Star-Spangled Kid

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Star-Spangled Kid is the name of several fictional superheroes in the DC Comics universe.

Contents

1 Character history

1.1 Sylvester Pemberton
1.2 Courtney Whitmore
1.3 Other versions of the Star-Spangled Kid

2 External links

Character history

Sylvester Pemberton

The original Star-Spangled Kid was Sylvester Pemberton, a Golden Age character. He became the Star-Spangled Kid in order to battle Nazi spies and fifth columnists during World War II. He was unique in that he was a kid superhero who had an adult sidekick, Stripesy a.k.a. Pat Dugan. Both he and Dugan were superb acrobats along with having sufficient training in hand-to-hand combat. They devised a series of acrobatic maneuvers that allowed them to build upon one another's strengths, the Kid's agility and Dugan's strength. They also designed and built the Star Rocket Racer, a bubble-topped limousine with the functions of a rocket and helicopter.

The Kid and Stripesy were members of the Seven Soldiers of Victory as well as the All-Star Squadron. In 1948, Pemberton and Dugan were joined by Merry, the Girl of 1000 Gimmicks , eventually supplanting The Kid and Stripsey from their own feature. The Seven Soldiers were lost in time in the late 1940s and rescued decades later by the Justice League of America and the Justice Society of America. Sylvester then joined the JSA, at which time a then-injured Starman Ted Knight loaned him his cosmic rod (it was later retconned that Starman wanted the young man to become his heir as neither of his sons expressed interest in carrying the mantle). Soon afterwards, the Kid refined the technology of the rod, devising a belt with similar powers such as energy projection, flight and matter transmutation. Eventually the Kid retired from superheroics to reclaim his inheritance, his father's business, from his corrupt nephew. In addition, he patched up his long since neglected relationship with Dugan.

He eventually changed his name to Skyman and led the team Infinity Inc. During this period he was able to form a partnership with the city of Los Angeles to commission his team as for-hire protectors, and used his purchased studio property to revitalize its movie productions. He was later killed by Solomon Grundy under the control of the third Harlequin who had been working for the Dummy's Injustice Unlimited. The Kid later returned from an alternate timeline to the prime post-crisis Earth to assist the JSA against Extant.

Courtney Whitmore

Courtney, who previously used the Star-Spangled Kid II identity, is the stepdaughter of Pat Dugan. She found Pemberton's gear in her stepfather's belongings and donned the costume in order to annoy him as partial revenge for marrying her mother and supposedly forcing the family to move from Los Angeles to Blue Valley, Nebraska. Dugan, a skilled mechanic, designed and built S.T.R.I.P.E., an armored robot which he rides in to accompany and protect her. Eventually, she joined the JSA and, after being given Starman Jack Knight's gravity rod, changed her identity to Stargirl.

Other versions of the Star-Spangled Kid

In Kingdom Come, Alex Ross portrayed a later Star-Spangled Kid (simply called Stars) as an African-American street kid wearing a leather jacket with an American flag bandana,and a T-shirt with an inverted American flag, using the cosmic rod in conjunction with the cosmic converter belt. He too was accompanied by a muscular older man in a striped shirt, this one called Stripes.

External links

[Don Markstein's Toonopedia]

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