eing a member of the Justice Society of America isn't enough for Johnny Thunder—he wants to be a writer, too. No mere mountain of rejection letters is going to deter him; he's a hero, after all (though not exactly the brightest one in the world). And so, armed with firsthand knowledge of fantastical adventure and a well-thumbed thesaurus, Johnny pens what he believes is his masterpiece and sends it off to the editor of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback.
Coincidentally enough, recently Gernsback has seen sales of his magazine sink to their lowest level in years. Who can be amazed by "scientifiction" stories when the news is filled with the spectacular JSA battling the Nazi menace? The publisher might see Thunder's submission as a godsend—if it weren't such terrible writing.
So Gernsback enlists the help of one of his most popular writers, Jack Williamson, to work with Thunder. "Take this kid under your wing," the editor tells Williamson. "Be his mentor, rewrite his stuff. I don't care—just get me something by Friday!"
Meanwhile, Thunder's told the rest of the JSA the good news. The Flash is skeptical, but the Star-Spangled Kid and Hourman are all for it. In fact, they want to make Johnny the JSA's official historian (which they hope will keep him busy). But not all's well with the JSA. The Green Lantern has detected a massive electrical storm in the city—followed by mechanical men dropping from the sky!
The first heroes do know Jack
This first issue in a six-part series is rife with potential. It's got the world's first comic-book superhero team and two of science fiction's major historical figures—the visionary publisher Hugo Gernsback and Grand Master Jack Williamson—as characters and true talents like Kevin J. Anderson, Barry Kitson and Gary Erskine doing the Golden Age storytelling. Whether readers will follow along to see if more of this potential is realized than in this first installment is another matter, however.
Anderson does a good enough job of capturing these disparate characters' voices, and the story's overall tone is reverentially playful with both genres. (Thunder writes gems of narration like "The dastardly nemesis used excrutiatingly sorcerus [sic] villainy to thwart the costumed champions of the JSA.") But, in the end, issue #1 doesn't do much more than drop a lot of genre names, make some cute jokes and introduce what looks to be the main bad guy. Things are looking somewhat predictable at this point.
Kitson and Erskine also handle the scope of the story fairly well, moving nicely from Gernsback's office to a JSA battle scene, infusing a number of panels with the more cinematic feeling many grand-scale superhero books often contain these days. But this is "fairly well" and "nicely"—not the "awesome" or "really exciting" that the subject matter seems to ask for. Like many projects from both comics' and science fiction's early days, this one feels a bit rushed and undercooked.
