The Boy Champions, and other Golden Age Gangs

 

I don’t know whether Jack Kirby got the idea for a comic book about a gang of kids in a tough neighborhood from The Bowery Boys, the Dead-End Kids, from Doc Savage’s team of experts, or even Our Gang, but it seems that there were plenty of examples of street gangs in popular culture when he created his sidekicks for the Guardian.  Nevertheless, Kirby seems to have taken this idea and run with it, spawning multiple examples in his comics: The Newsboy Legion appeared in Star-Spangled Comics, the Boy Commandos fought in the European theatre, later the unseen Yancy Street Gang bedeviled The Thing in the Fantastic Four comics, and even into the ‘70s a 1^st Issue Special debuted the “Dingbats of Danger Street.” 

I was always interested in the kid gang stories, especially when they were set in distant or sci-fi locations, or when they were from the golden age comics, which had an otherworldliness about them.  The kid gangs seemed the next step in the evolution of the sidekick.  As mentioned in this Wikipedia entry, "kid gangs seemed to be the way to go. Teenage sidekicks (Batman's Robin, Captain America's Bucky, etc.) were fast becoming a comics staple, intended to provide young characters with whom the youthful readers could identify.” What’s more natural than to provide a whole entourage of characters as a foil to the hero?   

Kirby wasn’t the only one to create comic-book gangs.  The Golden Age Daredevil had his own following called The Little Wise Guys.  I also have a Thrilling Comic that showcases the Commando Cubs. Commando Cubs were originally group of American kids who were originally sent to England as part of a study of "the effects of the old-world culture on kids of different backgrounds." But when the World War II reached the shores of the British Isles, the kids found themselves stranded. This blog author has put together a nice survey of some of the other gangs, both from the Golden Age, and later years. 

And recently I was reading The Green Lama and found a gang previously undiscovered (by me).  The Boy Champions look a lot like an imitation of Kirby’s Newsboy Legion.  Tuffy is an amalgamation of Scrapper and Gabby, while Mickey could be Tommy without the leadership skills, and Wellington wears the glasses, standing in for Big Words. The time frame, from 1944 to 1946, corresponds closely with the output from Kirby.  The characters are so similar in style, I was curious whether the art was cribbed from Kirby. That is, until I noticed it was Jerry Robinson (best known as the creator of the Joker ) drawing the Boy Champions.  Side-by-side you can see that these aren’t the best examples of Kirby’s work, while the art from Robinson has been cleaned up so it’s almost cartoony.  Mort Meskin wrote the Boy Champions stories, and they appeared in all eight issues of The Green Lama when it was published by Spark Publications.

A typical story is where the Boy Champions are hired by a rich woman to take her spoiled brat of a son out with them and see to it that he engages in good, clean fun. They head for the circus, just in time to spot a robbery in progress.  In a different issue the boys, after being denied the chance to give blood because they are too young, decide to try and get a Red Cross nurse's fiancé to donate himself.  Most of the stories involve being hired for a task, and then accidentally uncovering a robbery and solving it.