CW: spoilers to still-ongoing stories in links to plot synopsis, Julie Schwartz mentions in video interview with John Broome, comic book violence, links to information about terribly abusive people in the field of psychology, mention of death in a swimming pool, defense contractors, anti-Native American racism in text story

All-Star Comics Vol. 1 #35
DC Comics
Release Date: April 25th, 1947

Reprinted in:

Best of DC #21
All-Star Comics Archives #8

(From what I can tell at first glance, the first book I reviewed is not being reprinted by the rights holder.)

Weird that I’m just noticing that the two oldest comic books I own are both issue #35 of their respective series.

I got this book at a comic convention in Toronto in 1999, and I’ve been legit terrified to read it all this time, for fear that *gasp* I might damage a Golden Age book, and even worse, damage the only original, pre-1970s revival issue of All-Star Comics (featuring the Justice Society of America, probably my favorite super-hero team) that I own. Younger me was a cowardly, superstitious lot!

This book was written in its entirety by John Broome, who was about a year into his time at DC by this point, but 11 years into his writing career (he sold stories to pulps and such, as well). According to Wikipedia, John’s first credit is a strip called Pals and Pastimes in Funny Pages #7 (Centaur, 11/01/36), which is the 118th American comic book in Mike’s database in order of chronological release, overall (though it’s tied with another Centaur book, Funny Picture Stories #2, as they came out on the same day), though Mike’s Amazing World claims that the strip, credited to a W.J. Broome (whose work is not connected to the main John Broome bibliography, which also only lists his DC work, not his Fawcett work, which is listed on his Wikipedia bibliography), started in issue #5, so I’ll leave the sorting out of that mess to the actual comics historians rather than this very amateur one.

DC Comics, at the time that John’s first story was published, had only released between 25 and 27 comics overall, were not called DC Comics yet (that was a long road), and Marvel Comics and their characters in any form wouldn’t exist for about another 2 1/2 years. John would go on to write comics until 1970, making significant contributions to both the late Golden Age and especially the Silver Age, when he retired from comics to travel with his wife, and eventually taught English in Japan. He lived for nearly three more decades, passing away while swimming in a pool in Thailand in 1999, but he did make one appearance at San Diego Comic-Con in 1998. (Here’s an interview with John, done while he was there. In it, he talks about his friend and co-worker Otto Binder, the author of the Captain Marvel Jr. story from our last edition, as well as his time at both Fawcett and DC, some of the books and characters he worked on, and his life since, though I really wish the interviewer would’ve pulled on that thread more).

Per Degaton (co-created in this issue with John by artist Irwin Hasen) was perhaps John’s first major co-creation, in a career that saw him co-create a LOT of characters. Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps are probably the most famous, but Captain Comet, Detective Chimp, the Phantom Stranger (who we’ll be getting to sooner than later), the Atomic Knight, the near-entirety of Flash’s Rogues Gallery and Green Lantern’s 1960s roster of villains (he wrote most of the first 100 and 75 issues of Barry Allen’s and Hal Jordan’s adventures, and was also writing both Jay Garrick‘s and Alan Scott‘s adventures before DC discontinued most of their super-heroes at the end of the Golden Age), Eobard Thawne, Wally West, the Elongated Man, Carol Ferris, and Guy Gardner are among the characters he had a hand in. Until I’m done with my read-through of my comics from this point until December 4th, 1969 (The Flash Vol. 1 #194 is his second-to-last book, with Green Lantern Vol. 2 #75, which I don’t have, being his last), you’ll be seeing John in these posts somewhat regularly.

Before we get to all of that, though, I should probably (finally) read this book!

The Front Cover:

Irwin Hasen, who we talked about a bit above, drew the cover (and has a cover signature on it, which is a bit surprising, as I thought we were still in the “no one gets credited except Bob Kane” era), and it’s a good one. It introduces Per Degaton in a way that makes him look like a big deal. He also draws the full-JSA sequences inside the book.

