The logo and title link it to Armageddon 2001, DC's1991 crossover event storyline that spanned some dozen annuals and two bookend issues and centered on the new hero Waverider travelling back in time to try to determine which superhero would become a despotic masked villain in his future.
And, of course, the image on the cover of the first issue prominently features Waverider...as does the corner box, a sure indication of who a book's star is meant to be. The Justice Society, meanwhile, wouldn't make the cover until the fourth and final issue.
Even once one starts reading the series, it doesn't seem like it's meant to be any sort of Justice Society story. They are briefly mentioned in the second issue, when Superman suggests to Waverider that their old headquarters is no longer in use, and thus could make for a good place to host a gathering of superheroes. Other than that, they don't appear until the third issue.
Rather, the focus of the book seems to be to gather a whole bunch of DC's most popular characters, as well as some fan-favorite ones who might have been out of the spotlight for quite some time, and a murderers' row of artists to draw them.
In fact, that seems to be the major selling point of the book, and the JSoA's return from the limbo they had been stuck in for a half-dozen years or so is somewhat incidental.
Writer Jon Ostrander and primary pencil artist Luke McDonnell spend only nine pages setting the whole adventure up, moving quite fleetly to introduce the premise.
Waverider follows a disturbance in the timestream to a strange ritual in a Wyoming desert, where a dozen diverse people summon an extra-dimensional entity they call Abraxis. A bolt of lightning seems to split the sky, but rather than fading, it remains, and the slit of energy opens into a titanic staring eye. This is, a voice in a red-rimmed, tail-less dialogue balloon declares, Abraxis.
Realizing that his own time-travelling shenanigans—in either Armageddon 2001 or its sequel mini-series Armageddon: The Alien Agenda—seems to have allowed Abraxis to breach the wall between dimensions, Waverider realizes that means he can also stop him.
Using his time powers, he finds the locations in time and space the daemen have went to and then finds the precise heroes he will be able to send to these battlegrounds without causing irreparable harm to the time stream.
They turn out to be about whom you would expect, many of the primary heroes of the DC Universe circa 1992, including the most popular heroes, although Ostrander also includes various period heroes from the past, characters that don't turn up all that often in DC Comics, and a couple of oddball choices, current heroes from points in their own past or, in one case, the future.
The adventures of each of the four teams, which are essentially just fight scenes against the daemen and husks, are each drawn by a different artist, including some big names that one might think would have been featured a little more prominently on the cover, but then, maybe in 1992 comics were still more event-driven and character-driven than artist driven...? (Or DC thought so, at least...?)
Each team is announced on a full-page splash by the artist who will be drawing the sequences featuring them, which I'll scan and share here.
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The second half of this first issue features Mandrake's sequence, which lasts 11 pages. Its event will be repeated in each of the other three sequences not drawn by McDonnell.
1.) The heroes will gather.
2.) Ostrander will do a decent job of introducing most of them in a way that feels quite natural to them. (Case in point, Starfire is in the midst of using her energy bolts to keep Lobo and Guy Gardner from fighting one another when Orion boom tubes in with the line "I have the word--it is battle!" And then Hans Von Hammer appears, dueling with a huge pterosaur while brooding about "the killer skies"; Enemy Ace doesn't really interact with the superheroes at all and, interestingly, thinks they and the bad guys and the prehistoric reptiles are all part of a nightmare he's having).
3.) They will fight the daemen, each of which Ostrander seems to have done far more work on than was probably necessary, given that this series is the only place they will ever appear, as he gives them each a civilian name, backstory and motivation for selling their souls as well as a new, demonic name and a super-power of some sort that makes them a threat to the heroes they face. I suspect the designs for each of these villains was likely provided by the artists, given how much they seem to reflect the stylistic sensibilities of whoever is drawing them (My favorites are Mandrake's Zhazor, who looks vaguely Nazgul-like and throws bolts of flame; Netzer's Feth Sudol, who can transform himself into groups of different scary black animals; and Adams' Arquol, who can transform into a variety of cool vehicles; Adams' Inztuk has a somewhat generic eye-beam power, but his design, featuring a Styracosaurus head atop a humanoid body, is pretty cool).
