It first began by reprinting newspaper comic strips, and then it illustrated adventure stories had previously been in pulp novels and magazines, then the detectives put on masks and a man could leap tall buildings in a single bound. It was the Golden Age of Comic Books, the Golden Age of Super Heroes.

As mentioned previously, though I had read a few other comics, the first series I was committed to reading every issue was All-Star Squadron. A book that took place during that “Golden Age.”

I would discover and read other books at that time, some Justice League of America, Brave & and the Bold which would be replaced by Batman and the Outsiders, and The New Teen Titans.

The Titans became a representation of the “Present Day” comics for me, while The Squadron was the represented a modern telling of those original heroes of the Golden Age. I was far more interested in them than any of the new characters and teams that were showing up.

That was the world that I fell in love with. The world of ‘Earth 2’. (I’ll discuss my thoughts on parallel worlds in comics in another post.) But because of this I would become curious and want to learn more all about the heroes of the Golden Age, even those not at DC Comics. I began to do research, with great enjoyment, on all these comic book heroes and heroines of the 1930s and 1940s.

I remember in school one time; I had some graph paper and I attempted to create a crossword puzzle out of the name of every super hero I knew. Wasn’t easy since so many of the names ended in ‘man’.

I read books about comics of the period, and even bought a small “price guide” (Not Overstreet, because I couldn’t afford it), to find out what issues of what comics each hero first appeared in. I loved discovering all those long-lost characters, there are many more I’m only discovering recently and it is still fun. It was that fun that kept me going. Not only enjoying the comics I read, but discovering characters I might never be able to read their stories.

When DC Comics celebrated their 50th Anniversary they released a monthly series called WHO’S WHO IN THE DC UNIVERSE. Page after page, issue after issue of hundreds of characters from across the DC Comics universe and history. It was fantastic to read, but it didn’t’ include all the heroes I had discovered. I kept exploring, finding reprints to read when I could.

There are so many heroes that are lost to time. Some survived by being bought up by the bigger surviving publishers. Examples of what DC bought:

Fawcett Publishing:     the original Captain Marvel, Bulletman, Spy Smasher, and more

Quality Comics:           Plastic Man, Uncle Sam, The Ray, Black Condor, Human Bomb, and Phantom Lady.

Charlton Comics:        Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, The Question, Nightshade, and Peacemaker

Each of these purchases have stories in their own, but for the sake of this blog I’ll mention one. Plastic Man would find his place at DC Comics, but the other Quality Comics character get introduced into the DC Universe on another alternate universe. In Justice League #107 and #108. Only a few issues after the grand #100 which was the digest reprint that had started my love for super heroes, the JLA and JSA once again team up to discover that on Earth X Uncle Sam lead a team of Freedom Fighters that included Black Condor, The Ray, Doll Man, Human Bomb, and Phantom Lady that were still fighting the Nazi’s decades after America lost World War II. The Freedom Fighters would get their own comic series out of that, where they would be joined by another Golden Age character known as Firebrand.

When Roy Thomas wrote the All-Star Squadron years later, he included these heroes into the team, but also showed how they ended up on a dystopian world later. I’m still not certain if that was a good idea, but I’ll get to that and other alternate world issues in another blog entry.

The pantheon of heroes grew, and I wanted to know them all.

A lot of that was the foundation on which I began to build my own world of heroes. More on that later.

I still love to discover lost heroes from the past.

This is a continuing series on comic books as part of an assignment for Toastmasters which will result in a speech on the top of these blogs.