The Top Ten Ways to Dispatch the Young Allies

We fight together through stormy weather.
We're out to lick both crooks and spies!
We won't be stopped and we can't be stopped.
We are the Young Allies!

The Young Allies first appeared as a backup feature in Captain America #8 (1941), and soon spun off into their own 20-issue title (1941-1946).  They were extraordinarily popular during World War II, also appearing in in Complete Comics #2 (1943), Kid Komics #2-#10 (1943-1944), Amazing Comics #1 (1944), and, after the War, in Marvel Mystery Comics #75-83 (1946-47).

The group consisted of Bucky and Toro, the teen sidekicks of Captain America and the Human Torch,  plus four heavily stereotyped non-superheroic teenagers: the working-class stiff Knuckles (Percival Aloysius O'Toole), the swishy rich kid Jeff (Jefferson Worthing Sandervilt), the tubby Tubby (Henry Tinkle), and the minstrel-show reject Whitewash Jones.

Although they were out to "lick both crooks and spies," they mostly fought Nazi and Japanese super-villains.  Almost every cover illustration depicted at least two of the four non-superheros tied up and awaiting a horrifying doom, while Bucky or Toro or both rushed in to save the day.

In their regular titles, Bucky and Toro were constantly being rescued by their adult chums, so I guess they wanted to be the heroes for a change.

Of course, any male-male rescue in a world of men rescuing women is going to have a gay subtext.

Here are the ten most creative ways that super-villains conjured up to dispatch the Young Allies:

1, A tank of carbon monoxide. Wouldn't strangling them work just as well?  Notice that Knuckles is helping, so there will be three heroes, and they can pair off nicely at the end of the story.

2. All four face a stabbing machine.  Notice Adolph Hitler behind the Red Skull.  The covers have no connection to the stories inside, so I have no idea why the four are drawn as middle-aged rather than young teens. Maybe some sort of aging gas?

3. Just Jeff and Tubby this time, getting racked on a "Stretcher" machine run by skeletons in green pants.

4. Here Knuckles is helping Toro and Bucky rescue the other three from guillotines, but it actually looks like the evil Nazi cultists are planning to stab them.  Notice that Knuckles barely misses hitting Bucky in the butt.

5. Tubby and Jeff are facing death by giant octopus.

More after the break.

The Human Torch and Toro: Gay Subtexts in World War II Comics

I never had much time for Marvel Comics, but there's something to be said for the Human Torch, a blazing, naked humanoid who bursts onto the scene to rescue his rather buffed (and also flammable) teenage sidekick.

In his first incarnation, premiering in Marvel Comics #1 (1939), he was an android villain who burst into flame whenever he was exposed to air.  But he quickly learned to control his flaming, reformed, and became a superhero, single-handedly ending World War II by assassinating Hitler.

After the war he joined the New York City police force under the alter ego name Jim Hammond.

In Human Torch Comics #2 (fall 1940), the Torch encounters a teenage boy named Toro, who is impervious to fire.  The two become the standard 1940s superhero-sidekick romantic partners, with Toro requiring rescue from a horrifying fate on nearly every comic book cover.

I'm not sure what's going on here.  A cage of women and children is being lowered into flames, and Toro is somehow attached to the chain.

The Human Torch and Toro both faded into obscurity after the War.  They were resurrected recently for the dark, ultra-convoluted, and intensely heteronormative plotlines of contemporary Marvel comics.  Apparently Toro marries, then dies, then gets resurrected, but his wife has begun canoodling with the Torch, and...

You're probably more familiar with another Human Torch, this one actually human, named Johnny Storm.  A founding member of the Fantastic Four, he premiered in 1961 with no connection to the World War II android.  He had a heteronormative plotline, with no teen sidekick, and "died" in 2011.

He was played by Chris Evans in two Fantastic Four movies (2005, 2007).  The gay subtexts were completely gone, relics of the distant past.