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in: Dick Giordano/Executive Editor, Jerry Ordway/Cover Artist, Roy Thomas/Writer,
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All-Star Squadron Vol 1 29

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"A Man Called Doome!": 9 January 1942: At the end of a translantic flight aboard Winston Churchill's Boeing 314 flying boat "Berwick", arriving over Britain, Prime Minister Churchill and Sir Justin encounter a night-time German bombing raid on London. Leaving the craft aboard Winged Victory, th

Quote1 By my halidom, I should like to meet this Khan. Where is this 'Alaska'? Quote2
— the Shining Knight

All-Star Squadron #29 is an issue of the series All-Star Squadron (Volume 1) with a cover date of January, 1984.

Synopsis for "A Man Called Doome!"

9 January 1942: At the end of a translantic flight aboard Winston Churchill's Boeing 314 flying boat "Berwick", arriving over Britain, Prime Minister Churchill and Sir Justin encounter a night-time German bombing raid on London. Leaving the craft aboard Winged Victory, the Shining Knight attacks and damages an air-raiding German bomber, then alights on a rooftop. Shortly later he has a long conversation with Winston Churchill, in which he relates the events of a previous adventure with the Seven Soldiers of Victory.

At his secret laboratory in a lighthouse tower, on Long Island, Dr. Wilfred Doome invented a time machine, and used it to abduct, each from the hour of his greatest triumph, five historic conquerors: Nero, Attila, Bonaparte, Genghis Khan, and Alexander the Great. Each materialized in Doome's laboratory, and each was able to speak and understand English. Doome gave each of them a wand, with which to communicate amongst themselves, and each with the potential to send its user back to the very instant from which Doome's time beam had seized him. Doome showed them some movies and made them some promises, and recruited these despots to his world-conquering cause. And the first step would be to steal five of the rarest metals on Earth.
In New York, on Wall Street, Speedy witnessed an armored-car robbery, intervened, and got knocked unconscious, with Attila impulsively stealing Speedy's brand-new walky-talky radio. The bad guys escaped in a seaplane piloted by Dr. Doome, with the radio transmitting the whole time. Green Arrow and Speedy eavesdropped momentarily, but the signal faded. They called in the Seven Soldiers, and met up with them in a nondescript building in New York, during which confab the radio sparked back to life, and clues were gleaned, then the team split up.
The Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy, in the Star-Rocket Racer, went after a stolen gold shipment, near the Canadian border, and brought down Napoleon's airplane. Bonaparte momentarily escaped, on foot, into the trackless forests, but was caught by some mental hospital orderlies, and almost packed into a padded truck, before he activated his Time Rod, and escaped back to the early 19th century.
In the Everglades, Alexander the Great used a catapult to kill a brilliant inventor named Leo Starr, then searched for Starr's supply of radium, finding it already installed into some "humanized robots," as a power source. Alexander intuited that now he'd be able to simply march the robots to rejoin Doome. Green Arrow and Speedy showed up in the Arrowcar, knocked down his robots, and defeated him with arrows; Alexander activated his Time Rod, and escaped back to the 4th century BC.
Sir Justin and Winged Victory went after a platinum shipment, at the little port town of Jackpot, Alaska. They invaded Genghis Khan's cavern hideout, defeated his tommy-gun-wielding hoodlums, got ineffectually head-konked by a 13th-century Mongol minion, and caught Genghis Khan, who then activated the Time Rod that Doome had given him, and escaped back to the 13th century.
The Vigilante, and his Times Square cowboy pal Billy Gunn, went after a load of tantalum, at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and there he defeated Attila the Hun, and a few sword-wielding hench-Huns. Vig and Billy brought guns to this sword fight, and they won it, but Attila activated his Time Rod and escaped back to the 5th century.
The Crimson Avenger and Wing slipped aboard Nero Claudius Caesar's galley, at sea near a lighthouse on Long Island, and fought with Nero's Roman soldiers, and at first they were winning, but numbers got the better of them, and the heroes were set to work on the oars. A young stowaway (Sammy Singer) freed them, and this time they got a grip on Nero, but he activated his Time Rod and escaped back to the 1st century. But the Crimson Avenger had learned that the lighthouse was the base of the main villain.
The Seven Soldiers converged on Doome's hide-out; he dropped a bundle of dynamite on them; Vigilante shot off the fuse. The team walked into a hallway with spiky walls which closed in on them, but the Shining Knight shaved the spikes right off the walls with his irresistible broadsword. Finally Doome seemed cornered; he couldn't flee into the future because he still lacked the metals he needed, but he had one last Time Rod in his hand, and escaped, to an unnamed time. But he dropped his Time Rod, and Speedy recovered it, and after a swift war council, the team made use of the device, arriving at the time and place of the Trojan War. Doome was there, and had already cut deals with Agamemnon and Odysseus. A melee erupted, in which the Law's Legionnaires defeated a large number of Greek soldiers, until Sir Justin got within conversing range of Odysseus, and persuaded him of Doome's perfidy and his own team's virtue. When Agamemnon turned against him, Doome activated his Time Rod and escaped back to 1942, but as Doome had forgotten, Speedy also had a Time Rod. In one of his scientific instruments, Doome spotted the team pursuing him through time, homing in on his own chronal vibrations. He made one last pitch, to try to turn the Shining Knight against the other six, but this failed, and the Seven Soldiers materialized in Doome's lab. Doome desperately tried to flee into the future, but his time machine exploded, with him in it.

After finishing his tale, Shining Knight reveals he has decided to remain in Britain.

Appearing in "A Man Called Doome!"

Featured Characters:

Supporting Characters:

Antagonists:

Other Characters:

Locations:

Items:

  • Dr. Doome's Time Rods (Flashback only)
  • Leo Starr's humanized robots (Flashback only)
  • Trojan Horse (Flashback only)
  • Radium

Vehicles:

Notes

  • The Seven Soldiers flashback in this issue is loosely adapted from the story in Leading Comics #3. Sir Justin's retelling of this tale takes place shortly before All-Star Squadron #13, which in turn takes place on 9 Jan 1942.
  • Wilfred Doome was a former member of Prof. Damon Everson's first team of scientists, and acquired a partial formula for time travel before leaving that group.
  • Dr. Doome's Time Rods enabled their users to speak and understand any language.
  • Wilfred Doome supposedly died in an explosion, but we see no body and no body parts.
  • At story's end, Speedy still has one of Doome's Time Rods, but it's unlikely to be useful with Doome's main time machine exploded.
  • In Green Lantern #10, immortal caveman Vandal Savage claimed to have been Genghis Khan. While some of Savage's other assertions in that story have been shown to be false, this one has not been disputed.
  • Alexander mentions Zeus. In the original tale, he referred Jupiter, a Roman god, which would be unfit for a Macedonian.
  • In the original tale, each one of the Seven Soldiers are helped by a local person; none of them are mentioned in the retold story except Sammy Singer and Leo Starr's robots.
  • Green Arrow mentions that history says that Alexander will die at 31 y.o. from an excess of wine. Actually, Alexander died at 32. Wine is only regarded as one of the possible causes. On Earth-One, Alexander, along other conquerors throughout history, had their destinies doomed by an artifact known as the Emperor Eagle Statue.
  • Guards from Arkham Asylum take Napoleon. In the original tale, the asylum was unnamed.
  • In the original tale, during the Trojan War, there was no Agamemnon, and Odysseus was called Ulysses, his Roman name.
  • Nero is portrayed as playing a lyre. In the original tale, it was a fiddle, which is historically inaccurate.



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