What Do All Star Squardon Fans Think of Young All Stars?

[Timothy Hunter]

Young All Stars was the less successful Post Crisis successor to Roy Thomas' All Star Squadron. I'm currently on issue 9 of Young All Stars, and as someone who has never read much of Roy Thomas, I love it. The team dynamic is great with everyone having a clearset personality. The series is also filled to the brim with references not just to the Golden Age superheroes, but the 40s in general. If I had one grievance however, the art is very amateurish in places, which I've seen being a complaint by the (very few) things I've heard about this series online.

What do All Star Squadron and Infinity Inc fans think of this series? As far as I'm aware this series was looked at as a disapointment.

Does the Young All Stars series ever get referenced by later comics such as Geoff Johns' JSA? I first encountered the Iron Munroe character in Andreyko's Manhunter. Is James Robinson's the Golden Age a continuation of Young All Stars? I know Dan the Dyna-Mite plays a major role in that book.

[sifighter]

The best out of a bad situation I guess? I mean it was essentially created to replace All Star Squadron but also had help explain away some gaps that were created by the change in continuity to Earth-2 related characters after Crisis on Infinite Earth’s. It had to replace Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman/retconned Fury’s parents., so I feel bad for the series in a way.

[bretmaverick2]

YAS was good, not great. DC screwed Thomas with Crisis. Earth 2 should have been allowed to exist with Earth 1.

[DrNewGod]

The best out of a bad situation I guess? I mean it was essentially created to replace All Star Squadron but also had help explain away some gaps that were created by the change in continuity to Earth-2 related characters after Crisis on Infinite Earth’s. It had to replace Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman/retconned Fury’s parents., so I feel bad for the series in a way.

Yeah, ^pretty much this^. It was Thomas trying to make lemonade from lemons after having to completely change course.

His game plan went from Fill In The White Space Of Golden Age Comics to Let's Adapt A Bunch Of Superhero Antecedents To Make A History For This Mess DC Created. It just didn't work as well.

Even if All-SS was sometimes corny, it clearly had every gram of Thomas' affectionate heart in it. YAS was more like an experiment looking back beyond 1938 that he hadn't fully cooked yet.

[Jim Kelly]

Yeah, I wouldn't say anything that Thomas did actually failed--not as far as he had anything to do with it. It was more that someone at the publisher was undermining him.

Essentially, to get Roy Thomas--who was a very big deal from all that he had accomplished at Marvel--the Distinguished Competition gave him a lot to come over to their company. So he had rights--like the rights to every Earth-Two character, as well as the Marvel Family. And then someone else at the publisher didn't like that deal, so they did everything to rob Thomas of what he was supposed to have control over.

[marshal88]

not the same , crisis screwed earth-2 badly but what an opening first page intro.

[Jon Clark]

I think the problem was two-fold.

1) Roy's desire to replace the characters removed by Crisis without actually replacing them. Iron Munro was interesting to me as a character, but he was no Superman. Same with the Golden Age Fury. And as a Batman analog the less said about Flying Fox the better.

I knew in the original series that guys like Robotman, Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick were supposed to be the equivalent of regular joes. They could have interesting adventures in the 1940's where they were impressive, but ultimately they'd be minor players in the history of Earth-Two. Not a knock on them, they were just not going to be the JSA. But with these Young All-Stars you had no idea if Iron Munro was supposed to be Johnny Quick or the Flash. Were these going to be legends of the Golden Age like Kal-L, Diana, and Bruce Wayne had been for Earth-Two or footnotes that didn't rate a sentence in Post-Crisis Earth history?

It didn't help that they were all teen-agers. You took the father of the super-hero age, the standard bearer for non-powered heroes, and the first female JSA member then made them the "new guys" who were now less well established and respected than the Star-Spangled Kid, Miss America, and Mister Scarlett.

2)Roy went from having the loose team of All-Star Squadron where he had a core of regulars (Libby, Johnny, Firebrand) joined by whatever Golden Age hero struck his fancy to focusing almost entirely on the subgrouping of new characters. Except for being set in World war II it was a totally different book. Excluding the Millenium crossover, this could have been a non-DC book without changing anything major. No JSA ties, no ties to actual events from Golden Age comics, not really even may ties to events from the prior All-Star Squadron itself.

Maybe this might have worked better if Roy had just added the Young All Stars to the mix. maybe used Fury the way he'd used Firebrand as part of the core with Johnny, Belle and a few others. Then rotated Iron Munroe, Flying Fox and even Tigress through stories along with JSAers and other obscure Golden Agers.

