- What did you think of these adventures?
That if I ever suggest striking at my job to get better pay, Hawkman might bust through my window, call me a Nazi, and punch me in the face. …nah, I’m kidding. Sort of.
Striking is for Nazis, how dare you ask for better pay?! Complaining about a perceived lack of safety measures? You Nazi! Mad that some businesses are artificially inflating the cost of certain things? You BIG SUPER Nazi! (lol 1940s America was whack) All-Star Comics #16 brings up problems that really are an issue for Americans - back then and today - and should be discussed freely without any face-punching. I hear a lot of these same talking points about profit and labor nowadays, and it’s not Nazis making them. They are good points and real problems that need to be addressed. If they were, then enemies like the Nazis couldn’t use them against us in divisive ways.
With Hawkman, the mill workers would not have been so easy to throw into discord if there had been some kind of transparency between the company’s profits and the workers. There was even mention that their union rep would sit in on the profit meetings, so you also have another issue of a union not properly communicating with its members. If the owner of the mill really wasn’t making any more profit during wartime, the workers should have been able to easily find this information.
With the Atom, we have a “killer mine” that the miners are afraid to go into. People have died there in the past. Later we find out that the company did indeed retrofit the mine with safety measures, making it a perfectly safe (as safe as a mine can be anyway) place to work. However, the miners didn’t seem to know there were new safeties in place. Again, another issue with lack of workplace communication and transparency, but the main issue here is that they didn’t know, and were afraid, so they had every right to refuse to work in this mine. Wanting to make sure you’re not going to die at your workplace doesn’t make you a Nazi, dang man.
With the Sandman, another communication issue. Unfair distribution of profits along the entire supply chain is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed wherever it pops up. That the farmers wouldn’t know how much a grocery business is actually selling their crops for seems pretty farfetched, my grandparents ran a farm and they were always looking into food markets and staying on top of this stuff. But if farmers did feel like they were getting swindled then they should have every right to strike.
- At one point Atom says
“Don’t ever forget. Foreign born or not, white, black or brown we’re all the same. All for one and one for all.”
Do you agree with his statement and do you think it’s as relevant today as.it was back during WWII?
I agree with this statement and I would probably be very wary of anyone who said they didn’t, lol. It has never not been a relevant statement. I will say that today, we as a society are more apt to actively work towards this goal, whereas back during WW2 it was mostly talk to get people to feel more patriotic with no real work being done (by the majority, I mean)
People who are familiar with golden age comics probably know full well the “casual racism” that goes on in some of the comics, somehow all together in DC Comics right alongside the comics that espouse freedom and equality for all, sometimes even in the exact same comic which results in this weird cognitive dissonance that sort of emanates out of the pages like this unpleasant aura.
Off the top of my head, I can think of Sensation Comics #8, which was published only 8 MONTHS before All-Star Comics #16. It was the first Wonder Woman comic to show people of color, and man was it… bad. I’m talking full-on blackface, speaking in an “uneducated way” and wearing the stereotypical clothes of “the help”. If you haven’t been exposed to some of the racism in comics in this time period I 100% recommend checking it out, it’s currently on DCUI and I think it’s important to see the stark differences between these two comics published 8 months apart, as a good example of talk vs. action.
DC Comics did eventually take action, they’ve been great with representation and diversity, but this period of time mostly had them in the all-talk camp.
ALL RIGHT THAT WAS MY SOAPBOX. Moving on, to
Mouka’s random observations:
1 - I am dying at Mr. Fortune telling everyone to hoard sugar. Like what? WHY sugar, specifically? I feel like it’s 2020 and people are getting weird about hoarding toilet paper all over again. Why toilet paper? Why sugar? Why not rice? If you’re smart you’d go with rice. Toilet paper is the new sugar.
2 - “I’m gonna post a story in my crappy fifth column newspaper that some navy guy said the US navy doesn’t have any naval experience! That’ll cause, like, the ENTIRE COUNTRY to write angry letters to congress and they’ll stop buying war bonds because of this random generic thing I posted in my no-name paper! The bigger papers TOTALLY wouldn’t refute me at all!” 
If this is how the actually Nazis worked, we would’ve won this war in like two months. Friggin goofballs.
3 - I don’t like Sandman’s generic purple/yellow outfit, I’ve always preferred his cape and face mask thing. Am I in the minority here?
4 - Best corny fight lines of the issue: “I’m going to spread you out like a linoleum floor!” and “That jaw looks ideal to hang a left jab on!” 
5 - Have you noticed how back then we were more apt to make our foreign enemies look like stupid goofy oafs? I feel like nowadays in pop culture (not counting political cartoons in papers, those are ALWAYS goofy) we either portray our enemies in a more realistic way, or portray them as creepy-looking supervillainesque dudes. I kind of miss the goofiness. I feel like it takes power away from the bad guy, it’s a good thing to do. But I’ve also heard the counterargument that doing so downplays the threat that they pose, so it’s not a good thing to do. Both sides make good points, I guess, but man I love seeing a goofy-looking Hitler oaf and thinking about how much it must’ve raised his blood pressure if he’d seen how they were portraying him.
Pictured above: Dr. Fate breaks into a Nazi hideout, leading his army of two small children in a charge against many adult men who most likely have guns. A jolly romp, or child endangerment? You decide.
