All-Star Squadron #2

[iamrman]

Writer: Roy Thomas

Pencils: Rich Buckler

Inks: Jerry Ordway

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Per Degaton arranges a phony airstrike that will alter history.

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Next: Amazing Spider-Man #107.

Comments

[thanekos]

" .. then .. I shall carve out an empire for myself - in 1947! "

This is what sloppily written alternate history fiction leads to - guys like Degaton grabbing time machines and thinking they can just do it with as much planning.

(Yes, he has super-weapons, but they're not going to solve every problem.)

[dan_ingram]

I disagree.

Whoever said you can't solve every problem with super-weapons, simply wasn't trying hard enough.

[agharta75]

Roy Thomas thinking he can throw every obscure Golden Age character he knows of into his scripts. Who is this for, now, really?

[skjam]

At the time, me.

[iamrman]

All the deep cut Golden Age heroes was what attracted me to the series in the first place.

[beyondthefringe]

I honestly found the obscure members of the Squadron more interesting than the better-known JSA when this was coming out. Something about deep dives and lesser-known appealed to me.

Roy Thomas had a good run in the 80s with this and Infinity Inc.

[tcampbell1000]

Lots of superhero writers and readers lo-o-ove the deep cuts, and they pretty much have for the last 60 years. Yeah, Roy is an extreme case--and he looks more extreme in retrospect, now that we're as far away from ALL-STAR SQUADRON as ALL-STAR SQUADRON was from the 1940s. But you don't get to keep pulling that same trick for a decades-long career if there's not a demand for it. In the case of this comic, the deep cuts weren't just added in at the plotting stage, they were part of the pitch.

[michael_ellis_day]

In case anyone gets the wrong idea from reading these pages, comic book writers were not paid by the word, they were paid by the page. Roy Thomas wasn't making more money by filling his pages with these massive walls of relentless exposition. He just couldn't help himself.

(People may say in retrospect that's Roy for you, but the problem wasn't this bad when he left Marvel. Something about the jump to DC had a bad effect on his writing, and I don't think there was any editor there who could tell him to ease up.)

[iamrman]

I was going to say something about Roy Thomas editing his own books and make of that what you will, but Lein Wein was the editor here.

[huntleyhaverstock]

I think there was recently some brouhaha on Bluesky revealing that Roy Thomas routinely hired other people to ghostwrite for him -- at least on Red Sonja, possibly elsewhere -- and then took most or all of both the credit and the money. Here's Kurt Busiek giving context, with interesting links farther down the thread.

[michael_ellis_day]

...okay, that's a lot to take on board. My opinion of Roy Thomas has been going downhill steadily for several years now, but I thought the trick he pulled after the death of Len Wein would be the capper. Not so! His behavior also puts his extreme defensiveness around Stan Lee's misdeeds in a new and even more unflattering light.

(On the plus side, my respect for Kurt Busiek's willingness to talk bluntly about comics history has only increased with time.)

[blueprintstyles]

I'm reading The New History of the DC Universe and I'm interested in this team for the first time ever! Apparently there's a heartbreaking storyline with Uncle Sam and The Freedom Fighters.

[scorntx]

Oh, hey. Per Degaton before he became one of Geoff John's pet villains.

Ooh, Danette Reilly. Who is definitely not a robot!

Always felt Wotan's one of those characters who's never got quite enough love


(given this series, was wondering if that woman Phantom Lady meets is anyone important, but apparently she's just some random person?)

[thanekos]

This being Roy Thomas, I assumed the brick-throwing lady was copied from some 1940s " preparedness " movie he just didn't explicitly cite or drop a reference to.