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The Champions of Angor
The Assemblers
Justice League of America (vol. 1) #87 (Feb 1971) had the same cover date as the first appearance of the Squadron and featured the debut of the Champions of Angor. The story was written by Mike Friedrich (a friend of Roy Thomas - you do the conspiracy theory) and legendary JLA editor Julius Schwartz. It introduced the oddly named world of Can-Nam-Loo which had sent robots to two different planets in order to plunder their natural resources. Unsurprisingly those worlds were Earth and Angor. The heroes of each world, the JLA and the Assemblers, defeated their respective robots and tracked them back to Can-Nam-Loo. Both sets of heroes arrived simultaneously, assumed that the others were the robot’s builders, and promptly indulged in the ubiquitous hero versus hero battle. Peace eventually broke out when Zatanna healed the injured Blue Jay.
The four heroes from the planet Angor were a clear pastiche of the Avengers. A fact that was made explicit when Keith Giffen and Gerard Jones dubbed them the Assemblers after the Avengers battle cry of “Avengers Assemble!” No team name had been revealed in their original appearance and for years they were known only as the Champions of Angor. The leader of the group was Wandjina the Thunderer and was patterned after Marvel’s Thor. The other three Angorians were Jack B. Quick (Quicksilver), Silver Sorceress (Scarlet Witch), and the aforementioned Blue Jay (Yellowjacket) — see the accompanying picture for their original descriptions. The Assemblers would have remained a minor footnote in League history if Keith Giffen had not resurrected them in the late 1980’s.
The Assemblers next appeared in Justice League #2 (June 1987) where we find Wandjina and co assaulting a Bialyian nuclear missile base. They are quickly introduced to the Bialyian President Rumaan Harjavti who bumblingly tries to sweet talk them around to his side. It turns out that Angor has suffered an undisclosed nuclear disaster that wiped out the entire population including Jack B. Quick. In a flashback Quick is given the name Harry Christos, “the fastest man on two legs” and strangely the new alias of Captain Speed.
More of the personalities of the remaining three Assemblers are revealed. Wandjina is the most powerful and the leader, easy to anger and quick to act. He is balanced by the calm advise of the Silver Sorceress. We see Wandjina show abilities in parallel with Thor as a Thunder God, i.e. weather control, lightning, super strength, flight, etc. Of the other two, Blue Jay is the least developed - he grows wings as he shrinks and the Mayfair Justice League Sourcebook suggests that he has some technical ability. That book also lists the Sorceress’s power as some form of probability/luck manipulation while later interpretations of her seem to favour more traditional mystical powers.
The trio had come to Earth to rid it of nuclear weapons and to stop a repeat of the devastation that hit Angor. However, it is not clear whether Earth is their first stop since leaving Angor. At the conclusion of the story Wandjina dies stopping a Russian nuclear reactor from melting down and the two surviving Assemblers are taken into custody by the Russian authorities. The story was set at the tail end of the Cold War and the confrontation was hushed up by the Soviet authorities — later sliding timelines remove the Soviet elements but the story doesn’t suffer for it. Wandjina made one last appearance when the second Queen Bee used his reanimated corpse as a weapon. Captain Atom was forced to disintegrate the body when the Queen Bee sent it after a covert JLI team.
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