The back cover is an Eveready battery ad, claiming that their flashlight batteries contain energy “equal to the amount needed to smash out 200 Major League homers!”. How did they even figure that out?

Inside front cover is a house ad for The Dodo and The Frog, and goes over National Periodical Publications’ Editorial Advisory Board: Lauretta Bender (wow), Josette Frank, Charles Bowie Millican (who, in addition to working in the Department of English Literature at NYU, also worked with the CIA, which was founded about 5 months after this book was published), W.W.D. Sones and S. Harcourt Peppard (another one with a creepy as hell body of work). Sheldon Mayer is listed as Editor in the publication info.

The Splash Page:

I have my pretty deep objections to the whole “Wonder Woman taking notes (as Secretary to Hawkman’s Chairman) for the big bad men who she could squash like grapes, every damn one of them, even Green Lantern” part of it, even if it’s really Hazel Callahan of her, but with that off my chest, it’s still cool seeing a JSA meeting table splash page in an original All-Star for the first time.

Our Justice Society of America team for this issue:

Hawkman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Dr. Mid-Nite, Johnny Thunder, The Atom

At the meeting, Wonder Woman brings up a shield she found with an inscription in Macedonian reading “To the Justice Society of America, In everlasting gratitude” with a signature she can’t quite make out, that no one at the meeting remembers the team getting, but she’s on the case already, borrowing a device called a Magic Sphere from Queen Hippolyta (whose name either Broome or the letterer butchered as “Hypolite”) that looks kinda like one of the monitors they used in 1950s space serials, and the device purports to “reveal the past of any object “with proper stimulus!”, so from there, we spend a book-length issue of All-Star Comics watching the Justice Society watch TV, essentially.

As the story begins in earnest, all of the world’s technology becomes old-tymey or disappears completely, and we see great dialogue like “Great snakes, Joe! What in thunder has happened to us?” and “All this confounded equipment has vanished into thin air!”. After experiencing 8 months of 2025, I wanna go to 1947 in a time machine and tell these people to STOP COMPLAINING!

At this moment in the story, the Justice Society gets an urgent message to come to the hospital bedside of Professor Zee, who tells them about a new lab assistant he hired named Per Degaton, who kinda sucks in ways that are familiar to all of us. Power-hungry, erratic, red hair, convinced that his merits, without saying what those merits are, entitle him to advancement in the world…it’s almost as if this comic book about time travel has predicted the events of the present day!

After finding out Professor Zee’s theories on time travel (including the “domino effect“; Broome loved his science, much like Gardner Fox did) and his possession of a time machine (Which, wow, he just hired the guy, maybe a probationary period and a background check before you let the guy near the good shit?), Degaton straight-up shoots the professor, which is how he landed in the hospital.

Professor Zee is just about to tell the JSA what pivotal event in history Degaton’s changed to make the modern tech go away, when, no shit, he gets shot again. Active attempted murder investigation, in a hospital with security, and the dang Justice Society are there, and a creepy hand holding a gun just pokes in the doorway and busts another cap in him! This does not bode well for the effectiveness of, well, anyone!

Apparently, the doctors think that penicillin is the only thing that can save Professor Zee’s life (from a second gunshot; personally, I think they’ll do something else to save him, and the doctor just has the clap), and their supplies of it blinked out because of the time travel thing, so it’s up to the JSA to find some.

The Flash sets off to do that, The Atom sets off to BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF Per Degaton, because this is what an unpowered 5’1″ guy with a chip on his shoulder on a super-hero team does, Hawkman goes to protect the Mayor of Gotham City (good luck with that, buddy) because, and I love him, but Hawkman’s kind of a fuckin’ fascist, and with a team still in place that has Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and Johnny Thunder’s thunderbolt, three beings who can do virtually anything, they send Dr. Mid-Nite (a blind man whose only power is that he can see perfectly in the dark, so he wears special goggles that simulate darkness), by himself, to protect all the scientists of the world from Degaton. I mean, I guess good for them for having faith in their colleague, but wow, y’all. The more things change… The rest stay behind to protect Professor Zee from gunshot #3, because they did such a bang-up job on gunshot #2.

