Happy Birthday, Freedom Fighters!

Happy Birthday, FREEDOM FIGHTERS!

Next week marks the 50th anniversary of the "return" of the Freedom Fighters to comics, and I'm here to celebrate! 

I say "return" in quotation marks because as all true Freedom Fighters fans know, the group never actually existed during their members' original publishing run. The six Golden Age Quality Comics characters who made up the Freedom Fighters *were* published between 1939 and 1953, but only in solo stories. There were no team-ups! Writer Len Wein assembled them for the first time 50 years ago this month, in the pages of Justice League of America #107, which according to Mike's Amazing World of Comics, went on sale the week of June 5, 1973! 

 

Now, I didn't actually come across the Freedom Fighters fifty years ago. In 1973 I was NOT reading comics. In fact, I learned about comics almost a year later. So I did NOT read their debut appearance new. 

However, I WAS reading comics in early December, 1975. And that, according to Mike's Amazing World of Comics, was when Freedom Fighters #1 went on sale! I was buying as many comics as I could afford, especially the group books such as The Avengers, The Fantastic Four, The Champions, The X-Men, The Invaders, the Justice Society (in All-Star Comics) and my two favorites Justice League of America and The Legion of Super-Heroes. I know that I picked up this issue. In fact, I picked up their entire run! 

Immediately, the Freedom Fighters shot up to near the top of my favorites list. They were quirky, interesting, and fun. And unlike most of the other team books I mentioned above, their roster was stable and each of the six main characters appeared in each issue. Like a favorite situation comedy or drama, you could learn to love this cast of characters without too much effort. It's telling that of those 1975 groups mentioned above, I still feel warm nostalgia for the Freedom Fighters. 

For those of you who are not familiar with this group, let me introduce you. As mentioned, the team consists of six Golden Age super-hero characters who had been published by Quality Comics. In 1973 writer Len Wein and penciller Dick Dillin brought them back....as a group! Yes, Len took six individual characters from the same publishing company who had never met before and put them together and named them the Freedom Fighters. 

DOLL-MAN the series had ceased publication in 1953. The Human Bomb had disappeared from the shelves in 1946. Black Condor, Phantom Lady, the Ray, and Uncle Sam had not appeared in comics since 1943! 

So obviously, I had no idea who they were. They were brand-new characters to me! 

Here are their re-introductions from Justice League of America #107, after twenty-to-thirty years of obscurity. We, along with several members of the JLA and the Justice Society, learn: 

This JLA-JSA adventure explained that these six heroes were the only remaining super-heroes from yet another dimensional world, this one where the Nazis had WON World War Two! (Decades before "The Glass Tower, I might add!) The JLA and JSA help them free their world from the Third Reich's control, and each team ends up back on their original world. Uncle Sam says good-bye and hopes that they might meet again. 

As for the real-world reasons for their reappearance, writer Len Wein wrote in the Forward to CRISIS ON MULTIPLE EARTHS Book 2: Crisis Crossed (ISBN-13: 9781779513427): 

....As a collector, I had always been a fan of the old Quality Comics line, publishers of Plastic Man and Blackhawk and GI Combat and many other favorites from the 1940s until the early 1950s. When Quality folded, DC had acquired the rights to their titles and continued publishing several of them, especially the ones I just mentioned. The Qualtiy characters seemed the next likely choice for revival. 

I went through the list of Quality characters and settled on the six you're about to meet, including one of my personal favorites, Uncle Sam. But since the Quality characters had known their heyday mostly during the Second World War, I contrived a way to set my story in a world where that war had ended very differently....

The Quality characters I dubbed the Freedom Fighters were so well received, they went on to earn their own title a few years later, a fact of which I'm still humbly proud. 

As he says, their appearance in the 1973 JLA-JSA team-up must have been a success, because when Gerry Conway moved to DC a year or so later from Marvel, he wanted to put them into their own book, and DC agreed. And thus, FREEDOM FIGHTERS the series was born!

Right out of the gate the book was amazing, with gorgeous Ric Estrada & Mike Royer art, and a great story by Martin Pasko. The Fighters come to "our" Earth, probably so they can interact with the majority of DC's other characters. Also, that dimensional travelling gives most of the heroes additional powers, which created sub-plots for the first year involving all of them learning how to deal with their new powers. This was a very clever idea. Then, before they even managed to settle in, due to the craftiness of the evil Silver Ghost, the Freedom Fighters are forced to commit crimes, and their new world begins to think of them as criminals!

Unfortunately, the book suffered the same bad luck as the team. Gerry Conway went back to Marvel after only four issues. Marty Pasko left at the same time, replaced by Bob Rozakis in the middle of a two-parter. Tony Isabella took over as editor until he was replaced by Jack C. Harris. All of these gentlemen are talented, but the "flow" of the book was definitely affected. And the artists! The book couldn't keep the same team for more than two issues in a row until Dick Ayers and Jack Abel came aboard in FF #7! It probably should not come as any surprise then that the book failed to find a loyal fan-base and only lasted 15 issues.  

Recently I had been thinking of what I would enjoy re-reading and reviewing here on the blog. When I realized that the Freedom Fighters would be celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, I knew that I had to revisit them. It's going to be fun to re-visit a series I have not re-read in more than twenty years. Let's find out together whether a series that was at the top of my Must Read pile for nearly two years really earned their spot, or if Time has not been kind to them. 

For the next 50 plus weeks I'll be covering their fifteen issues as well as their "return" in another "Golden Age" book, plus a few more guest-appearances and specials. And it all starts next week! Please join me a week from today when we kick it off with Justice League of America #107, "Crisis on Earth-X!" re-presenting The Freedom Fighters!