The All-Star Companion edited by Roy Thomas (book review).
Getting early TwoMorrows books is problematic. Like their magazines, they carry the history of mostly American comicbooks and those who buy them tend to be very reluctant to put them on the secondary market. It was pure luck that I came across ‘The All-Star Companion’, edited and mostly written by Roy Thomas, at a good price.
In the introduction, writer Roy Thomas points out that although the story quality of the original run of the Justice Society Of America wasn’t exactly the best in the world, it does share something in common with Superman. It was the first, in this case the first super-hero team in the world. That doesn’t mean there weren’t earlier teams as he cites Doc Savage amongst others but they weren’t in costume. As such, the JSA’s significance becomes important. If an individual super-hero was popular, combining them would also increase reader numbers. From my perspective, I suspect any of the comicbook companies would have created a team, just National Periodicals got there first.
There are rundowns of the various comicbook creators where the character artists contributed individual chapters when they divided up. The checklist rollcall of the JSAers themselves is done from their support cast from their own comicbooks, although they mostly never appeared there.
The information for the individual issues is eased somewhat with break-offs with other information. Outside of Timely’s All-Winners Squad, only a couple of comicbook companies tried teams a little later. As none of them had as many characters as National, the JSA was unique.
If this volume was just an issue-by-issue coverage, you could follow the page reduction during WW2 and think the drop in JSA members was attributed to that. However, Jerry Bails and others point out that the stories weren’t printed in any particular order but as there was no continuity I doubt if that made any difference. However, behind the scenes, Harry Donenfeld and Bill Gaines had a falling out. This caused a division in the characters usage and split some from the JSA. Ironically, some of the individual chapters were simply rewritten with different characters. If anything, it was a sign of the times that Wonder Woman became secretary to the team and invariably was rarely seen. These days, we might read more into it than that.
It’s rather interesting reading about the third Psycho-Pirate story that never happened because it also gives insight into some of the inhouse shenanigans that went on as to who governed the characters and their absence in ‘All-Star’. With the individual chapters for characters, their regular artists were employed in this. When editor/writer Bob Kanigher took over the writing chores briefly and he did try to shake up the formula more. A lot of the stories were written by Garner Fox and John Broome. There’s also some evolution of Hawkman’s mask, finally getting rid of the bottom of his beak and eventually a standard mask which lasted into the JLA/JSA team-ups. I’m surprised it didn’t happen earlier because it really squashed his face up and looked plain ugly and difficult to draw effectively and they were forever playing with his feathered ‘ears’ as shown in this book. It also looks like the artists weren’t happy with the Atom’s costume neither, as well as sprucing up his strength. With the absence of Superman and Batman, the real powerhouse amongst them was the Green Lantern.
The end chapters looked at the Junior Justice League for readers. About the only thing missing is the deciphering of the coded messages in each issue, although it looks like it was done for revealing what was going to be in the next issue.
Lastly, there’s a look at the JLA/JSA team-ups which is where I first came across both teams back in 1965 at loggerheads with each other.
There is a second All-Star Companion looking from the creators point of view from the looks of things but I suspect you’ll want to read this one first and a bit of luck getting one at a decent price.
GF Willmetts
June 2026
(pub: TwoMorrows, 2000. 207 page illustrated large softcover. Price: varies. ISBN: 1-893905-05-5)
check out website: not even a digital copy but there are copies out there!
