Rereading Chistopher Moeller's JLA: A League of One and "JLA: Cold Steel" via the new JLA: A League of One: The Deluxe Edition

I used to think about the Justice League a lot in the late nineties and early '00s, and I remember at one point thinking that a good qualification for whether or not a hero belonged on the team at the time was if they would conceivably be able to defeat all of the other members of the line-up.

That probably sounds like a pretty dumb criteria—like, if Martian Manhunter is able to defeat Superman, would Superman be able to defeat Martian Manhunter?—but I was just thinking conceivably, not that, say, J'onn could take Superman every single time if they fought repeatedly. 

Of the "Big Seven" in 1997's JLA #1, I think that criteria holds true, for the most part...I guess Aquaman is the only character I can't see reasonably beating any and all of his peers one-on-one, although he did drive away an early version of the League featuring Wonder Woman and J'onn in 1996's Aquaman #16.

This many decades later, I'm afraid that I can't necessarily think of in-comics examples of stories in which a particular Leaguer had to, for some reason or another, take on the rest of their teammates, but Christopher Moeller's 2000 fully painted JLA: A League of One is the story in which Wonder Woman has to take on and takedown the other six founders of the JLA. 

The "One" referred to in the title is, of course, Wonder Woman, and, if you're wondering why she's on the cover by herself, well, all the boys are on the other half of that image, as you can see in this lovely, text-free image from the JLA: A League of One: The Deluxe Edition, which pairs the title story with one published in 2005-2006 miniseries JLA Classified: Cold Steel. 

Moeller's story opens in 1348, as the world's last dragon is being driven back to her underground lair by the warriors of the day, who engage in furious battle with her humanoid dragon servants while she hides. The humans ultimately seal the lair's cave entrance, and the problem of dragons is solved once and for all...or, at least, for the next 652 years.

In the present, we get a bit of day-in-the-life of the JLA, as J'onn, Wonder Woman and Superman do some Justice League business, and then, perhaps surprisingly, we meet a pair of gnomes in Switzerland: These are small, spindly, mostly naked little guys with bald heads, no beards and pointed ears. We get a little bit about a day in their life too, and then the pair, Emrick and Elmen, return to find something extraordinary in the history of their people has happened: Behind a set of gigantic doors deep underground, the gnomes have discovered the slumbering Drakul Karfang Drakonis Serpente, the last dragon from the opening scene. 

She is shown cradling a large crystal in her arms. This is her heart, as, we are told, dragons, like unkillable characters in some folklore, hide their hearts outside of their bodies so that their enemies can't hurt it and thus kill them. The gnomes, who used to serve dragons in their olden, glory days, plan on waking her up to lead them to greatness once again.

Meanwhile, we spend some time with Wonder Woman at home on Themyscria, where she hangs out with a wood nymph named Althea and nereid named Zoe. Under Moeller's brush, these characters look like photorealistic little girls, save for the fact that the former is green and the latter blue (Moeller's Diana, I think, has more than a touch of Lynda Carter to her face and expressions, and she wears a costume that hangs and fits in ways evocative of Carter's, rather than simply resembling body paint). 

(It's not just me, right? You see a bit of Carter in there too, right...?)

The girls accidentally reveal to Diana that the oracle in Delphi is expected to foretell Wonder Woman's death in a prophecy that night, and Wonder Woman decides to attend. 

The prophecy is, of course, vague, but Wonder Woman thinks she gets the gist of it: There's gonna be a dragon, the Justice League is going to fight and defeat it, but, in so doing, they will also die. 

Within the week, the full League—or at least the main seven—are seated around the meeting table, with J'onn bringing up various issues and the team deciding who will tackle which mission. Aquaman notices that Wonder Woman seems a little out of it, and Batman (who Moeller draws without the usual white triangle eyes, as if there's always a shadow over his face, giving him a creepy eye-less look) notices, and seems suspicious. (Indeed, he's so suspicious that, when the other Leaguers all leave, he uses tweezers and a plastic bag to lift a fiber from Wonder Woman's chair to analyze.)

