Pacific City Chronicles

SQUIRE

Some of the early mystery men of the 20's and 30's occasionally had assistants that were younger than they but none were consistent or noted. It took the unusual action of putting a minor into combat to bring the term 'sidekick' into the American vocabulary. Squire, the assistant to the Quantum Knight, was the first teenager to put on a costume and fight crime, beating out the first appearance of Kid Superior by two full years. In one interview the hero now known as Sentinel said that he regarded Squire's appearance as an inspiration to him to use his gifts for the betterment of mankind.

William L. Shirer's monumental work Godlike, his 1965 follow-up volume The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which details the entrance of true metahumans onto the world stage, contains a lengthy interview with the Quantum Knight and Squire done soon after the end of the war. Later in the book he examines the proliferation of young assistants to the metas of the time without the bias and cruel animosity seen in 1954's Seduction of the Innocent (an FBI-sponsored propaganda peice aimed at swaying popular opinion against the prominent metas of the time, especially The Astronaut and Starboy, and The Eagle and Wing).

Metahuman historian Ron Goulart explored the popularity of the sidekick in his 1967 book Boy Wondering, which devoted a good quarter of the book to Squire's exploits in WW2, his later popularity on the American pop scene, his rise as one of the first 'teen idols', and his gradual withdrawal from the superhero community as he aged.

TV and movie portrayals of Squire have been surprisingly sparse given his popularity in the 1950s. The movie serial 'Quantum Knight vs The Robot Menace' featured John Duncan as Squire; productions values were terribly cheap though even it was not as bad as Christopher Atkin's portrayal in 1980's 'War Hero', widely regarded as the role that ended the young actor's career. Much better was Kevin Zeger's portrayal in 1999's 'The Greatest Generation'.