All-Winners Comics #2

History

Published in the fall of 1941 by Timely Comics under publisher Martin Goodman, the issue appeared at a moment when the United States was on the cusp of entering World War II — just months before Pearl Harbor — and Timely was aggressively expanding its stable of wartime heroes. The Captain America story featured art from the outgoing Simon and Kirby team, who would leave Timely for DC later that year, while the Destroyer strip — written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Binder — continued one of Lee's earliest co-created characters. The exact pencil and ink credits on the issue's text-story illustration remain contested, with scholar Nick Caputo suggesting possible Joe Simon involvement that was disputed by historian Michael J. Vassallo, reflecting the loose documentation common to Timely's Golden Age production.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published Fall 1941 by Timely Comics (Timely's All-Winners Comics #2); 68 pages, full color.
• First appearance of both the Destroyer (Keen Marlow) and the Whizzer (Robert Frank) in All-Winners Comics — each had debuted in a separate Timely title just weeks prior (Mystic Comics #6 and USA Comics #1, respectively) — establishing the anthology's core roster through issue #12.
• The Destroyer (created by Stan Lee and Jack Binder) is depicted as American journalist Keen Marlow, empowered by a super-soldier serum from an anti-Nazi German scientist while imprisoned in a concentration camp, battling Nazis from inside occupied Europe.
• The Whizzer (Robert Frank), whose super-speed derived from a mongoose-blood transfusion, would continue as a regular in All-Winners Comics from this issue through #21, eventually joining the All-Winners Squad in issues #19 and #21.
• Captain America story features art by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby — one of their final contributions to the title before leaving Timely for DC Comics later in 1941.
• The issue's 'Winners All' two-page prose text story, written by Stan Lee with illustration by Jack Kirby, depicts editor Stan Lee meeting with the assembled heroes and agreeing to add the Destroyer and the Whizzer — a self-referential narrative conceit that prefigured the formal All-Winners Squad superhero team by five years.
• The Sub-Mariner story features a memorable plot in which Namor uncovers a Nazi 'ghost fleet' that turns out to be a 3-D movie projection using Polaroid lenses.
• Material from this issue has been reprinted in Giant-Size Invaders #2 (2005), Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age All-Winners Comics Vol. 1 (2005), and Timely's Greatest: The Golden Age Simon & Kirby Omnibus (2019).

Cast · 28 characters

Full credits

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