Star-Spangled Kid

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

Fictional character history

ylvester Pemberton

The original Star-Spangled Kid is Sylvester Pemberton, a Golden Age character. He becomes the Star-Spangled Kid in order to battle Nazism during World War II. He is unique in that he is a kid superhero who has an adult sidekick, Stripesy a.k.a. Pat Dugan. Both he and Dugan are superb acrobats along with having sufficient training in hand-to-hand combat.

Decades later, he eventually changes his name to Skyman and leads Infinity Inc.. He is killed when Harlequin III makes Solomon Grundy touch Pemberton with Mister Bones's hand, thus inflicting Bones' cyanide touch.

Courtney Whitmore

Courtney, who previously used the Star-Spangled Kid II identity, is the stepdaughter of Pat Dugan. She finds Pemberton's gear in her stepfather's belongings and dons the Cosmic Converter Belt, with a costume of her own design, 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, designs and builds S.T.R.I.P.E., an armored robot which he rides in to accompany and protect her. Eventually, she joins the JSA and, after being given Starman Jack Knight's cosmic rod, changes her identity to Stargirl.

Third Star-Spangled Kid

A third Star-Spangled Kid appears in Terror Titans #1 and is subsquently captured by them for the Dark Side Club. He is forced to fight a meta-human fighting arena, and is defeated, though allowed to live. Not much is known about this version, other than he wears the uniform of the original Star-Spangled Kid, and is implied to have been active for sometime now.

Other versions

In Kingdom Come, Alex Ross portrays 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, is accompanied by a muscular older man in a striped shirt, this one called Stripes.In the first issue of the Teen Titans spin-off Terror Titans, a new Star-Spangled kid who looks exactly like the Golden Age version is introduced. Nothing seems to be known about him yet.

External links

* [http://www.dcuguide.com/who.php?name=skyman DCU Guide: Star Spangled Kid]
* [http://www.toonopedia.com/s-s-kid.htm Don Markstein's Toonopedia]
* [http://home.aol.com/MG4273/spangle.htm Classic Comic Books: The Star Spangled Kid]