Once it becomes clear that this dragon business is about to come true, Diana executes a plan she had apparently put together over the last few days. If the Justice League is destined to die defeating the dragon, she has no choice but to defeat her fellow Leaguers for their own good, removing them from play, and then taking on the dragon by herself. In other words, by beating up her teammates and sacrificing her own life to defeat the dragon, she can save the rest of the Justice League.

And so, then we get to what might be the most interesting passage of the graphic novel, and what I imagine was the selling point when Moeller was making his pitch: Wonder Woman versus the Justice League.

Now, given her powers—super-strength, super-speed, near-invincibility, flight—and her combat expertise and magic lasso, I think Wonder Woman could conceivably take out each of her allies in a protracted one-on-one fight, with J'onn's mental powers probably proving the biggest threat to her (Aquaman and Batman would, obviously, go down easiest). 

Moeller doesn't actually have her engage in long drawn-out fights with each of the other Leaguers, though. She mostly resorts to surprise to ambush them each, taking them out before they have a chance to mount a defense. 

J'onn she lassos, punches and then tosses into a teleporter, sending him to a prison from which he can't escape (This attack actually seems the most cruel, as, in a bit of foreshadowing, J'onn shares with Diana, and the readers, how much he would hate to be in that particular place).

For Green Lantern, she slyly removes his ring and then headbutts him into unconsciousness. There seemed to be an element of seduction to this scene to me, the way she touches Kyle, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it:

Perhaps oddly, the third panel on the second page above, the one with the star imprint from Wonder Woman's tiara on GL's mask, is the single image from this comic that stayed with me over the past 26 years. It's a neat visual of just how damn hard she must have hit Kyle there, and I'm actually kind of amazed she didn't pulp his head. I guess she has amazing control of her super-strength. 

Aquaman, with whom she was assigned a mission, is taken out easily enough. After they save a shit, she simply picks him up and flies off with him. He protests the whole time—"I won't have this, blast you!"—until she dumps him into Charybdis, the mythical whirlpool*, while the nereid Zoe looks on and laughs. 

The Flash fight is even funnier and also involves one of her little mythological friends. Flash and Batman have been sent to the Amazon to thwart Poison Ivy's nefarious plans there, and the nymph Althea causes a root to grab The Flash mid super-speed stride. 

The scene includes my favorite sequence of the whole book, as The Flash tripping is watched from afar by Batman using binoculars. On the next page, Wonder Woman steps out of the jungle, and no sooner does The Flash, not expecting anything untoward from her, is in the middle of realizing that his leg is wrapped up by a vine, when Wonder Woman kicks him into unconsciousness ("WHD").

The next two are, perhaps surprisingly, the most challenging: The World's Finest.

Batman is the only one Wonder Woman doesn't surprise attack, and, ready for a fight of some kind, seems to fare the best against her. She's on the Watchtower and in the middle of trying to launch the unconscious Flash and GL into space in little statis tube thingees when Batman confronts her ("I've fallen into the same trap his opponents always make-- --I've underestimated him," she tells herself...with somewhat awkward phrasing on the first half there; I think an editor should have cleaned that up to, "I've made the same mistake his opponents always make"...)

After the confrontation and argument, the fight takes a full seven pages, with Batman having a clever way to escape her lasso, but while he manages to dodge and trip her up a few times, she eventually prevails, hitting him in the head with a chunk of rock and then taking him out with a pair of punches.

Their dialogue is interesting here. At the outset, Batman is charmingly dickish to her regarding Greek myth and her belief: 

He takes it pretty far, though, and at one point I recoiled at a few of his lines, which are sexist and show a remarkable lack of empathy (she calls him a "reptile" at that point), but a few panels later she says, "I...know what you're doing...Trying to goad me into a mistake." I wonder which of Batman's mentors and teachers taught him to weaponize Being An Asshole in order to win a fight...?

Finally, there's Superman, and this leads to the funniest scene in the book:

The guileless Superman falling for such a simple trick (and just pages after Batman told Wonder Woman to get out of the betrayal business, because she's such a bad liar...but apparently good enough to trick Superman!), the kicked Superman skipping like a stone, and then his face skidding along the ground...? Comedy perfection. 

