Peerless Power of Comics!

In my last post I presented an article on the superhero revival of the 1960s that appeared in an early fanzine, Hero . In this installment I follow up with another piece from Hero # 1; a discussion on DC’s popular  Justice League of America . The team concept was not only a proven financial success, but garnered robust support from a majority of fans, including a portion that had collected All Star Comics in the 1940s and early 50s, a comic book that starred the original “Justice Society of America".   Justice League of America # 16 (December 1962), published a few months before the article in Hero # 1 appeared, is an example of the industry's growing awareness of fandom. A character in the story, Jerry Thomas, is a nod to both Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, two well-known fans whose missives were published in editor Julie Schwartz's letter columns. Murphy Anderson art; Ira Schnapp letters. Image from the Grand Comic Book Database: http://www.comics.org/issue/17301/    Rick

My next few posts will focus on an early fanzine, Hero , sampling articles by comic book enthusiasts at the dawn of the superhero revival. Many fans, both teenagers who might not have experienced that era firsthand and adults who had actually grown up in the "Golden Age" - a period of time that began in the late 1930s with the debut of Superman in Action Comics # 1, and lasted into the early 1950s - yearned for a return to the fantastic characters that were in short supply for nearly a decade.  By the 1950s comic book content was dominated by genre material, the most popular being war, western, humor, mystery and romance. The once unbeatable superheroes who dominated the newsstands in the 1940s faded from popularity in the following decade, although a few of National/DC's long-running characters survived, specifically Superman (and related characters), Batman and Wonder Woman . In a period of four years (1956-1960) DC's attempts to update/revise once popular charac