First superhero team

Today, superhero teams are a staple of comics, and comics-based movies, and are often involved in epic battles. However, the first superhero team had somewhat more humble beginnings. All-Star Comics was originally conceived as an anthology title featuring the separate adventures of a number of different superhero characters in a single publication, all at a bargain price. In All-Star Comics 3, cover dated for the winter of 1940, the featured heroes all met together around a table to swap stories about their crime-fighting antics. In later issues the heroes would collaborate in order to defeat more powerful foes than they could successfully combat on their own, an idea that served as the template for every superhero team that followed from the Justice League to the Avengers and the X-Men. However, the first superhero meeting was just that; a meeting. The founding members of the JSA were the Atom, Doctor Fate, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Hourman (Hour-man at that point), the Sandman and the Spectre, as seen sat around the table on the cover of All Star Comics #3. Although he is also mentioned on the cover, Johnny Thunder is not depicted and did not become a member until issue #6. All-Star Comics was published by a company called All-American comics, owned by comics entrepreneurs Max Gaines. It was considered a sister company to Detective Comics, which published Superman and Batman and shared a number of staff.

Detective Comics characters, including Batman and Superman, both appeared in the Justice Society of America.

In the 1940s there was a lot of consolidation in still relatively new comic book industry. Detective Comics merged with National Allied Publications to form National Comics, which then absorbed much of All-American Publications to form National Periodical Publications in 1944.

Despite this official name, the Superman and Detective Comics brands remained strong and the company (which eventually became part of Time Warner) officially adopted the DC Comics brand in 1977.