Also, in terms of predicting the future in other ways in a time travel story, congratulations, John Broome: you’ve basically written the plot of Avengers: Endgame.

We cut to The Flash (art by Lee Elias), after a stash of penicillin that’s been hidden in a special time capsule made of metals that’ll protect it from the effects of time travel (Gosh, that’s convenient), and when he arrives, he meets Degaton and his gang of weirdos, who are using the time capsule cave as a hideout (Even more convenient!), and he’s doing OK fighting three or four ordinary men (keep in mind, even the Jay Garrick Flash was, at least as it’s been retconned, in touch with the Speed Force, and able to travel at the speed of sound) until Degaton drops a stalactite on The Flash’s head when he’s not looking. (Remember this part for later.)

Rather than killing him outright while he’s unconscious, they wait until he’s semi-conscious and woozy (while writing this initially, I forgot what CTE was called for a minute), and put him in the time capsule with the goddamned penicillin, expecting him to run out of air and die before he can escape, despite his being able to do super-speed shit (This is why you’ve never advanced past lab assistant, Degaton!), so of course he does super-speed shit (probably one of the earliest examples of a Flash vibrating through solid objects written by Broome) and escapes with the penicillin, but by the time he’s out, Degaton’s flown the coop!

And now, it’s time for a Del Ennis Wheaties ad! There’s a name you don’t hear every day. Good little career, too.

From here, we cut to The Atom’s part of the story (art by Paul Reinman), where Degaton’s riding tanks into the subway tunnels in Gotham City, somethin’ somethin’ THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE, and then his assistant Kale (who is literally the smartest character in this entire book, smarter than the guy who built the time machine, even), mentions that he rounded up “a hundred mugs” for his job, and they would like to get paid, so he suggests robbing the vault of an insurance company nearby (See? SMART!), as there’s a million dollars in gold inside, and that’d make the boys happy! (Alas, the math isn’t great. Adjusted for inflation, Kale and each of his mugs would get $146,050 in 2025 dollars, which, for world conquerors, ain’t shit. Can’t even buy most houses with that!)  At first, Degaton just punches poor Kale in the face, but then he decides that it’ll make the fellas loyal, so he starts firing tank rounds at the wall of the vault, in the subway tunnel, because those things are really stable, right?

This alerts The Atom to where they are, because the shots crack the ground open underneath his feet (What did I just tell y’all?), and The Atom BEATS THE SHIT OUTTA SOME GUYS when he finds them, grabs Degaton, almost gets the identity of the pivotal historical event out of him (Degaton spills “The Battle of” before he’s interrupted), and then Kale whacks The Atom in the back of the head and knocks him out. (Mugs at Your Six: 2, Justice Society: 0 after 2.)

Kale suggests that they just shoot The Atom at this point (See? SMART!), and instead, Degaton calls Kale’s mind “petty” (What’d I tell you about this fuckin’ guy, too?) and puts The Atom in the accident test room of the insurance company, in a trap that he’ll never escape! (Spoiler Alert: The Atom escapes, and heads to the hospital with “The Battle of…” as his contribution, sadly, without BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF Per Degaton.)

We interrupt this story to tell you that SWIFTY SEAVER WINS FOR BEAVER! WHUT? Oh, it’s a Jim Wise ad for P.F. Canvas sneakers, made by B.F. Goodrich, which I assume is now a Raytheon joint. (Michelin bought the tire business in ’86, and United Technologies bought the rest in 2011, and Raytheon bought United Technologies in 2020. I don’t think Raytheon give a rat’s ass about making sneakers these days, though, too busy making murder tools. Golly, this is a lot of mergers and acquisition info for a 1-page advertising comic about a kid winning a foot race at a summer camp!)

