memory. And so began my second round of comic-collecting, just in time for Chris Claremont’s X-Men, Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen’s Legion of Superheroes, Tomb of Dracula, Master of Kung Fu, the masterpiece of comic-book storytelling.In the series collected here, Paul Levitz begins his career as DC’s top scripter of the time, and, though the artist change, this is still one of the series that I remember to this day – though the first Crisis eventually came and swept it out of continuity.That never swept it out of memory though, despite the best endeavours of DC’ editors and publishers, and now it comes round again, to entertain a new generation.Legends NEVER end.