Maybe that was because, at that point, we JLA readers had been acclimated to issues from guest creators.
For example, January's #27 was from guest-creators Mark Millar and Mark Pajarillo (that was the JLA and the reserves vs. Amazon done-in-one, a sort of spotlight on The Atom). That was followed by Morrison, Porter and Dell's four-part "Crisis Times Five" (the JLA/JSA/Captain Marvel story arc). And then we got two more issues from fill-in teams, with Mark Waid, Devin Grayson, Pajarillo and Walden Wong handling JLA # 32 (in which the team investigates the "No Man's Land" situation in Gotham) and the same creative team (minus Grayson) also handling JLA #33 (in which the team investigates a faux Bruce Wayne). The "regular" team was back for #34 (in which Green Lantern gets swept up in a prison riot at Belle Reeve), but it was beginning to look like we were getting at least one fill-in issue between each complete story by Morrison and company.
It might also have been because that September's Day of Judgment event felt so much like a JLA story that I felt like I was getting more JLA that month, not less. (Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and Zauriel played big-ish roles in the main Day of Judgment series, while Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman also appeared).
Looking back now though, JLA #35 looks like a rather unwelcome interruption of Morrison and company's Justice League epic. In issue #34, "The Ant and the Avalanche", New Gods tell the League the long-foreshadowed apocalyptic threat is finally arriving, and the cliffhanger ending reveals that Lex Luthor, the villain of 1997-1998's "Rock of Ages" arc, has now aligned himself with Prometheus, the villain who single-handedly took on and took down the newer, bigger Justice League in 1998's JLA #16 and #17.
What could these two be up to, and who else might be on the "new Injustice Gang" Prometheus mentions...? How might it tie into the prophesied threat? Readers in 1999 had to wait not one but two months, not getting a resolution to that cliffhanger the following month, but instead a story by J.M. DeMatteis and Pajarillo about Hal Jordan, a character who had never appeared in this particular title, and how he was dealing with being the new host of The Spectre. (The side-quest nature of this story is particularly apparent when encountered in a collection of JLA today;I re-read it in a library-borrowed, 2000 collection entitled JLA: World War III, where it is sandwiched between the aforementioned "The Ant and the Avalanche" and the five-part "World War III" arc, the latter of which was both the climax and the finale of Morrison's run).
According to comics.org, DeMatteis and Pajarillo's JLA #35 was released on September 29, 1999, the very same Wednesday that Day of Judgment #5 and Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins were released. So, depending on which order one read them in that week, this is either the first or second appearance of Hal Jordan as The Spectre following the events of the main Day of Judgment series (And though the cover of this issue brands it as a Day of Judgment tie-in, it is, according to a footnote, set after the events of the series, so, like the Secret Files and Origins special, this too is a sort of epilogue).
The story, entitled "The Guilty", opens with a two-page sequence in which "the camera" seems to be zooming in from a longshot of a city street from far above, down to a troubled man in a yellow shirt and blue pants in front of a toy store, all the other people passing by depicted only as silhouettes. Green narration boxes make it clear that the words in them are supposed to be the thoughts of Hal Jordan, and that he is, apparently, the man in the yellow shirt.
I wouldn't have recognized him, honestly. He looks far younger than he did in Day of Judgment, his build is thinner, and colorist Pat Garrahy gives him a very light brown hair, far lighter than he usually has. Honestly, he looks more like Ralph Dibny than Hal Jordan. Given the events of the story, though, this could be either Pajarillo and Garrahy rendering him a bit off-model, or it could be intentional.
Anyway, as the suffering Jordan narrates about how he can't stop being flooded with darkness and evil, he finally cries out in anguish, assuming the form of The Spectre, a white-skinned giant wearing not just the customary green hooded cape and gloves, but also a green mask evocative of Jordan's old Green Lantern uniform (As is hinted at on Porter's cover at the top of the post, the design for the new Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre hybridizes Hal's Green Lantern outfit with The Spectre's get-up).
