-lastly, comments by Roy Thomas, that tie into this board --the roots of Crisis. Thomas, who elsewhere in the issue is described as being more representative of mainstream comics during the year of Frank Miller's Daredevil due to his 3 new titles (Arak, Capt Carrot, All-Star Squadron), and his love of verbiage over art, mentions the situation at DC:
"Now I can work with the DC Universe, which is in such a state of disrepair that Marv Wolfman and Len (Wein) and Gerry (Conway) and I, it's all we can do to just keep sticking fingers in the holes in the dike."
Was the Crisis just a result of hiring a raft of Marvel writers in the 80s?
I heard somewhere that Roy Thomas was the force responsible for CRISIS taking place because he felt that if his Golden Age titles were set on Earth-1, his sales would improve.
Thomas waxes nostalgic about the creation of All-Star Squad, and mentions that DC brass in 1980 called Earth 2 characters "doppelgangers" --meaning essentially useless, slightly menacing duplicates of already-existing characters.
Ver-r-ry nice interview, incidentally. A few points of interest in the book:
1) It was pretty funny to hear Roy Thomas - of all the people in the world - rationalizing about how to get a female on the team.
2)
But-Aquaman? Besides being a "doppleganger" character, with a basically identical Earth-One counterpart, the sea king had always proved a problem in Justice League of America, since he had to be in the water to be effective. So I decided to hold him off till later. (How much later, I couldn't have guessed at the time!)
Now this is something that I, and many other Aqua-fans, including Tegan Gjovaag, find interesting:
There was almost never a mention of the Earth-2 Aquaman. If Roy intended to use an Earth-2 Aquaman in ALL-STAR, it's a very intriguing footnote.
Yes, there WAS an Earth-2 Aquaman; he was the son of a scientist who gave his son a serum that allowed him to live underwater. Aquaman was believed to be a Mort Weisenger creation, which is why he returned in backup form come the resurgence of popularity for superheroes, allowing Aquaman, the superhero version of Kato Kaelin, to crash on the couch.
3)
But Sir Justin had been a knight of the Round Table, which gave him super-hero status in my eyes. And I had, after all, conceived the modern-day Black Knight at Marvel in 1967 largely in homage to The Shining Knight.
WOW. Now this I did not know, but in retrospect it DOES make sense considering the winged horse and all.