All Star Comics No.8 (1941)
So right off the bat, this book opens up with a good refresher on who the official JSA members are, while promoting (or demoting, depending on how you see it) others to “Honorary Members” meaning ‘hey kids, Supes, Bats, Jay, and GL won’t be in this book! Go buy some other comics ya dead beat!’
Okay… well maybe it’s not ‘that’ harsh… but you get the idea 😛
Anyway, the first page of actual story (page 4 at this point) is all about how Hawkman (the new leader of the team) has his feathers in a twist about a mob/gang that isn’t interesting or important unless you were a kid in the 40s. Other JSA members are asking him for help with their own problems with this gang but he’s all flustered about the case, when literally out of nowhere pops in Dr Mid-Nite! No explication on where he came from or how he got there… actually come to tell you the truth, they’re not actually anywhere… All of these characters are being drawn on single colored backgrounds so I really shouldn’t judge.
Anyway, so Dr Mid-Nite decides to bust out a tale to The JSA!
*queue twelve page flashback!*
So Doctor M heard some shenanigans on the radio of some dude who broke out of prison so he checks up with some newspaper clippings he had in a filing cabinet then leaps out a window to go… fight crime… or catch the crook… it isn’t quite clear.
Regardless, by the very next page Dr M finds this dude and reacts the same way I first did by saying something like “oh shit that was fast” before immediately tackling the dude and getting into a knife fight! But if you were hoping for a cool fight… TOO BAD! He knocks him out within five panels!
After that, he just up and kidnaps this dude, takes him back to a lab, draws a few blood samples and just ditches him for some other scientist to help with his analogy of the blood. But when he get’s to his buddy’s lab, the dude isn’t there! Instead Dr Mid-Nite finds his assistant and the assistant tells him that he’d left for Africa for some ambiguous reason conveniently right before Doctor M got there.
So despite not just having the assistant be the actual scientist for the addition of a few extra panels, Mid-Nite finds one of the scientists’ formula’s just lying around and get’s the lab assistant to help him inject it into an ape that just so happens to be chillin in the basement!
Some how during all of that Dr M had been working on some kind of tranquilizer antidote formula and after only just injecting the ape with something, he then injects it again with the antidote right before he’s attacked by this ape who’s mad at him for getting poked or something (look it’s all a bit convoluted…)
So anyway, Dr M whisks back to where he left the criminal dude he beat up and injects the guy with the antidote. The criminal dude is all like ‘yo man, my lawyer injected me with the crazy serum man, thanks for helpin me bro’
So then Mid-Nite has this criminal write down the address for him and takes off again to find yet another needle and syringe in the lawyer’s office. Dun dun dun! *drama*
Then as if this story wasn’t convenient enough already, the lawyer walks in with (I kid you not, this is his actual title) The Notorious Political Boss of The City.
So Mid-Nite is all like ‘sick! Imma get these fools!’ … So he jumps out of the closet he was hiding in and beats them up, then ties them to chairs and interrogates them by threatening to use the crazy drug on them (which is kinda cool actually… felt kinda batman-ish)
So after all that, Mid-Nite gets the two to write confessionals of their crimes. He notices that they don’t mention anything about a Dr Elba (which I don’t recall reading that name up until that point so I don’t understand this dude’s purpose but it turns out he’s the villain of this overarching story)
Then there’s actually a really cool moment where this Elba dude had snuck up on Dr Mid-Nite during this exchange, whacked him in the back of the head and Dr Mid-Nite looses his vision temporarily. So Hooty (Dr Mid-Nite’s sidekick owl friend) swoops in and saves him from being shot in the back!
*end twelve page flashback!*
Hawkman is all like, ‘Yo! We’ve been chasing the same dude! This Elba fella is gonna get what’s coming to him!’ and so Dr M is all like ‘Sweet! Here’s some of those tranquilizer drugs, and a shit ton of needles!’
After that, there’s a few pages where Doctor Fate meets up with Inza (his GF) and some dude named Bill who runs a Bus Company who was effected by The Notorious Political Boss of The City and like a typical Golden Age superhero Doctor Fate is all like ‘This looks like a job for me!’ then flies off without saying goodbye to anyone
So what does he do next you ask? Why, he breaks into some random place and starts beating people up of course! At one point he throw’s a couch at some dudes and makes a pun like ‘SoFA so good’ or some crap and it’s terrible 😛
Anyway, Doctor Fate get’s some info on the whereabouts of some lady named Marge and, yep, you guessed it, he breaks in guns blazing and takes out a bunch of dudes before rescuing this Marge chick who has been given no character up to this point.
…Wait… Turns out it was Bill’s wife or something. Doesn’t mater, because it never comes up again and the writers didn’t give her any kind of character anyway!
So then after all this, some of the gang members that Doctor Fate beat up, regroup and hop on a bus and plan to hijack it to taint Bill’s name or something idk… but PLOT TWIST the bus driver was Doctor Fate wearing a Bus Driver uniform over his Doctor Fate costume and he gets them again oh my god this story is ridiculous!
After that he hops off the bus and politely returns the uniform to the original bus driver. Then he chases down this gang boss (named Goopy Gus… ya know, a mobster name) and totally wrecks his car, rips him out of the drivers seat, and throws him into the side of the bus he just hopped out of!
Dr fate then takes him to prison yadda yadda… Dr Elba is still up to something and I can’t believe I’m now nineteen pages into this book.
The Atom and The Sandman also have their own solo stories like this lasting until page thirty one! (geez this book is long) Then we finally get The Starman’s story!
And honestly… it’s just as convoluted as the other stories! This one has to do with a haunted house and some kid named Billy that finds a chest full of money and then almost get’s ran over by a car but its not any car, it’s Ted Knight’s car (aka Starman) and Ted brings him back to some mansion where Billy spills the beans on this cash and then Starman goes back to this haunted house to find some criminals and what does he do….?
He… he beat’s them up. That’s how all of these heroes solved their problems.
THEN HAWKMAN AND THE SPECTRE GET THEIR OWN SPERATE STORIES THAT GO UNTIL PAGE 50 THEN THE BOOK ENDS WITH NO CONCLUSIONS!
IT’S VERY FRUSTRATING
I read this book in hopes to have more to talk about than this, but you know what, it just kind of burned me out. Now don’t get me wrong, they’re not a terrible group of stories (if read on their own) but like as an over arching narrative for an entire book, it was pretty thinly tied together. I mean that Spectre story is kind of neat; he strands some dude on an asteroid as a method of interrogation. Hawkgirl shows up in Hawkaman’s story… but yeah.
Apparently this was the good stuff back in the day. I can see why (because it has like eight stories in this giant comic book featuring like forty characters) but I’ve read better stories from DC around this era. Sayin’ jus sayin’
Take that DC!
…Nah, we cool.
(EDIT PS: I’m beginning to think that the copy of the issue I read was incomplete because upon further inspection, All Star Comics No.8 also has a backup story introducing William Moulton Marston’s newest character; Wonder Woman! …But that wasn’t in the copy I read so maybe there was a conclusion to the story but I couldn’t find it so whatever I guess, this was a weird post to write for anyway)
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The main reason I shot this shoot was because of ParisCustomBricks most recent release of his Doctor Mid-Nite figure! It’s a great design even though I didn’t receive my entire promised fig. Despite my pre-order of it from November of 2017, I didn’t receive the dual molded boots or the Owl piece I was promised. However, I hope that Gabe can rectify this in the future. But at least the figure arrived! I’m glad to have it now than wait another six months for those two details. However, I won’t forget about them and felt inclined to mention it on this post.
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