Review: All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant

In 1999, All-Star Comics had two momentary revivals. All Star Comics vol. 2 was part of the Justice Society Returns! storyline, so I'll cover it when I get to that, but there was also the All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant. Like most of the 1990s/2000s 80-page giants, it contains several original short tales on a central topic. I meant to read it with All-Star Squadron, as the latest All-Star ongoing, but ended up not getting it until later and thus read it after Infinity, Inc. I wish I had read it with All-Star Squadron, though, because despite not being published until over a decade later, it really feels like it ties in with Roy Thomas's work on that series.

Partially the reason for that is obvious. One of the stories in here is explicitly an All-Star Squadron tale, and Roy Thomas writes it. I haven't got to Young All-Stars yet, but I understand it takes the All-Star Squadron story from April 1942 up to June; "Thunderstruck" reads like it could thus be the very next issue after Young All-Stars #31, picking up on June 27, 1942 with the adventures of Green Lantern, Doctor Fate, Firebrand, and the Shining Knight; there's even appearance by those perennial All-Star Squadron favorites, FDR and Churchill. It's a fun story that reignites the oft-deferred romance between Firebrand and the Shining Knight. (I know many threads from Thomas's 1940s series were picked up in the present day in later JSA revivals, so I hope I will see what become of these two.)

script by Roy Thomas, art by Kevin Sharpe & J. Baumgartner

But outside of that explicit All-Star Squadron branding, several of the other, stories feel more like tributes to the Thomas version of the JSA rather than the Golden Age itself. "The Way of the Amazon" by Eric Luke, Chris Jones, and Keith Champagne is billed as a Wonder Woman tale. While Crisis on Infinite Earths wrote the Earth-Two Wonder Woman out of history, and Roy Thomas's work on Infinity, Inc., Young All-Stars, and Secret Origins substituted Miss America and Fury into her place in history, John Byrne's run on Wonder Woman in the late 1990s later featured Diana's mother, Queen Hippolyta, traveling back in time to the 1940s and acting as Wonder Woman during World War II, giving a different/new explanation of who took the Earth-Two Wonder Woman's role in so many Golden Age stories. Set in June 1943, "The Way of the Amazon" folds that retcon in with Thomas's All-Star Squadron milieu, featuring Hippolyta hanging out with the Phantom Lady and Liberty Belle in the Perisphere. It's another fun story, as the trio of women take down a Nazi air fortress and discover the original Red Tornado.

script by Eric Luke, art by Chris Jones & Keith Champagne

The other stories here don't draw as heavily on Roy Thomas retcons, but many still feel like they could have slotted in as issues of All-Star Squadron had the series made it further than April 1942. The Sandman, Wonder Woman, and Hawkman team up in "Waking Nightmare" (November 1942); the Atom has to be steered into pacifism by the rest of the JSA in "Steam Engine" (December 1942); Starman has to talk the Spectre into believing in hope again in "P.O.V.—a Fable" (January 1945). Of these one, my favorite was "Steam Engine," a charming tale of how the Atom lets the way bigger people mock him get him down-- no surprise that it comes from the pen of Mark Waid. The story of "Waking Nightmare" was hard to understand, to be honest, but the evocative art of Dennis Cowan and John Floyd makes up for it. (They draw the wrong Sandman costume, as continuity pedants love to note, but the gasmask one is way better than the yellow-and-purple one, so who cares?) On the other hand, I found "P.O.V." pretty unconvincing; why was it Starman who needed to help the Spectre regain his connection to humanity? Why would seeing someone in an internment camp make a paper airplane even help? (If the Spectre really feels so bad, why wouldn't he just close the camp himself?)

script by John Ostrander, art by Dennis Cowan & John Floyd

Just two stories seem to go outside of the All-Star Squadron-verse. "The 90-Minute Man" by Tom Peyer, Peter Pachoumis, and Wade Von Grawbadger is a pre-war, straight Hourman tale, where the guy who has superpowers last only sixty minutes has to figure out how to take down someone with one-and-a-half times the duration! I've read a lot of stories with Hourman in them, but this is probably the first where I've actually got something out of his gimmick. There's just one of these not set during the Golden Age, "The Ropes" by David Goyer & James Robinson, David Ross, and Andrew Hennessy, where the Jack Knight Starman spars with Wildcat and talks courage. It's okay. (It's the only one of these stories to be collected, in The Starman Omnibus, Volume Five. I feel like it probably reads better in that context than this one.)

script by Joe Kelly, art by Duncan Rouleau & Aaron Sowd

Overall, it seems like 1999 was the time of JSA revivals. It was the year after Hippolyta was retconned into the JSA, and the year that we got The Justice Society Returns!, the debut of the Geoff Johns Stargirl, and the return of a JSA ongoing comic. It will be some time before I get to all that, but All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant is a good tribute to the ongoing vitality of DC's original superheroes. If anyone ever bothers to make an All-Star Squadron/Young All-Stars collection (unlikely), they could do a lot worse than chucking a few of these in at the end.

All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant was originally published in one issue (Sept. 1999). The stories were written by Mark Waid, Joe Kelly, Eric Luke, Tom Peyer, Roy Thomas, John Ostrander, and David Goyer & James Robinson; pencilled by Adam DeKraker, Duncan Rouleau, Chris Jones, Peter Pachoumis, Kevin Sharpe, Dennis Cowan, and David Ross; inked by Mark Propst, Aaron Sowd, Keith Champagne, Wade Von Grawbadger, J. Baumgartner, John Floyd, and Andrew Hennessy; lettered by Ken Lopez, Ken Bruzenak, Kurt Hathaway, Rick Parker, and John Costanza; colored by Gloria Vasquez, John Kalisz, Noelle Giddings, and Carla Feeny; and edited by Dan Raspler with Tony Bedard.

This post is the twelfth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Steel, the Indestructible Man. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)