Suddenly, the JLA's resident angel Zauriel swoops down to look Hal in the eye, his flaming sword already drawn:
Is there a problem?
Your howl of grief across the ethers--drew me here through the sheer force of your thought.
It slowly dawns on Hal that he knows Zauriel—they met in Purgatory in Day of Judgment, and, prior to that, a time-travelling Jordan from the past met Zauriel in the 1998 "Emerald Knights" arc Green Lantern, but I'll be damned if I can remember if Past Hal kept his memories of this adventure in his future, or if they were power-ringed away before he got sent back, so as not to screw with the timeline (As far as I know, "Emerald Knights" is also the first time Hal Jordan actually met Plastic Man, too, but I may be wrong on that; do correct me if I am).
Then a bunch of Leaguer's appear, Superman saying "That'll be enough, Hal--" to presage their dramatic appearance. Assembled here are Superman, Martian Manhunter, Batman, Green Lantern and Plastic Man. Together with Zauriel, they would make up the half-dozen Leaguers who are featured in this story.
It's an interesting mix, as Superman, Batman and J'onn have known Hal about as long as anyone and served on Leagues with him before. Zauriel is there for obvious plot purposes, standing as he does between Earth and the divine realm that birthed The Spectre. Green Lantern Kyle Rayner has a complicated history with Hal, having had to repeatedly fight him while also trying to live up to his legacy ("Emerald Knights" is one of the relatively few times Kyle and Hal shared a story where they weren't fighting, actually). And as for Plastic Man, well, his particular past is salient for one scene DeMatteis writes later.
Among the other eight Leaguers, Aquaman, Wonder Woman and then-Flash Wally West might seem conspicuously absent, given Aquaman co-founded the League and served on it for years with Hal, while Wally and Wondy were his colleagues on Justice Leagues during the multi-Leagues "International" era between the end of the Giffen/DeMatteis era and the start of JLA. (Remember, in post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis continuity, Wonder Woman wasn't a founding Leaguer, nor even in Man's World throughout the entirety of the Satellite Era).
During a brief argument with Superman, the still-giant Spectre returns to a human form, and then tumbles out of the sky, eliciting a fun panel in which J'onn, Kyle and Plas all shout "I'll get him!", but Superman beat them all to the catch, thanks to his super-speed.
To their shock, they don't recognize the man in Supeman's arms at all. "If Hal Jordan is the new Spectre--" Plas starts, before Batman finishes his sentence, "Then WHO is THIS?"
Taking the unrecognizable Hal back to the Watchtower, the narration makes it clear that not only do none of them recognize him as Hal Jordan, but he appears completely differently in the eyes of each of them (Pajarillo helpfully draws six completely different-looking men the same yellow shirt in a series of panels; one of them, the one Plas sees, is a Black man).
Zauriel interrupts the questioning, takes a good hard look at the man he sees, and then explains:
Our inability to recognize him-- is part of the ordained plan for The Spectre's mission on Earth.
Jordan is dead...The world believes him dead...and though he's been given the semblance of a human form, no one-- --not even those who knew him best-- will recognize him now.
Though Zauriel somehow seems to fix that for his fellow Leaguers, he stresses that this is just temporary, and that "For reasons known only to The Presence," Zauriel's name for God, once Hal leaves the Watchtower, the Leaguers will only remember him as The Spectre, not as Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre.
I didn't like this development when I initially read this comic. Not only did it seem to violate one of the established "rules" of The Spectre that I had previously read about—everyone seemed to recognize the dead Jim Corrigan as Jim Corrigan when he was The Spectre—it seemed counter-productive. What, after all, was the point of making the long-lived DC character Hal Jordan the new Spectre if DC was only going to obscure that identity from everyone in the DCU anyway? Would stories of Hal Jordan possessing The Spectre's god-like powers in the modern DCU be all that interesting if only the writers writing his adventures and the readers reading them knew who he actually was?
