Leading Comics #1 (1941)
cover by Mort Meskin
The Justice Society proved popular enough to be joined by a lot of the DC Comics heroes, but I guess there were too many of them to fit into a single team… which is why we have the Seven Soldiers Of Victory, who feature the others and their teammates.
And we’ve already met all the Seven Soldiers, by order of appearance:
1) Crimson Avenger
2) his sidekick Wing
3) Green Arrow
4) his sidekick Speedy
5) Star-Spangled Kid
6) his sidekick Stripesy
7) Shining Knight
8) Vigilante
Wait, what?
Yes in a truly baffling decision, all the sidekicks are counted as official members… except Wing.
I find that bizarre because Wing IS in the Crimson Avenger part of this book!
I can sort of understand why they didn’t include the other two sidekicks in the count… Victory is just Shining Knight’s horse, and while Vigilante does have Stuff (The Chinatown Kid) as a sidekick, he debuts AFTER this story.
But Wing has a superhero costume and everything!
Exactly like the Justice Society, the book has a framing device and then separate vignettes for all members of the team.
Seven Soldiers Of Victory
by Mort Weisinger & George Papp
We begin with the criminal known as The Hand learning he has a month to live.
Credit where it’s due: The Hand has a terrific start. Typically Golden Age villains are very shallow and don’t have anything besides “he’s evil” as a motivation, but this is good stuff.
He starts his crime spree by getting other villains our of jail first.
He then issues a challenge to all the superheroes he can think of. Notice that they’re apparently all located in Gotham City.
The Seven Soldiers feel like a very random assortment of heroes, but I think I’ve finally figured out what they have in common: they all have their own trademark transportation!
Although Vigilante’s motorcycle and Crimson Avenger’s car are not shown, probably because they’re definitely more mundane than the rest.
All the heroes gather to hear the challenge, and it’s quite clear that at this point they’re not a team yet.
Especially since, once the framing device is over, all heroes have their separate adventures.
Green Arrow & Speedy
by Mort Weisinger & George Papp
Considering Shining Knight is in the team, you’d expect “Professor Merlin” to be from his rogues gallery… but no, he’s actually a Green Arrow villain.
He already appeared in More Fun Comics #75, which has a cover date of January 1942 (one month after this) but which must have been published first.
He’s not to be confused with classic Green Arrow villain Merlyn, that’s a completely different character debuting in 1971. That’s another super-archer, while Professor Merlin is a crime professor.
Not a professor of criminology… he teaches how to do crime.
So obviously he fights Green Arrow by piloting a plane and dropping bombs on him.
And his big plan is forcing a guy hoarding lots of gold into wrecking the economy.
Yeah outside of the Big Three, the Golden Age was quite lackluster when it comes to villains.
Oh for the love of… is EVERY SINGLE GOLDEN AGE CRIMINAL contractually obligated to capture the hero and tie him up without shooting anyone???
If it didn’t happen all the time, I could excuse that.
What I DON’T excuse is the villains allowing the superhero archers to keep their bows and arrows!!!
I’m skipping a lot of these individual adventures because… well the comic is very long and they’re not all that interesting.
All you need to know is that Professor Merlin is buried alive in an avalanche (!!!) that also buries the gold.
That is the most chill reaction to losing literal tons of gold I have ever seen.
Star Spangled Kid & Stripesy
by Jerry Siegel & Hal Sherman
You might recall SSK is just an insufferably smug teen, so he needs to get permission from his parents to have a secret adventure in the Panama Canal.
His villain is The Needle, who debuted in Star-Spangled Comics #4… which was ALSO published with a January 1942 cover date.
He’s just a very skinny regular guy, but at least he has a gun!
Pop quiz! I hope you took notes during Professor Merlin’s lessons.
If you’re a villain holding a gun and you have a superhero at point blank range, what do you do?
A) shoot him
B) shoot him twice
C) no seriously, just shoot
D) tie him up and trap him into a very slowly sinking boat
E) JUST FREAKING SHOOT!!!
That makes this yet ANOTHER instance of the villain tying up the heroes… and he’s STILL so incompetent that SSK breaks out without trouble!!!
Both SSK and Stripes are so famous that they’re even recognized in Panama… and then ignored.
Meanwhile The Needle manages to get his hands on a rather impressive-looking gun.
With a name like that, you probably figured out that the Ray-Gun™ shoots vibrations powerful enough to PULVERIZE BUILDINGS.
I can’t get a read on The Needle. One moment he’s a doofus who can’t even tie a knot, and then he’s about to WRECK THE PANAMA CANAL.
But even the Ray-Gun™ pales in comparison to the Star-Rocket Racer, which I guess was built on Krypton.
The heroes manage to defeat him by… uhm… you tell me, if you understand these panels.
Crimson Avenger & Wing
by Mort Weisinger & Jack Lehti
Making fun of the fact that “gay” had a different meaning in the 40s is a low hanging fruit that is so predictable I rarely point it out…
…but when it’s on THIS PAGE, I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t comment on it!
I mean… COME ON.
Despite the fact that he debuted as a knockoff of the Green Hornet and therefore used to travel with his own car… Crimson Avenger and his heterosexual life partner take a cab.
The Hand really does have his, uhm, hands in everything, because his goons immediately catch up to the heroes.
After they stop the potential kidnappers, the heroes notice there are several blackouts in Broadway.
And yes, Wing talks like that thoughout the whole story.
They soon find the criminals responsible for the blackout… in the middle of a huge hole.
Who would’ve thought they would be spotted IN BROADWAY LIKE THIS!
But the criminals do something unexpected: THEY call the cops!!!
Ever seen a superhero get arrested because he just punched a civilian?
Too bad the criminals don’t have the patience to wait until Crimson Avenger is put in a cell before causing another blackout.