[Riv86672]

Both Young All Stars and Infinity Inc. were good ideas that didn’t live up to their potential in the least, and were then picked at/apart by other writers for spare parts.

[Nomads1]

I think Young All-Stars was a good attempt by Roy Thomas at playing with the hand he was, badly, delt. All-Star Squadron was, quite obviously, Thomas dream come true project. You could feel the love in every page he wrote of that book. Young All-Stars, not so much. It was an honestly good effort though.
I liked that Thomas went outside of comics to get the inspiration for his Golden Age big guns replacements. However, he limited these replacements to merely the powers, when the characters they were replacing had so much more going for them, and the war-time DCU ended up poorer for that. The personalities didn't match. Sure, he wanted to create new characters, and not just carbon copies of the original, but the personalities were too disparate. Superman was inspirational, Arn was, at times, a bit amoral. Wonder Woman was the exemple of a strong woman. Fury was too timid. I think Flying Fox was the one they came closer to getting it right. I also think that it was a mistake to make the Young All-Stars a splinter group, with the adults only make occasional guest spots. After a few issues to sample , it simply threw out of the window all the fanbase All-Star Squadron had amassed. They should have been a more integral part of the team (and perhaps the book should have been named the New All-Stars, instead of Young All-Stars). The lack of a solid regular artist also hurt a lot the book (but that was something it was already suffering from ever since Rick Horberg left the book, IMHO). I actually stuck with the book through all its run, but I could always see it wouldn't succeed. It did have its moments, though.
As for long lasting repercussions, Arn Munro was an integral part of the Damage comicbook in the 90's. Fury was in Phill Jimmenz's Wonder Woman (though it was not a good story for her). And Danny and Neptune Perkins was part of the Sins of Youth storyline over in Young Justice (PAD actually also used Perkins and Tsunami over at Aquaman around the same time).

Peace

[M L A]

He tried his best with what he was (not) given

[Jim Kelly]

I really liked how Roy went through all the classic comics and pulps of the past to find characters he could use for the Young All-Stars, rather than just making them up out of whole cloth. Kind of like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen years before Alan Moore tried that.

[DrNewGod]

I really liked how Roy went through all the classic comics and pulps of the past to find characters he could use for the Young All-Stars, rather than just making them up out of whole cloth. Kind of like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen years before Alan Moore tried that.

I thought that made for a couple of good stories, but I felt like trying to frame the entire series around it was problematic. Ironically it might have worked better if they had not done away with the multiverse. Just as the events on Earth 2 had inspired comic books on Earth 1, he could have framed it that a lot of the pulp and sci-fi on Earth 1 was similarly taken from writers somehow psychically connecting with Earth 2.

[Timothy Hunter]

The problem I see is that Roy Thomas set out to create Post Crisis replacements of Golden Age replacements of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Arrow and Speedy, so naturally you could say that everything that happened in the All Star Squadron series occured Post Crisis except swapping out Superman for Iron Munroe, Wonder Woman for Fury, etcetera.

However... Roy Thomas made the bizarre decision to set Young All Stars after the events of All Star Squadron, making the need for Post Crisis equivalents of Earth 2 characters completely pointless.

Roy Thomas said in the letter columns that his intention was for Young All Stars to run for even more issues than ASS, even saying the series would outlast World War II. I would make a guess that this would've been a reality if it had truly been All Star Squadron in the Post Crisis world, instead of a Golden Age Teen Titans. (A regular artist wouldn't have hurt either.)

[captchuck]

I wished at the time that Roy could take All Star Squadron through the late 1940's. Young All Stars was an good book, but I always preferred all the old heroes. Roy was the best choice for writing such a book.

[Jim Kelly]

My recollection, from all the interviews and articles I've read, is that when Roy was in discussions for doing the All-Star Squadron, he reassured them that if that didn't prove successful then he had a back-up plan for another group which would be more in style with the popular teen super-hero groups at the time. I believe that idea he had in his back pocket was the Infnity, Inc., group.

However, when the plug was pulled on ALL-STAR SQUADRON, I think that another teen super-hero team was the only thing that would get the publisher's blessing. The idea of a bunch of guys in their thirties was not trending at the time--let alone set in the 1940s. YOUNG ALL-STARS was the best compromise Roy could have got. And look what happened to the Justice Society soon after Crisis. The people in charge didn't want to remind readers of their original characters from the 1940s--they feared that would take away from the current heroes they were rebooting.