The Strange Beginnings of the Super-Team

I blame society.

Many hero narratives are ego trips. In the simplest superhero stories, everything’s all about the main character. So a superhero ensemble story seems like a contradiction in terms. If everyone in the pack wants to be the alpha dog, you don’t have much of a pack.

But when publishers tried the idea in 1940, both classical literature and then-recent publishing success had provided precedent. The legends of the Argonauts and the Trojan War had put multiple myth-worthy heroes into group adventures.

And a few months earlier, Marvel Mystery Comics #7-#10 had published the first major superhero crossover, with the first hero-versus-hero fight. Namor the Sub-Mariner, a quick-tempered prince of Atlantis as likely to conquer humanity as to save it, clashed with the first Human Torch, a traditional crime-stopping, peacekeeping hero.

That battle ended with the heroes’ mutual love interest negotiating a cease-fire. Their differences were otherwise irreconcilable, though in post-1941 stories, they could at least bury the hatchet long enough to fight some Nazis together.

By contrast, the Justice Society of America was an agreeable body—almost too agreeable. All-Star Comics #3 used this image for the cover, first page and last page:

The only problem the group faces in that story is that the comical hero Johnny Thunder keeps saying things:

Some of this was just the writing style of Gardner F. Fox. Fox’s work was smart and imaginative, but no one ever accused it of bristling with conflict. The JSA’s members tended to agree on just about everything at all times (#5).

Some of it was just wartime propaganda, like the appearance of a talkative J. Edgar Hoover in #4:

But behind the scenes lay another reason the Justice Society’s adventures were a little extra amicable. The super-team’s existence was the product of an uneasy truce.

The brand now called “DC” is a Katamari ball rolled together from a long history of mergers and acquisitions. DC was once called National Comics—and in the early 1940s, “National Comics” was three distinct publishing houses working together. This made the Justice Society not only the first super-team, but the first (and longest-lasting) intercompany comics crossover.

Most JSA stories were thinly veiled anthologies. The first, like The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, is a storytelling competition (see below). Later adventures (like the spy-smashing story above) would just have the team split up for most of the story, even when splitting up made no tactical sense. This format was easier for multiple companies to produce, since each subplot could be made separately. But the covers’ description of the results as “complete book-length adventures” was a little stretchy.

The blue-hooded Atom, wondering where Superman and Batman are in this collection of “mightiest champions,” may have been speaking for the reader. Superman and Batman would be “pretty busy” for most of the Justice Society’s original publishing run, only hopping in for one cameo and one full guest appearance, both together.

Wonder Woman would join, but did little actual fighting in the war years, despite being way more qualified than some guy with a gas gun or a short luchador (#12).

Looks pretty sexist! But like Superman’s and Batman’s absence, it had more to do with company politics than anything else. When Fox did write a Wonder Woman story, William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator, didn't like it much and let Fox know. For a while after that, the conflict-averse Fox kept her in for optics but didn't use her very much.

Marston died in 1947, and a second heroine—the Black Canary—became popular enough to join the team around then. National Comics/DC was now one entity. By All-Star Comics #57 in 1951, things were looking more equitable.

But by then, the superhero genre was on its way out (for good, or so many people thought). With the next issue, All-Star Comics would become All-Star Western. The only sign it even remembered its past was that it later introduced a hero also named Johnny Thunder. No relation.

Today, it's hard to imagine a super-team whose alpha dogs don't bark at each other at least a little, at least sometimes. But there’s a certain nostalgic appeal to Fox’s vision of a group that just gets together and gets along. The JSA would remain the template for other super-groups for decades, until a more realistic model started to displace it in the 1960s.

But that’s a story for another day.

Next Sunday, specifically.