(Another post rewritten from four years ago on my blog)
When I read some recent, particularly crappy comic from the Big Two it’s easy to grumble about how Kids These Days don’t know good comics, or know how to write them, or how everything went to pot with Crisis on Infinite Earths/Infinite Crisis/Jack Kirby’s death (pick your turning point). While lots of comics today are mediocre at best, my own collection testifies to how many mediocre series came out in times past that I was willing to buy. Case in point, the 1976-8 Freedom Fighters.
In Justice League of America #107 (Len Wein/Dick Dillin), the JLA and Justice Society experiment with a new technology for crossing between Earths. Red Tornado accidentally screws the system up, landing him and members of both teams on another Earth. Although they materialize in the U.S., they’re immediately attacked by a Nazi strike force, then rescued by the Freedom Fighters, a half-dozen of the Quality Comics superheroes DC had acquired some years earlier (Brian Cronin says they were freebies thrown in along with the Blackhawks).
The Freedom Fighters explain that in this world, FDR died earlier, which in some fashion delayed the Manhattan Project long enough that Germany had time to build its own bomb. (Richard Rhodes’ exhaustive history of the a-bomb shows Germany’s research was a dead end, but on Earth-X who knows?). That left Allies and Axis stalemated until 1968, when the Nazis developed a mind-control technology and conquered the world, except for the Freedom Fighters (they found a way to immunize themselves). Wein’s original concept was to name this world Earth-卐, but Julie Schwartz refused to let him use that symbol. In any case, with the heroes of three worlds fighting the Nazis, the Third Reich’s rule is soon overthrown.
What happened next? According to Freedom Fighters #1 (by Gerry Conway, Martin Pasko and Ric Esrada) the team couldn’t adjust to the end of the war. Finding peace and freedom completely dull, they 
traveled to Earth-One to find some excitement. Arriving in New York, they wind up in a clash of titans with the Silver Ghost. AKA Raphael Van Zandt, he’s a descendant of the Dutch trader who originally bought Manhattan from the Native Americans. The Silver Ghost now wants it back by any means necessary. His Midas touch turns three of the team to silver, forcing the other members to serve him. By the time the heroes take the Ghost down and restore their teammates nobody believes the team are good guys. The Freedom Fighters are, as later covers told us, “Hunted by the law! Hated by the underworld!”
According to the first-issue text page, the talent behind the series saw Freedom Fighters as a chance to work with a blank slate. Outside of the Earth-X story and a few reprints, the cast had no history as far as contemporary readers were concerned; where Flash, Superman and Hawkman had established characterization and everyone knew their backstories, the Freedom Fighters could go in new directions.
Rereading now, I can see the potential in that. America on Earth-X must have been wildly different by the time the JLA and JSA arrived there. Would they have had a Red Scare in the 1950s? A civil rights revolution? Obviously the Nazi takeover meant no Watergate and probably no chance for modern feminism to take off. The heroes’ view of their role might be very different from the Justice League’s or the Teen Titans. After seeing America ground under the Nazi boot, they might be hyper-patriotic, ready to defend the U.S. against all threats. They might be horrified by any sort of mind-control research and passionate about civil liberties; then again, the sight of neo-Nazis marching (though back in that decade, we usually called them just Nazis) might inspire them to immediate violence. Just the fact they’re so hooked on action that they can’t be happy in peace has some potential.
The creators apparently didn’t see it that way. For example, Black Condor grumbles in an early issue that the police aren’t showing up when needed because they’re probably stopping some mugger from bleeding out. That’s a typical right-wing, we’re-too-soft-on-crime sentiment for the 1970s, but it’s unlikely someone from Earth-X would express it. The rest of the characterization wasn’t any better. Half the team’s in love with Phantom Lady and jealous of the others; Human Bomb sneers at Black Condor for being a mutant; everyone argues a lot. The most interesting angle was Doll Man meeting his dead wife’s Earth-One counterpart, but as usual the story ignores that Earth-One’s Martha wouldn’t be the same person at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I bought and enjoyed the entire run as a teenager, but even then I knew Freedom Fighters was far inferior to, say, Swamp Thing or Steve Englehart’s Avengers run. I doubt the series was a high priority for anyone working on it. Rereading, a couple of issues stand out for me but only for being worse than average. #11, for instance, involves Native American stereotypes (welfare queens who don’t do anything but sit on their butts all day) gaining powers and going on a rampage.