After that thrilling little bit of sponcon, we cut to the tanks riding out of the Gotham City subways, ready to raise hell, and for some reason, technological objects are still changing back to old-tymey shit, so Hawkman (drawn by Joe Kubert) spots a man’s car turning into a horse and buggy, and then the bridge he’s on turning into a rope bridge, so he’s gotta go save that mug before coming after Degaton, and he does. While this is going on, Degaton takes over an antique shop to serve as his new headquarters, the Mayor of Gotham tries to bust a cap in Kale’s ass, but first, his gun turns into an old-tymey gun, and then it just disappears!

Hawkman arrives just in time, starts beating up some mugs, and when he turns to tell the mayor to stay behind him, Kale knocks his ass out! GO KALE!  (Mugs at Your Six: 3, Justice Society: 0, middle 3.) The Gang takes them both to Degaton’s new secret lair, and when Hawkman regains consciousness, he asks, “So you’ve taken over an antique shop, Degaton! What’s the idea?” (Good taste?)

At this point, I miss 4 pages of my copy of the book, because as I remembered from 1999, my copy of All-Star #35 is missing its centerfold. (I got it for a song.) Any of you hoping for my description of a nude drawing of Al Pratt, sorry.

However, I tracked down images of those 4 pages, so I can tell you that the real reason Degaton chose an antique store is because everything in it was too old to be affected by his time travel history changin’ plan. (I swear, nowadays, you probably go into an antique shop and find Pogs and Furbys. I can tell you that I’m old enough to have found a book that I’m in at an antique shop, so I guess anything goes.) It also had some sort of trapped bed, so of course Degaton tries to kill Hawkman and the mayor with it rather than just shooting them both, and that works out about how you’d expect. (They make sweet, sweet love in the bed…nah, Hawkman and the mayor escape the trap, and he flies the mayor to City Hall, where OF COURSE he’ll be safe! Has Hawkman BEEN to Gotham?)

My copy of the comic resumes with Dr. Mid-Nite (drawn by Frank Harry) arriving at the Hall of Science at Gotham University, where all of Gotham’s scientists (Hey, I thought he was supposed to protect more than just Gotham’s! Rip-off!) are trying to make plans by candlelight, because they’re deeply romantic people and also the power’s out. GOTHAM PLUNGED INTO DARKNESS! IN OTHER WORDS, IT’S WEDNESDAY. (Also, maybe not the best idea to gather even all of these guys in one building, y0.)

The scientists decide that they’re going to re-invent all technology, if they have to, from memory! (BOOOOOOOOOO!) Lurking in the building, Kale wants to just waste them all, like the only sensible person in this comic book, but Degaton insists on making a super-villain speech first instead, because Degaton’s a dildo, y’all. He announces himself, brings in Kale’s army of a hundred mugs, and then Dr. Mid-Nite rallies these nerds into battle against the mugs! “Fight, men of science! Fight for liberty — and for the future of the world!”

During the battle, Dr. Mid-Nite gets the jump on Degaton, and is about to break his back Bane-style, but…sing it with me…a mug on his six knocks him the fuck out! (Mugs at Your Six: 4, Justice Society: 0, middle 4.)

From here, Per Degaton tries to force the world’s greatest chemist, physicist and biologist, all of whom he worked for at one point (You’d think these cats would’ve warned Professor Zee via whisper network or something, but you know scientists, they’re so competitive!) to be his assistants (don’t kink-shame, y’all), and orders them to set a trap to kill Dr. Mid-Nite, but doesn’t check their work. (Jesus, this again. No wonder this guy got shitcanned so often from these gigs.) One of them tips off Dr. Mid-Nite as to how to escape the trap, of course, and he rescues the three scientists just as they’re about to get bumped off by a firing squad.

