Review of The Young All-Stars Issue #5

Review of issue # 5 of Young All Stars



What Is It? A comic book in DC's “New Format”. Approximately 24 story pages, all color. Cover date is October 1987.
Plot Summary: It's 1942. World War II is happening. Some youngsters adjunct to the All Star Squadron are in Hollywood/The Los Angeles area for a dance/bond rally. Intragroup squabbles cause a pair of them to leave early. They end up at the closed Santa Monica Pier Amusement Park.

Another pair of these Young All Stars tail them. Axis America, a group of super-powered saboteurs, fight the four All Stars. Three of the four All Stars are knocked out and captured by fight's end. This leaves Dan the Dyna-Mite to lead the rescue effort. And there's the cliff-hanger ending.

What's Good About It? Writers Roy and Dann Thomas write stories that combine a Golden Age feeling with certain Modern Age sensibilities. Just to bring up, a random example: Internment Camps for Japanese-Americans. Today we can look back at them as a mistake. At the time, very few dared to speak up against them. Well, Roy and Dann Thomas do try to bring up some of the moral points against Internment Camps, yet the script still conveys a sense of World War II patriotism.

The letters page is another small point in the book's favor. I like to read them. It gives a sense of what the fan community was like before the rise of the World Wide Web.

What's Not So Good About It? Some of the WWII-era patriotism comes off weird to my sensibilities. Maybe it seems a bit jingoistic or something of that nature.

What The... Moments: I'm not sure as to whether it was the massive ret-conning of the history of the DC Universe in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths or something else, but the casting seems to involve rather a lot of knock-off characters. There's Flying Fox (a Batman knock-off), Iron Munro (a Superman knock-off), Fury (a Wonder Woman knock-off), and Neptune Perkins (an Aquaman knock-off).

Who Needs It? Superhero fans, fans of DC's 80s-90s Secret Origins series,and fans of Roy Thomas's writing should find this book to be worth their time.

Rating: 5 Stars (out of five)