For this weekend’s light-hearted, escapist blog post about superheroes, Balladeer’s Blog looks at the 1949 issues of America’s very first superteam in comic books – the Justice Society.
ALL STAR COMICS Vol 1 #45 (February 1949)
Title: The Case of the Cosmic Criminals
Justice Society Roster: Dr. Mid-Nite, the 1st Wonder Woman, 1st Flash, 1st Atom, 1st Black Canary, 1st Hawkman and 1st Green Lantern
Villains: The Cosmic Criminals
Synopsis: Professor Felix Egri uses star alignments, stellar energy and a distant nova to provide a charge of cosmic energy to 6 ordinary objects. The Rocky Castle Gang of criminals raid his lab and steal the half-dozen items and begin a crime wave with the powers granted to them by the cosmic energy of those objects. Continue reading
For this weekend’s light-hearted, escapist blog post about superheroes, Balladeer’s Blog goes back to the Justice Society of America, this country’s very first superteam.
ALL STAR COMICS Vol 1 #39 (February 1948) 
ADVENTURE COMICS VOL 1 #352 (January 1967) 
The Fatal Five are Tharok, a cyborg whose cybernetic brain makes him more intelligent than Brainiac 5; Validus, a huge purple monstrosity whose insanity drives it to perpetual violence; the Emerald Empress, evil ruler of an entire planet whose populace recently won a war to overthrow her; the Persuader, a killer and plunderer whose armor and Atomic Axe make him unstoppable; and Mano, a mutant whose hand wields energies so powerful that the hand destroyed his entire home planet. 
LEGION OF SUPERHEROES (Superboy starring the …) Vol 1 #203 (August 1974) 
Eventually, Dream Girl has a dream foretelling an imminent attack by Validus – the huge, mindless monster who is strong enough to take on entire teams of Legionnaires at once. Because Validus is usually harmless unless controlled psychically by its fellow Fatal Five member Tharok, the Legion makes sure that the cyborg Tharok is still safely incarcerated at Space Prison Complex X33. 
When Validus ultimately attacks Legion headquarters in future Metropolis, he is routing the heroes while withstanding all their counterattacks. Invisible Kid at first seems to have abandoned his post to dally with Myla but it turns out he actually solved the problem at hand. 
For this weekend’s light-hearted, escapist blog post about superheroes, Balladeer’s Blog goes back to the Justice Society of America, this country’s very first superteam. Years ago, I covered the early years of the JSA, from their first appearance in 
ALL-STAR COMICS Vol 1 #28 (April 1946) 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1 #183 (October 1980) 
The remaining evil forces on Apokolips – led by Granny Goodness (a Kirby creation, needless to say) – have raided New Genesis and abducted most of the inhabitants, then taken them as slaves back to their own planet. They did it with the help of three Earth-Two villains – Icicle, Shade and the Fiddler – so the New Gods use the annual get-together of the Justice Society and Justice League to recruit the two teams to help them recover their kidnapped population. 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1 #123 (October 1975) 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1 #82 (August 1970) 
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1 #21 (August 1963) 
The company’s method of adapting more “up to date” versions of their Golden Age heroes without losing the copyrights on those figures was to state that the original versions of all their old heroes came from an alternate Earth, designated Earth-Two. The Earth with the newer heroes was called Earth-One, since they were the newer, CURRENT versions. 
PREZ Vol 1 #1 (September 1973) 
This caught the attention of corrupt political handler Boss Smiley, whose head was one of those syrupy and kitschy smiley faces that had become widespread by 1973. Boss Smiley and slimy advertising mogul Misery Marko recruited Prez to run for the Senate as their pawn, using the slogan “He made the clocks run on time.” (a Mussolini joke, of course) 
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