DC Comics 1981 All-Star Squadron #1 CGC 9.0 VFNM SIGNED by Roy Thomas

Signed by writer/creator Roy Thomas!  Love this issue, cover and team!  Here's the classic origin issue!                 A new super-team, the All-Star Super Squadron, has been founded on Earth II in the hopes of finding several lost heroes from the Justice Society of America.  Although the team was introduced in the 1980s, its self-titled series took place in the 1940s, retroactively inserting their narratives into the fictional history of the DC Comics superheroes. The team included many of DC's Golden Age era characters, new characters, and other World War II superheroes that DC did not own during the 1940s but later acquired. The name "All-Star Squadron" was creator Roy Thomas' reference to All Star Comics, the series that introduced the Justice Society of America, the first comic book superhero team.

According to the series All-Star Squadron, US President Franklin Roosevelt creates a "superhero draft" called Article X during World War II. Article X asks all active American masked crime-fighters and superhuman adventurers to join forces as a single war-time organization, just as many American labor organizations did during World War II. In the canon of DC Comics, the Axis Powers used the mystical Spear of Destiny to create a "sphere of influence" over their occupied territories and surrounding areas during most of World War II. This sphere of influence caused superhumans, magically empowered people, and magic-users to fall under Hitler's control and take on some of his personality traits. For this reason, the All-Star Squadron focused its activities on protecting the US from invasion, super-villains, spies, and sabotage rather than risk their minds being controlled by the Axis Powers if they operated overseas in Europe, Asia, or Japan.           

SIGNED BY ROY THOMAS ON 9/10/21  Roy Thomas is a legendary comic-book writer and editor, who was Stan Lee's first successor as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics.  He is known for co-creating some of comics' greatest characters including Wolverine, Carol Danvers, Iron Fist and Morbius.  He introduced the pulp magazine heroes Conan and Red Sonja and sci-fi fantasy Star Wars to Marvel Comics, and had lengthy writing stints on Marvel's X-Men and Avengers, and DC Comics' All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc., among many other titles, books and a couple of movies. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2011.