4.) Abraxis will inhabit the simulacrum. (Abraxis is also a pretty great design, which every artist draws the hell out of; he's a black-colored giant with diabolical horns and fangs that looks a little like Chernabog from Fantastia's "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence blended with a Thanos-like supervillain).
As you can probably imagine, each of these extended fight sequences are great, and it's hard to overstate how fun it is to see these particular artists drawing these weird groupings of characters, most of whom seem to have been chosen by asking the artists which characters they might most like to draw (In fact, I wonder if that's how Ostrander went about assembling the characters to be featured).
By the third issue, The Spectre sends a duplicate of himself to confront Waverider in the timestream to tell him the plan doesn't seem to be working, and suggest that they throw another group of heroes at Abraxis in his home dimension, thus stretching the demon/supervillain's attention across five conflicts in two different dimensions to further weakine him.
When Waverider says that he has already recruited all of the heroes he can without endangering the timestream, The Spectre volunteers a group of superheroes who area already outside of time and space: The Justice Society of America, who are still in some limbo dimension fighting Ragnarok from the events of 1986's Last Days of the Justice Society of America.
Ostrander also writes a sequence from the point-of-view of one of the natives on Abraxis' home world, a hairy hominid that looks like he could be an ancestor to modern homo sapiens. Because Abraxis feeds on souls, he basically treats the native population of his world as cattle, their reproduction providing him with new souls. They are ruled by their most base instincts, and have no real concept of things like bravery, selflessness or heroism...at least, not until the Justice Society appears and awakens a light within them.
Dick Giordano pencils the Justice Society sequences in the fourth issue, so there's one more name to add to the who's who of this particular art team.
That final issue includes four more splashes from Adams, Mandrake, Netzer and Simonson, each showing their assigned team of heroes battling Abraxis and his minions. These echo the splashes from the first issue, but each is a little stronger, I think, as it shows the heroes in triumphant action, rather than simply posing for a group shot.
They are all great, but this one's my favorite:
Naturally, the good guys win, and Abraxis is defeated, never to threaten the DC Universe again (Which is maybe unfortunate, given what a cool design he has). The modern-day heroes are all debriefing in the JSoA's old HQ, where they had met prior to embarking on this mission, when Superman laments the fate of the Justice Society, and Flash says, "Jay--all of them--deserve better!"
"You're correct, Flash," a voice says from off-panel. It belongs to Waverider, who appears suddenly, and the Justice Society materializes right behind him.
"It would be small thanks to such heroes as they to consign the Justice Society back to limbo," Waverider says. "That is why the daemen now fight the eternal battle of Ragnarok and the Justice Society is here instead."
The last panel is a big one, filling most of the last page, and in it, McDonnell draws all the modern day heroes from the series chatting with the newly returned Justice Society. Ostrander pens four narration boxes, the last of which reads, "Every once in a while, the good guys actually win."
The very next month, DC would launch a new ongoing Justice Society of America series by writer Len Strazewski and pencil artist Mike Parobeck, though it would only last ten issues before being cancelled. That book has never been collected, and I've never been able to find it in back issue bins, so I've never actually read it (and I keep hoping DC will collect it at some point).
As for Waverider and the Armageddon-branding, well, the character would remain a mainstay in the DC Universe, but never got his own series again, and was mostly employed when a narrative called for time-travel or a character to explain time travel. Following the previously mentioned Armageddon 2001 and Armageddon: Alien Agenda, this was the last time DC used that title and/or logo. Inferno has never been collected...and neither have those other Armageddon books. I know I've said this repeatedly before, but I hope DC will eventually collect Armageddon 2001 into a couple of DC Finest collections...maybe they can throw the sequels into one of them.
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