Publication history
Young All-Stars was a follow-up to DC's popular 1980s series All-Star Squadron, created and written by Roy Thomas. All-Star Squadron retroactively introduced new stories into DC's Golden Age history, mainly during World War II. The series premise was that during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created Article X, a "superhero draft" that asked all active masked crime-fighters and superhuman adventurers to join forces as a special war-time group, the All-Star Squadron. The team's base was located on the grounds of the 1939 New York World's Fair. The team introduced brand new characters, used many of DC's Golden Age heroes, and also featured Golden Age heroes who weren't published by DC Comics in the 1930s and 1940s but had since been acquired by the company. The series was known for revising and expanding parts of the fictional history of DC Comics superheroes.
The series took place on the parallel world of Earth-Two, which DC had designated as the reality where stories published during the Golden Age of Comics took place. Modern day comics (starting with the mid-1950s) were said to occur in a reality called Earth-One. While the Golden Age Superman, introduced in 1938, had lived through World War II, the Earth-One Superman had not even been born until long after the war was over. While the modern-day Earth-One Wonder Woman was a superhero in her prime, new stories revealed that the Golden Age Wonder Woman of Earth-Two had fought Nazis during World War II, then later semi-retired, married her dear friend Steve Trevor, and had a daughter named Hyppolyta Trevor (who became a hero called Fury and joined a team of heroes known as Infinity, Inc.).
During the 1985-1986 series Crisis on Infinite Earths, Earth-Two and Earth-One, along with some other realities, merged into a new, unified reality with a revised history. The heroes of World War II now existed in the same timeline as modern heroes, simply operating at an earlier time. While it was not a major problem to establish that certain characters such as the Golden Age Flash (Jay Garrick) and the later Flash (Barry Allen) could co-exist and both operate during different time periods, this explanation did not work for heroes with direct counterparts. Golden Age heroes such as Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Robin, and Green Arrow all of whom had the same secret identities, same basic origin stories, and largely similar supporting casts as their modern day counterparts. For this reason, these particular Golden Age heroes, and some others, had to be removed from the history of the new, unified timeline. This also meant the canon of the All-Star Squadron stories was now questionable, since the Golden Age versions of those same heroes made multiple appearances in the series. To clear the slate after Crisis on Infinite Earths and re-launch the franchise, All Star Squadron was canceled with issue #67 and replaced with a successor series, Young All-Stars.[4]
Young All-Stars featured the previously existing characters Neptune Perkins and Dan the Dyna-Mite as stand-ins for the Golden Age versions of Aquaman and Robin, respectively. The rest of the team consisted of brand new characters created to be spiritual and contextual analogs for other eliminated Golden Age characters: Iron Munro stood in for Superman, Flying Fox stood in for Batman, and Fury stood in for Wonder Woman (this new character was now said to be the mother of the modern day hero Fury who served in Infinity, Inc.). Another character included in the team was Tsunami, who had been originally introduced in All-Star Squadron.
Young All-Stars issue #1 also introduced a team of villains called Axis Amerika, a subversive US-based organization that included agents of the Axis Powers. The members of the group were all evil analogs for the Golden Age versions of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Robin, Green Arrow, and Aquaman. The villains included: Übermensch, Gudra the Valkyrie, Der Grosshorn Eule (Horned Owl) and his son/sidekick Fledermaus, the archer Usil, and the amphibious wolfman called Sea Wolf.