It seems like DeMatteis must have changed his mind about it too...if this aspect was his idea, and not an editorial edict. About a year and a half after this issue was published, DC would launch a new volume of The Spectre, with DeMatteis writing it. (I wonder now if DC and DeMatteis knew the latter would be writing the series at this point or not.) But by 2003's JLA/Spectre: Soul War two-part mini-series, the League all knew that Hal was The Spectre again.
Hal resumes his Spectre form, and there's a bit of debate among the assembled men. Superman tells Hal he's a good man, while Batman argues, "As far as I'm concerned, Jordan stopped being a "good man" when he turned on the guardians. When he killed-- and kept on killing."
Hal again discusses how his new, supernatural senses are overwhelming him:
If only you could see--what I see! What this...thing I share consciousness with makes me see: The demons! The guilt!
Humanity's shame and sorrow! It's festering jealousy--and murderous rage!
After Plastic Man interrupts him—"Let me get this straight: Before you were dead--now you're the all-powerful Spectre--and you're kvetching about it?"—we get to the heart of the comic.
"All men--no matter how pure they may appear--are guilty!" Hal says, spreading his cape like a matador. "Every soul on Earth is a potential target of The Spectre's divine wrath!"
Superman scoffs, saying he doesn't, he can't subscribe to such a philosophy, at which point Hal-as-The Spectre starts using his powers to illustrate his points, giving Pajarillo lots of intense imagery to work with. He shows them the time Superman executed the Phantom Zone criminals, the instance in which he actually took a life—there's no asterisk or footnote, but I believe this happened during John Byrnes run, right?—and how guilty Superman felt about it.
Batman cuts in, and then The Spectre turns on him, noting how many people have suffered due to Batman's arrogance, and that there's a small part of Batman that wants to kill his enemies, one he may eventually act on—should The Spectre attack Batman now, or wait until he's crossed that line? (Batman's refusal to ever kill, even the likes of The Joker, makes him maybe a poor example to subject to The Spectre's scrutiny; I wonder if it might have been better for DeMatteis to use the harsher, more violent Huntress, or perhaps warrior characters like Wonder Woman or Aquaman, although, to be honest, I don't recall if any of those three had actually killed anyone by this point; I feel like Peter David had depicted Aquaman killing at least one alien invader earlier in his run, but I'm no longer positive.)
Hal goes on to accuse Kyle of fearing being corrupted by his power and lashes out at Zauriel when he again mentions The Presence.
It is at this point, Plastic Man joins the conversation, transforming into an easy chair and sweeping Hal off his feet with a "Siddown a minute!"
As a Plastic Man fan, I should note that DeMatteis does a pretty fine job of the character in a sequence of less than a half-dozen panels. While Morrison had an even-handed, nuanced approach to Plastic Man as a true hero despite his jokes, in general, most of the other writers to handle the JLA during Morrison's run just played Plas as a source of usually lame jokes, his shape-shifting abilities employed to contort him into visual punchlines.
(For one example of Morrison's take on Plastic Man from the very collection I am reading this issue in, in the first chapter of "World War III", Zauriel said that Heaven has decided Earth will surely end during this particular threat, and that the angels are already planning the architecture of a new universe. Plastic Man's head turns into that of a chicken, and notes that if Heaven has given up, maybe he and Zauriel should as well, to which Zauriel responds, "I haven't given up...and neither will you when it comes to it, Plastic Man." He's right! They both play their parts in saving Earth and the universe from the new Injustice Gang and Mageddon.)
Plastic Man explains that he too had been in the position Hal has been in, a bad guy who was seemingly killed and then got super-powers (Although there's an obvious difference in scale, here; Eel O'Brien, as his surname is spelled here, was a rather cartoonish gangster pulling robberies and heists, while Hal was an honest-to-God cosmic supervillain with a considerable body count who, at one point, unraveled all of time in space in order to recreate it in his own image).
"Believe me, when the fates offered me a second chance--I took it!" Plas says. "But did I mope and moan about it? Nuh-uh! I decided to have fun with it! If I was gonna live my life over, it was gonna be--YOWCH!"