The third issue, by Pasko and Ramona Fradon, is particularly clunky; while I can accept a certain amount of coincidence in a comic, this one exceeds its allowance. An unstable businessman suddenly snaps and kills his wife (creepily, Pasko implies she always wanted this), then coincidentally walks into the middle of a battle between the Freedom Fighters and some bank robbers. By another coincidence, some Qwaardians are monitoring the battle and try teleporting a weapon to Earth to help the crooks. Oops, the weapon instead fuses with the businessman, turning him into Skragg — the Super-Snpier! A ray-blasting killer, Skragg has no motivation other than to blast rays and kill people.
As cancellation approached, the series’ final writer, Bob Rozakis, sought to wrap up everything in a crossover with his Secret Society of Supervillains. While most of the villains were off on Earth-Two, the Silver Ghost recruits a new batch to take down the Freedom Fighters, but winds up dying battling another Earth-X hero, Firebrand. The DC Implosion sped up the fall of the axe and the conclusion only appeared in the legendary Canceled Comics Cavalcade. That was it for the Freedom Fighters until Roy Thomas’ run on Wonder Woman, which showed them returning to Earth X and finding it had fallen apart without them. Nothing further came of that before the Crisis removed Earth X from the board, though post-Crisis versions of the Freedom Fighters have appeared irregularly.
I still have those Bronze Age issues because comics from that era have great nostalgic value for me. But if our history got rebooted and this series never happened, I wouldn’t miss it.
#SFWApro. Covers top to bottom by Nick Cardy, Ernie Chan, Bernie Wrightson and Dick Dillin.
I apologize for the lack of a header — I hope to add one today, but I figured squeezing out a post without one was better than no post at all, which was how the day was running.
I like Black Condor in Starman!
(I’m pretty sure Geoff Johns had him brutally murdered at some point, though)
Killed by Sinestro in Infinite Crisis mess.
I think my favorite moment with the original Black Condor was when Hawkman and Hawkgirl meet him in All-Star Squadron and Hawkman asks how the heck he can fly. “Would you believe I was taught by condors in Outer Mongolia?” HAWKGIRL; “See, Hawkman, you ask a silly question …”
Though Lou Fine’s art on the Golden Age strip was breathtaking. You WILL believe a man can fly.
I don’t know why Gary Frank seems to have hitched his wagon to Geoff John’s, he surely has to be one of the worst writers of the last couple of decades. Well apart from Meltzer and Bendis.
The only thing I’ve enjoyed from Bendis is Alias but I must admit I really do like it.
Yeah, I had the whole run of Freedom Fighters back in the day (bought the whole run in the cheap in 1981 or so) and I was less than impressed with it.
Even back then, I was puzzled as to why they had been moved to Earth 1 – and Earth 2 would have been more ‘fitting’ as they could have stepped in to replace the aging JSA. But they should have stayed on Earth X, as I think more interesting stories could have been spun out of a world dealing with the aftermath of decades-long war and Nazi conquest. The fact that they were fugitives on Earth 1 was also kind of silly – why wouldn’t the JLA just step in and tell everyone that these guys are cool?
And yeah, that issue with the Native American villains was bad. I found it a bit offensive even as a 13 year-old white kid.
I don’t remember that issue bugging me as a kid but it’s dreadful to read as an adult. And you have a point about the JLA — you’d think putting them on Earth-One would lead to some crossovers and interactions like that because otherwise why bother?
The title doesn’t quite work, though. This is a review of a bad comic (actually, to me it sounds ‘fun with some problems’ more than ‘bad’) from ages ago. It doesn’t prove that quality hasn’t declined in the years, just that there was at least one bad comic back then.
(And what I’m saying doesn’t prove that they have declined, either. There are still good comics to be had.)
It’s not literally accurate but it’s more about my subjective tendency to remember the comics of years past with a gloss they don’t deserve. And that my subjective assessment of Now vs. Then isn’t correct.