I shared this anecdote on Bluesky when I was rereading this story in the Deluxe Edition a few weeks ago, but I remember a friend of mine excitedly showing me this scene a few years ago, laughing as she did so.

I believe this is the "There's the door spaceman" of fight scenes.

Now, I think Wonder Woman could take Superman, especially after a devastating surprise attack like that. I mean, just throw the lasso on him, and the notoriously vulnerable-to-magic Superman is done, right? 

But Moeller apparently thought having Wonder Woman take out Superman was a bridge too far, and so she has devised another plan to remove him from the dragon fight: Those pods she was loading The Flash and Green Lantern into? (And then, after beating up, Batman as well?) These were basically designed to keep Superman busy, as the time it would take him to fly into space to rescue them would be the window in which Wonder Woman would fight the dragon. Why fight him at all? (They trade a few more blows, including one that sends Wonder Woman skidding along the desert floor.) Well, Wonder Woman explains that she wanted to weaken Superman enough that he couldn't save the others too quickly. But I imagine it was actually because devoting a few pages to a fight allowed for that hilarious scene.

So with the League out of commission, it's up to Wonder Woman to face the dragon, the climax of the story. She does have a little help, from Althea, Zoe and one of the gnomes. By this point, A League of One very much transitions into a Wonder Woman story more than a JLA one, and while I was originally put off by this fact half a life-time ago, now I really appreciate how much work Moeller put into the lore of his characters and story here, making the fantasy characters and the dragon actual characters, with distinct personalities and motives (He will do the same with the aliens in "Cold Steel", which we'll get to in a little bit). 

I don't love his dragon, her huge nostrils making her quite distinct among dragons but also a little funny-looking, I always thought, but she's well-conceived and rendered. And, as I said, it's admirable that Moeller makes her an actual character, rather than just a generic threat. 

You won't be at all surprised to find that the dragon is destroyed and that Wonder Woman is still alive at the end of the book, the result of the prophecy being only technically true. (That is, she does die...but just temporarily, Superman bringing her back to life with some super-CPR.)

The rest of the League seems to forgive and forget pretty quickly...with the exception of Superman, whom Wonder Woman has a few pages worth of a heart-to-heart conversation with. It ends with a happy group shot, though: 

And no one ever brought this up ever again. Meanwhile, the team kicked Batman off the team over the events of that same year's "Tower of Babel" arc in JLA, and still seem to give him shit about his whole developing-plans-to-defeat-them-all-in-case-any-of-them-ever-go-bad thing...

It's a pretty good JLA story, from a time when there were a lot of JLA stories, many good and many not so much, and it's an even better Wonder Woman story. I'm glad to see that DC republished it in this format, as it gives it another chance. 

I'm more glad still that they collected it along with "Cold Steel", though, as I think that story probably got rather lost in the shuffle of the publisher's chaotic nature at the time of its release.

Despite being written and painted by Moeller, and featuring the same seven Justice Leaguers, "JLA: Cold Steel" could hardly be more different from A League of One. Perhaps most distinctly, it is a true Justice League story rather than a Wonder Woman story featuring the Justice League in it. 

The presentation was pretty different, too. While A League of One was an original hardcover graphic novel, the follow-up was published as a standalone two-part miniseries in early 2006, under the unlikely title of JLA Classified: Cold Steel. 

A discrete JLA story not tied to month-in, month-out continuity and published shortly before the 1997-2006 JLA title would be canceled, it came out in the "End of JLA" period I wrote about last year, and would thus seemingly have fit into either JLA proper, which, in its last years had become a Legend of the Dark Knight-style anthology series featuring different story arcs by different creative teams, or the pages of JLA Classified, a 54-issue, 2005-2008 ongoing that was also an anthology series featuring different story arcs by different creative teams. 

Instead, Moeller's Cold Steel was a Classified miniseries, a spin-off of a spin-off, apparently. 

I would love to know what, exactly, was going on behind-the-scenes regarding DC's JLA material around the time, as, between the two books, the publisher seemed to be burning up inventory stories and repurposing miniseries. Moeller's short text page about Cold Steel suggests part of what might have been going on, but we'll get to that in a bit. 