All the heroes, concussions still a-blazin’, regroup at the hospital, where the penicillin has taken effect, and Professor Zee’s conscious and ready to talk! For reasons they don’t get into, apparently this historical turning point that Per Degaton interfered with was the outcome of the Battle of Arbela, also known as the Battle of Gaugamela, so they head back to Degaton’s first lair, where he’s keeping the time machine, and Green Lantern goes in by himself (oh god, I can see where this shit is going) because somethin’ somethin’ the element of surprise.

Green Lantern walks in on Kale asking Degaton why he’s getting ready to destroy the time machine by sending it 10,000 years into the future and blowing it up (always sensible, that Kale) and Degaton says it’s to keep the time machine out of the Justice Society’s hands. At that point, GL makes his move, but Per Degaton had the good sense to build a button that released “a solid bar of invisible air pressure” just as he was about to tackle Degaton (oh, come the fuck on), and Green Lantern hits his head on the wooden (remember, kids, Alan Scott Green Lantern’s weakness is wood, huh-huh, huh-huh) control lever, which also serves the dual plot point of moving the lever from 10,000 years to 10 years! (“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding.”-Palmer)

Green Lantern emerges from the time machine with the 5th concussion of our story, 10 years in the future, and finds the Justice Society waiting for him, 10 years older, because he botched the raid so bad that Degaton took over the world and forced them into hiding! (See? Endgame, basically!) If you’ve ever wanted to see Johnny Thunder with bad five o’clock shadow, READ THIS BOOK.

They all prepare to go back to the time machine to go to the Battle of Arbela to fix things, and, as planned, the time machine BLOWS THE FUCK UP. Point, Degaton!

But, wait! Green Lantern, I shit you not, uses his ring as a time machine, which he could’ve done without even attempting a raid, and could’ve avoided 10 years of misery for the world and especially his friends! COME ON, MAN!

The next page is a half-page of not-terribly-funny one-panel gags at the top, and an ad for a competing battery product (Bright-Star, still in business in the town of Hanover, PA), and then we get a 2 page text story, The Trap by Charles King, which is a weird, kinda racist Native American murder mystery that I couldn’t bring myself to read in detail because, well, that.

They cut back to a scene of Per Degaton, ruler of the world (and Kale), ruling the world from perhaps the most basic, threadbare office I’ve ever seen in my life, never mind a comic book, and while he’s gloating, the telephone in the office re-appears, and a train does the same outside his window! But how?

They cut back to the Battle of Arbela, where the JSA intercept Degaton’s Army of A Hundred Mugs and their modern weapons attempting to change history, kick their asses, make Alexander the Great happy (questionable, that), and he inscribes the shield from the beginning of the comic, explaining the mystery signature.

At that point, the JSA start fading away, because, according to Wonder Woman, “Since we’ve set the past straight, it means that ALL THIS NEVER HAPPENED!”, and they reconvene in front of the Magic Sphere, which translated the message on the shield from Macedonian, and now they can see Alexander’s signature, plain as day.

As for what happened to Per Degaton? He’s back at Professor Zee’s lab, with Professor Zee apparently unharmed (?!) and unaware of what’s taken place, and he thinks that he dreamed being ruler of the world for 10 years. (Spoiler: this part didn’t fully take.)

And that’s the end! Back inside cover is a Thom McAn ad. Also, in the late 1940s, about half of all ads had baseball in them. I miss Thom McAn, but, well, CVS happened. No, really, look at the corporate history at that link. It’s whack.

What’d I think of the book?

I can tell y’all with certainty that John Broome definitely got better as his career advanced. There are still early flourishes of the stuff that made his ’60s work cool in this story, though. It’s also cool to see, as someone who was a kid in the summer of 1981 and was wondering “Who the fuck is Per Degaton?” while reading All-Star Squadron #1, where he came from, and I’m glad that the one issue of pre-1970s All-Star I’ve ever been able to get my paws on retroactively became a key issue, thanks, I guess, to that no-good Roy Thomas. This one was never bought for the point of reading it, though. I just wanted an original All-Star Comics issue, a thing I basically thought of as unattainable, because I rarely saw them, and they were never cheap, and I got one. It just took me half my life to get around to actually reading it.

