Okay, I know teen/kid heroes were just a thing in the Golden Age. Sandman and you have both talked about how that came about. But most of those guys had some form of adult supervision.
How on Earth did these guys come about?
And how did it happen again?! Against Doctor Light?!
This story requires us to go back, not very far, in either time or place. But back just the same. To a mid sized community in Potter County, Pennsylvania that was at the time known as Big City but is now known as Radiance. It is and was a fairly normal city. Not nearly as big as its original name might claim but industrially prosperous in the war era and successfully pivoted into a stable enough recovered rust belt town in the modern day. The Great Depression, however, was rough on Big City, as it was on everyone in the United States. And whenever regular people are desperate and struggling there are those seeking to take advantage.
Because of its position as a less attended link in the industrial chain, Big City began to catch the refuse of larger cities' criminal element. Low rent gangsters, racketeers and cheats who were still more organized and more violent than the town's well meaning but over worked D.A, one Dan Rogers could handle with the limited experience and resources available to his office. Luckily for Big City though, DA Rogers' son Tommy was an avid reader and follower of the stories in the newspapers, stories starring the mystery men that had begun to pop up all around the country in response to the rising criminal pressure.
Duly inspired, Tommy asked his friends Herbert and Richard, whose parents also worked in the District Attorney's office, if they would join him on his endeavor to clean up the streets. Taking the names Boy Blue, Toughie and Tubby respectively and collectively known as the Blue Boys they wrought sweet, preteen HELL on the crooks and cheats that rolled into Big City looking for a quick score. Their appearance marked not by a bespoke signal, or a subtle calling card. But by Tommy blowing a trumpet on a large, silver horn that most often meant the trio were going to rush through the nearest broken window and start breaking boards over peoples heads. They were eventually joined by another member of the friend group, a fiery young girl named Janie who donned a red haired wig and a yellow skirted leotard to be known as Little Miss Redhead.
Words cannot describe how much the quartet was defined by their style of pure, abject chaos. Imagine yourself as a 1940s street tough. You're staked out at a warehouse in some one horse town, moving smuggled goods under the nose of wartime rationing, someone might go hungry but who cares really? And if any of the sleepy cops in this town question it, well that's what the heater in your pocket is for.
Then, all of a sudden, someone's blowing a tin horn so loud it's rattling your teeth. Four kids, no older than 14 come rushing through the front door. They're smashing open crates, they're hopping on tables, one of them threw a smoke bomb, you're pretty sure one of them has just knocked out two of your friends with a parking meter he must have ripped fully out of the pavement outside. And before you can even think about your personal morality of shooting children, something solid lands upside the back of your head and you wake up in the jailhouse.
This continued for the war years but eventually, sooner than most communities, Big City returned to peace and quiet after the war. Changing its name to Radiance to reflect a comfortable post war prosperity. The Blue Boys become part of the local character, beloved city figures and souvenirs for lost or bored tourists on their way to Erie for the summer. The four kids themselves melted back into the community with no one being the wiser, Tommy Rogers is eventually elected mayor! With the other members of the quartet taking on important but unglamorous jobs as sheriff, the owner of the local hardware store, and school superintendent.
And then, out of nowhere. Decades after the last important or noteworthy thing to happen in this town. DOCTOR LIGHT SHOWS UP. And not the nice one who was on the Justice League, either. He decides, apropos of nothing while he's on the run from prison that he's just going to...take over this small town and either hold it hostage or run it like a personal fiefdom he can't decide which. NOBODY in the town is prepared, trained or equipped for this in the slightest. Because who the hell would be?
Luckily for everybody, the three original Blue Boys have all had sons of their own. And their chaotically heroic streak seems to be genetic. So EQUALLY at random, three kids, like the Blue Boys born again, blue head socks and all come riding in with skateboards and baseball bats and whatever else and they run a Justice League level threat out of town on a rail. They vanish just as quickly, leaving most of the town standing around looking at each other. What is there to say, really?
Other than needing to update the souvenirs and the town sign I guess...
Betweennthese guys, the Boy Commandos, and the Newsboy Legion, I guess kids in the '40s were just Built Different?
The "built different" was called being born in the great depression and the aftermath of prohibition.
...okay, yeah, that is several levels of teenage crazy.
I mean, good for them for all the good they did, but four untrained kids just throwing themselves at gangsters is nuts even by Golden Age standards.
I mean it worked, god bless em!
Listen, okay, I'm from western PA. Not far from Erie, in fact. And I have to tell you, you'd find it a LOT less surprising if you were also from western PA. The Blue Boys are remarkable only in that we didn't have more of them. We're all hellions who'll ask you what the hell got in your head to go out driving in the middle of a blizzard while we're helping to push your car out of the ditch and refusing to take your money for it (you damn fool, now drive slow getting home, you hear me?). Some city asshole shows up to fuck with our people? Aw, hell naw. We're not playing.
They were good kids, both sets of them, and we're still proud of them eighty years later.