Then we have a rematch with the villains, featuring some of the worst lettering I have ever seen…
…which is immediately followed in the next panel by the worst attack I have ever seen.
Crimson Avenger is so invested in the creation of a new superhero team that once all criminals are arrested his priority… is catching a movie.
Shining Knight
by Mort Weisinger & Creig Flessel
The villain is Red Dragon, who debuted the same month in Shining Knight’s series.
And this one is set in Canada… I would do the “don’t do anything racist” running gag, but this comes after a story featuring Wing so what’s the point?
Yeah, uhm, this is actually WAY worse than Wing.
Not content with treating 1941 Native Americans like this was the 18th century, the Red Dragon even enslaves them.
This looks like a job for Shining Knight, SOMEHOW.
Now that I think of it, Shining Knight is the powerhouse of the Seven Soldiers: he’s the only one with actual superpowers!
I wish this was the Vigilante story because I could make the joke that the villains are just playing “Cowboys and tanks” here.
You’re wasted on this team, Shining Knight. I doubt any of the other ones can fight a tank!
Or JOUST A PLANE.
You know what, I actually like this one!
Vigilante
by Mort Weisinger & Mort Meskin
The Vigilante story is significant because it introduces what is probably his most recurrent villain: The Dummy.
From what I can tell there’s some doubts whether he’s literally a dummy or if he’s a regular human who just looks like a dummy.
But considering he can apparently turn people into stone, I guess he might actually be a magically animated dummy.
Yeah I’m in the “definitely a magic dummy” category.
This one is set in Los Angeles, and at this point we’ve completely dropped the pretense that these heroes care about the challenge issued to the Seven Soldiers.
Especially since he spends the beginning of the story just being an actor.
He stops some criminals trying to steal a safe by… uhm… I have absolutely no idea what Vigilante is doing here.
He also wrestles a tiger, because why not.
We pick up the plot about the dude turned into stone only at PAGE SEVEN.
We learn that The Dummy is able to move on his own (I still say it’s not a human), in a sequence that includes one of the worst placed balloons I have ever seen.
I can excuse some roughness in the early Golden Age years, but in late 1941 this balloon is just unacceptable.
The Dummy is defeated by dropping a bunch of statues on his head.
Okay so he doesn’t ACTUALLY turn people into stone. Still doesn’t prove he’s not a magically animated dummy.
Seven Soldiers Of Victory
by Mort Weisinger & George Papp
We’ve reached the last chapter. I would ask if the story will stick to landing… but did it ever take off in the first place?
Once the heroes figure out the headquarters of The Hand, they get past several traps to get to him.
But The Hand has a last trap, every superhero’s weakness: glass.
Until Vigilante kills him by dropping a death ray projector on his head.
So really you didn’t need any of the other six for this.
And that’s it! We don’t even learn who chose the name Seven Soldiers Of Victory… but it has to be Shining Knight, right?
If so, not very imaginative considering he’s already named his horse Victory.
Also: is Wing not considered an official member just because Crimson Avenger didn’t bring him to this last mission?
Historical significance: 1/7
The Seven Soldiers are a concept that keeps coming back, for some reason.
Silver Age-ness: 5/7
A lot of super-science thrown around in this!
Heroes arrested by the cops: 2
Heroes who are not tied up by the villain: 4
Heroes tied up by the villain without being shot: 4
Does it stand the test of time? 2/7
This was rough. The framing device is great: as I mentioned, the Hand is a surprisingly good villain for the Golden Age. But other than that, Star-Spangled Kid’s story has a truly bonkers villain and Shining Knight’s one has some passable action and an unexpected finale.
Other than that, this hasn’t aged well. Having a team book that spends most of its pages on individual and disconnected adventures was the norm with the Justice Society, but that doesn’t really work today. Most of the heroes and plots are very bland, there’s some shockingly sloppy artwork here and there, and the writing leaves much to be desired… even by the Golden Age standard.
How close is this to the modern team? What modern team?
Considering the team is composed by, let’s face it, mostly second-stringers, it’s no surprise that the Seven Soldiers don’t last long.
They only have 14 issues of Leading Comics (until #14 from 1945), which then changes into a “funny animals” book.
As mentioned for the individual heroes, the Seven Soldiers Of Victory are eventually brought back in 1972 on the pages of Justice League Of America.
Poor Wing never made it into the official roster AND sacrificed himself for the others.
Despite their return, the Seven Soldiers didn’t have staying power. It also doesn’t help that the team included the Earth-2 Green Arrow, who was definitely less popular than his Earth-1 counterpart.
The only thing they got was a serial on Adventure Comics, lasting from #438 to #433. Starting in 1975, it was based on an unpublished script dating back to the 1940s and included a rotation of several artists (including Howard Chaykin, Mike Grell and José Garcia-Lopez among others).
One of the issues about keeping the Seven Soldiers in post-Crisis continuity AND keep them as a 1940s team is that you need to remove Green Arrow.
In later stories, it’s done either by considering Wing a member and adding Vigilante’s sidekick Stuff (the Chinatown Kid), or by replacing the two archers with TNT and Dyna-Mite.
DC Comics seems to like the name “Seven Soldiers Of Victory” WAY more than the original cast, because whenever a team needs to come up with a name it’s always on the list.
And don’t even get me started on the Grant Morrison projects that use the name… some of it DOES connect back to the originals, but things are so convoluted and metaphysical it would take forever to explain even if I did understand any of it.
Perhaps the best indication of just how much DC loves the name… there’s an incarnation of the Seven Soldiers that is just the Wildstorm heroes that DC inherited.
What else was in Leading Comics #1?
Shockingly, basically nothing! Just a two-page gag strip.