Truthfully, as someone who adores the JSA, every Golden Age JSA story I’ve read except the first one in All-Star Comics #3 (which is technically all solo stories, but which had a great framing device of them bragging about their adventures at the first JSA meeting) has been pretty dire. We’ll see, as we advance through the ’40s and ’50s books, how quickly the stories improve in the super-hero books, though by the time the DC Silver Age stuff started, from experience, I can tell you that they felt like they were on more solid ground.

Without having read all of All-Star or any of the characters’ solo books back then (someday, maybe I will; here and there, I get scraps of it), I’d guess that most of what makes the Justice Society great really started in the Silver Age when the writers who had the first pass at the characters like John Broome and Gardner Fox came back to them when they were more seasoned, and mixed with kids who loved the JSA, then grew up, got into the comics business and started fleshing these characters out more.

Now, if only they’d gotten around to fleshing out Kale some more. When I get to my re-read of All-Star Squadron, I’ll have to see how Thomas uses Kale (he shows up in one issue), who was absolutely the best part of the story, way cooler than Per Degaton as written here. He was like a Jonathan Banks kinda dude in this. REALLY liked Kale!

On This Date:

Births: actor Jeffrey DeMunn, who I first saw in Resurrection with Ellen Burstyn and Sam Shepard when it first hit cable (I keep meaning to revisit this one), but who is more well-known these days as Dale on the television adaptation of The Walking Dead, was born on this date.

Film:

There were a few interesting and/or notable films released both domestically and abroad in the week or so around the release of All-Star Comics #35:

It Happened on 5th Avenue was out in limited release (I’m assuming major cities) on April 19th. Odd Man Out with James Mason was also out in limited release on April 23rd. If you were in London at the time, Black Narcissus by Powell and Pressburger was out on April 24th. Three pictures came out on April 26th in either limited or wide release: Hard Boiled Mahoney (a Bowery Boys picture), Land of the Lawless (a Johnny Mack Brown western) and, in limited release, The Captive Heart with Michael Redgrave. I’ve seen none of these, but I did see Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (their next film after Black Narcissus) recently, and that was pretty incredible.

Both Odd Man Out and Black Narcissus are free on YouTube, at least for the time being, so if you watch them before I do, let me know what you think.

Sports: Lou Thesz beats Whipper Billy Watson to win the National Wrestling Association (eventually merged with the National Wrestling Alliance) world heavyweight title at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis, Missouri. It was the beginning of Lou’s 2nd of 3 title reigns with this belt. (I tried to find a kinescope of this match for y’all, but to no avail. It’s probably in the bottom of the East River along with the rest of the DuMont archives.)

Music: there weren’t a lot of albums released in 1947, but Music Out of the Moon was an April 1947 release. A cassette of this album was actually listened to during the Apollo 11 mission, and it’s also widely regarded as the most popular Theremin album of all time.

Here, have a listen…

Other Comics:

There were 11 books released on this date, and in a refrain that you already know you’ll be hearing a lot until I get into late 1963’s books, I own none of them. Highlights are Detective Comics #124 (with an allegedly drawn by Bob Kane Joker cover story, plus Air Wave, Slam Bradley, and Curt Swan drawing the Boy Commandos), Feature Comics #111 (with a sadly non-Lou Fine Doll Man story and a 3 page story featuring Rube Goldberg‘s character Lala Palooza), Kid Eternity #6 (without getting into too many specifics, one of the Kid Eternitys is in current DC books), The Kilroys #1 (an ACG book, and the only #1 of the week; this ran for 8 years and 54 issues, and I’m completely unfamiliar), Laugh Comics #22 (with Katy Keene, Betty/Veronica and Debbie Twist stories by Bill Woggon in addition to the Archie cover story), and Shadow Comics #75, which has a railroad tracks bondage cover!

What’s next?

CRIME!

Does it pay?

Tune in to find out!