Pajarillo's art is a little confusing here—I'm sure the script couldn't have been all that clear, given what's going on—but Hal interrupts Plastic Man by ripping open the back of his head, where he finds Eel hiding:
You hide behind a mask of arrogance and flippancy--
--but there is another face that lies behind that vapid grin! A man who preyed on the weaknesses of others! An all too common criminal--
--named "Eel" O'Brien!
Again, pretty sure it's spelled "O'Brian," but whatever. The Spectre's beat is evil, sin and vengeance, not spelling.
Here we get a glimpse into Plas' mind, wherein he reveals that he faces "the darkness" of his soul constantly, that he knows every rotten thing he's ever done and been face-to-face with his own guilt, but that he likes his "mask of frivolity." And, when he finally meets his maker, as Hal phrases it? "I'll take my chances that he's just a tetch more forgiving than you are!" Plas says.
Hal seems to really lose his shit at this, at which point J'onn loses his, screaming "Enough!" in big, bold red letters "both verbally and telepathically".
Using his powers, J'onn transports all seven of them to a scary-looking plane of fire and stalagmites and weird architecture.
"Back in Hell?" Kyle asks; he and Superman having just been there in Day of Judgment. "After a fashion," Zauriel replies. He seems to be the only one who knows where J'onn has taken them—mentally, if not physically—although Batman figures it out a moment before Hal does, and before DeMatteis and Pajarillo reveal it to us.
After a four-page fight through a bewildering hellscape, they meet an extremely ordinary-looking middle-aged man and his wife, sitting in easy chairs and listening to a radio show in a cramped cave. An aggressive Hal confronts the man and is shocked to see that "the scared light" shines within him.
Who is this guy, and where are they?
The place was The Joker's mind, and that guy was the light of God within The Joker.
Here's J'onn's explanation of what they all just saw:
Do you see, Hal? Even there--in the most corrupted of human souls--
--lies a spark, however small, seeking hope, seeking love-- and yes--
--redemption.
...
Perhaps you've been projecting your own guilt, for your own transgressions--real and imagined--onto everyone else.
You're not seeing us, Hal. You're seeing yourself reflected back at you--through the prism of the Spectre's wrath....
I learned, long ago, not to underestimate the human race... and their capacity to rise above their limitations.
Too bad about that "ordained plan" that means everyone will be unable to recognize Hal Jordan now that he's The Spectre, or else maybe Martian Manhunter could have continued to counsel him in his new career, and his efforts to wrestle the Spirit of Vengeance into a Spirit of Redemption.
On the last page, The Spectre grows giant again, and he floats through the ceiling out into space, saying that the men he's leaving are "still the best friends-- --I ever had." Presumably he was speaking just of J'onn, Superman and Batman, as he, like, just met Zauriel and Plastic Man, and his relationship with Kyle seems...well, "friends" doesn't seem like the right word at this point in their personal history, does it?
As for the League though, they've already forgotten him, as Kyle gets the last word among them. "Sure hope we helped him--," he says, "--whoever he was."
The last image in the book is of Hal-as-The Spectre, impossibly gigantic and semi-transparent, seeming to hold the Earth itself in his hands, as he ends his narration with something I don't think we see regularly in super-comics: A prayer.
"Lord.. ...let me be worthy," he thinks.
After this issue, the League goes on to face Mageddon in "World War III" in the pages of JLA, after which writer Mark Waid would take the reins from Morrison (and Zauriel would fade into very occasional guest-star status). Waid would, in one of his handful of arcs, get into Plas' head in a way similar to what DeMatteis did here, with the hero lamenting his life of crime and facing the temptation to steal again once Plastic Man and Eel O'Brian are split into two separate people.
While I wasn't particularly annoyed by this book back in 1999, I don't think I appreciated its virtues, either. I don't know that it's necessarily the best Hal Jordan story or anything, but in just 22 pages, it does manage to fit interesting portrayals of Zauriel, Plastic Man and Martian Manhunter.
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