At any rate, this new edition rescues Cold Steel from the relative oblivion of 20-year-old back-issue bins and re-presents it to what I hope is a more appreciative audience.

Oh, and because this book came out when it did, you will notice that the line-up doesn't fit into JLA continuity anywhere. The line-up are the same Big Seven heroes that were in the first issue of Grant Morrison and company's JLA, and the same that were in Moller's own A League of One. 

But you will note a few cosmetic changes meant to update the cast. So, the Watchtower exteriors we see show the squatter redesign that Brian Hitch had given it during his short tenure on JLA, with the emanating out-buildings. Green Lantern Kyle Rayner is now sporting his newer, Jim Lee-designed costume, the all-black-and-green one with the prominent collar, that he started wearing in the summer of 2002. And Aquaman has cut his hair, trimmed his beard, picked up a magic water hand and put on a new pair of pants, a short-lived look that lasted only about 14 issues of his 2003-2006 series (After which he would start going cleanshaven again for a while, and put his favorite orange shirts and green pants back on).

And yes, Kyle left the League in 2003's JLA #76 and never rejoined. Similarly, while Aquaman came back to life in the present, the epilogue to "The Obsidian Age" arc (the only issues of JLA in which Kyle wore that particular costume), he also left the team, and didn't reappear in the title until deeper into the "End of..." era, appearing briefly in "Syndicate Rules", "Crisis of Conscience" and the post-League "World Without a Justice League" arc, though not in this particular get-up).

In other words, these seven Leaguers, wearing these particular costumes, were never on the team at the same time.

So, if the elevator pitch for A League of One was Wonder Woman vs. The JLA, that for "Cold Steel" seems to be "the JLA pilot giant robots." In fact, the book seems to have been reverse-engineered from that concept, much of it—probably too much of it, actually, as Moeller explains later—written to get the team into the particular circumstances where they need to climb aboard giant robot versions of themselves.

As with his previous story, Moeller does an admirable job of world-building, thinking through the biology, culture, religion and technology of the two warring alien races in the story and, gradually, revealing them not to be simply a good race and a bad race, but two complicated peoples.

Their conflict pretty much crashes into the team's lunar Watchtower in the opening pages of "Cold Steel," as a crescent-shaped, metal ship containing a Ghoji expedition seeking out the League is attacked by a stranger ship, one that seems to be alive, pursues and seeks to destroy them. It's piloted by the Voruk.

The former are roughly humanoid, extremely thin with pale skin, big eyes, antennae, and "backwards" legs like the hindlimbs of some mammals. The latter are more fish-like, resembling rays and prehistoric creatures, and floating through their water-filled ships, which are organic in nature.

After the Ghoji are taken into the Watchtower and everyone is speaking the same language—the Ghoji, it turns out, are psychic—they tell the story of an interplanetary war, one in which the Voruk attacked and sought to conquer the Ghoji home world, taking them as slave labor. In the end, the Voruk subjected the Ghoji's planet Penumbra to a strange super-weapon. A huge metal ring in appearance, it has the effect of putting everyone on the planet to sleep from which they cannot wake, and during which they don't seem to age. 

The Leaguers discuss whether to involve themselves in a war like this at all. Aquaman has reservations and Batman has suspicions that they aren't being told everything, despite J'onn's telepathy and Wonder Woman's expertise revealing that the Ghoji are telling the truth. The deciding factor, however, seems to be that a Ghoji Green Lantern had previously ventured to Penumbra, back when there was still a Green Lantern Corps, and thus Kyle wants to rescue her if they can, and finish her work.

So, after a brief call to the JSA to tell them they'd be off-planet for a bit, the League boards a ship and heads to space, intent on saving Penumbra, rather than picking a side in the war. After scenes set among the Ghoji, we eventually get to the giant robots. The Ghoji have technology to shield ships from the effects of the sleep weapon, but it's big technology, not something that could be worn on a belt or as a backpack.

Luckily, the Ghoji also have very large robots.

And so, in short order, with Batman doing the design work and the super-strong and super-fast Leaguers the heavy-lifting, they have the giant robots from the covers to pilot.

"I've designed the armatures to mirror as closely as possible our personal strengths and abilities," Batman explains: 

In battle, I want our instincts to work for us, not against us. 

