All-Star Comics
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All Star Comics (no hyphen) was a comic book series published by fore runner of DC Comics through the 1940s. It was notable for portraying the Justice Society of America, the first team of superheroes.
In the 1940s the company now known as DC Comics was actually two sister companies, the core Superman/Batman line of books and a sister company called All-American Comics (AAC). At that time the majority of comic books were anthologies that contained a disparate mix of superhero, adventure, western, detective, and humour features. Only the most successful characters (i.e. Superman and Batman) had a title devoted exclusively to their adventures. AAC did not have a headlining star who could carry their own title, but they did have a number of popular characters who together could carry a new anthology.
All Star Comics #1 appeared in Summer 1940 and was relatively successful. However, it is the Winter issue (No #3) of that year which is of the greatest historical importance. In that issue the heroes were shown gathered at a meeting of a group called the Justice Society of America where they swapped stories about their exploits. From Flash Comics there was the Flash and the Hawkman, from More Fun Comics was the immortal Doctor Fate and the Spectre, from Adventure Comics came Hourman and the Sandman, and finally from All-American Comics came Green Lantern and the Atom. This new format proved to be so successful that the pretense of individual adventures was dropped and the heroes started teaming up to fight crime as a single group.
All Star Comics changed over the years as wartime paper shortages shrank its page count and it switched from a quarterly to two-monthly publication schedule. However it never really lost its heritage as an anthology and different chapters of the JSA's stories would often be handled by completely different artists. The JSA lasted in All Star Comics until issue #57 (ironically a story titled "The Mystery of the Vanishing Detectives"). Superhero comics slumped in the early 1950s and All Star Comics was transformed into All-Star Western #58 (with the hyphen). It ran as a western until ALL-STAR WESTERN #119 (1961).
In the 1970s the name All Star Comics was resurrected for a series portraying the modern day adventures of the JSA. This new series ignored the numbering from All-Star Western and continued the original numbering by starting with All Star Comics #58. That series ran for seventeen issues before it was cancelled and the JSA's adventures were folded into another title. Since then the name ALL-STAR has been used by DC Comics on a series of projects to denote a connection with the characters from the original comics. Reprints of the original series are now published as hardback volumes of the All Star Archives.
Grand Comics Database Project: All-Star Comics Bibliographic index (http://www.comics.org/series.lasso?SeriesID=140)