The Angry Adolescence of the Super-Team (1 of 2)

We could use a super-team called "the Young Allies" today.

The Justice Society inspired a few imitator super-teams in the 1940s, two of them from Marvel: the All-Winners Squad and the Young Allies. (Well, Marvel was called Timely back then, but you get it.)

But they were gone when the Society itself vanished from publication in 1951. Was this…the end of the super-team??? For a few years…yes.

Superheroes almost vanished from comics for part of the 1950s, but a few exceptions survived—Superman had a hit TV show, so he wasn’t going anywhere, and Batman and Wonder Woman still had some gas in the tank. World’s Finest Comics began as an anthology with separate Superman and Batman features, but shrank into comics’ first “team-up series” with #71 in 1954.

Batman and Superman’s first meeting outside the Justice Society had come in Superman #76, two years earlier…but that was a one-time encounter. Here, their team-up became a regular feature.

Can it be a “super-team” with just two members? The comic called the duo “the world’s finest team,” so…maybe? But they never got a team name like “the Titanic Two” or even a relationship portmanteau like “Superbat,” so…maybe not. Heck, even Batman and Robin were labeled “the Dynamic Duo,” so maybe they were the most prominent super-team just then.

In 1958, Superboy first met the Legion of Super-Heroes, a super-team from 1,000 years in the future. (Their membership numbers also seem small for a “Legion,” but let’s stop nitpicking.)

The first Legion story shows the storytelling trope Mort Weisinger just couldn’t get enough of: lots of asshole behavior during the story, followed by a conclusion that assures the young reader “Don’t worry, things weren’t what they seemed!” The Legionnaires outdo Superboy at every turn and make him feel like a loser, then reveal they were just hazing him because they liked him.

However, the Legion was no more than an occasional guest-star in Superboy stories at first. Comics didn’t see a marquee super-team until 1960, when DC Comics revived the Justice Society concept. It was now the Justice League of America, because baseball was cool:

To me, “society” meant something you found on Park Avenue. I felt that “league” was a stronger word, one that readers could identify with because of baseball leagues. —Julius Schwartz, series editor

The new Justice League had an old hand writing it—Gardner F. Fox. Fox’s interest in science and learning was sharper than ever…

And so was his lack of interest in giving characters much individuality. Now and then, he’d serve up some Weisinger-style conflict, but it resolved in ways that left all the good guys blameless.

Marvel had been a staunch follower of trends in its first two decades of publication, starting with the way it slapped together hero groups in the 1940s. It was that same spirit of imitation that led publisher Martin Goodman to decide Marvel needed a new super-team as a response to the Justice League’s success. Where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby innovated was in the details.

But anybody who called the Fantastic Four a knockoff of the JLA wasn’t a careful reader. The Four offered up genuine intrateam conflict. In the early issues, it was dysfunctional enough to make a reader question whether it was a “team” at all (Fantastic Four #4).

“Fantastic Four”…short for “It’ll Be FANTASTIC If These Guys Can Go FOUR Issues Without Murdering Each Other.”

More tomorrow!