For example...

Superman's machine is loaded up with armor. It can take a hit from a battleship and keep going. 

We've installed cutting lasers that he can trigger instantly, from inside the cockpit, with his heat vision.

Aquaman's vehicle has been equipped with undersea propulsion and a harpoon arm-- 

--while Martian Manhunter's machine has been fitted with a powerful psychic amplifier. 

And so on. Some of the exact abilities won't be revealed until the robots are in use, like the fact that The Flash's humanoid-shaped vehicle can uncurl what looks like a giant backpack on it to turn it into a sort of giant super-speed wheel...

Or that Batman's can transform, Robotech-style, into a sort of Batplane...

It almost sounds like a Transformer, doesn't it...? 

As for the color schemes and superhero sigils, those are the work of Green Lantern and The Flash. "Something's missing," Kyle says, regarding the giant gray robots, "Can we get ahold of some paint? We'll need a lot."

Not sure why Moeller left that up to artist Kyle Rayner. I mean, when has Batman not matched a vehicle of his to his costume colors, and applied a bat-symbol to it...?

Finally inside their giant robots at the end of the first issue, the second issue is devoted to their mission on the sleeping planet, where they fight alongside the Ghoji—each has one of them as a co-pilot within their vehicle—against native dangers on the planet, as well the Voruk and, ultimately, the super-weapon, which is malfunctioning in a way that threatens the planet...and galaxy...maybe even all reality. 

I don't want to spoil anything else about the second half of the story than I already have, as this is where Moeller subverts a lot of what we think of as standard genre tropes, and we get payoffs regarding Batman and other characters' suspicions about the Ghoji, but it's a pretty great story, showing the Justice Leaguers as peacemakers as much as warriors, and giving each of the heroes an equal share of the spotlight.

Oh, and Kyle manages to rescue the long lost Ghoji Green Lantern, and they get along pretty well:

At this point, I don't remember who Kyle would have been dating back on Earth (Was it Jade, maybe...?), but I suppose the fact that this issue doesn't really fit neatly into JLA continuity anyway means he's off-the-hook for flirting with and kissing an alien lady, right? 

I wonder if any other writer ever picked up this character, Shirea Vaas in the 20 years or so since this story saw publication...? I mean, there are thousands of Green Lanterns, right? She could be one of them now. Oh, and I wonder what became of her, her ring and her lantern between the end of this story and the return of the Corps after Green Lantern: Rebirth...? 

Anyway, this was a really fun story, and probably one of the most toyetic Justice Leaguer stories I can think of off the top of my head...

After this story ends, there's a 25-page "Making of JLA: A League of One" section, a 34-page "Making of JLA: Cold Steel" section and seven pages of paintings related to the covers, one of which went unused, but featured League of One's dragon fighting Cold Steel's Superman mech fighting in the background, with Wonder Woman leading the seven Leaguers and GL Shiera Vaas in a dramatic charge, Aquaman in his gladiator harness and Kyle in his later GL costume.

There's a prose passage about working on each of the books, and plenty of sketches and design work. Moeller went so far as to sculpt the head of the dragon for League of One, and the Cold Steel section is full of detailed designs for each of the robots in Cold Steel. 

In discussing the later project, Moeller reveals that he was approached by then-JLA editor Dan Raspler to do a follow-up to A League of One, and was reluctant to do so, as he was busy producing covers for the series Lucifer. He was given a longer-than-usual production schedule, and had completed the obviously extensive design and world-building work as well as the script and the art for the first of what was meant to be three issues before Raspler was laid off and, as he says, the project was "orphaned."

In the end, the last two issues were compressed into a single issue, and I imagine this orphaning is why Cold Steel came out as JLA Classified: Cold Steel, rather than as a standalone miniseries...and I imagine Raspler's layoff might explain some of the chaos in the last few years of JLA. 

For fans of this particular era of the Justice League, I'd definitely recommend this book. 

*Not to be confused with the villain Charybdis, who's the guy that had Aquaman hand chewed off by piranhas at the beginning of Peter David's Aquaman series, and whom Erik Larsen later brought back as Piranha-Man.