The End of JLA Part 1: "Extinction"

The very first of the story arcs to run in the pages of JLA during its odd final years, when it became a sort of anthology title with rotating creative teams, was this three-part story entitled "Extinction, from issues #91-93. Interestingly, it comes before what turns out to actually be Joe Kelly's last issue of the book, although that wouldn't come until issue #100, making it one of a pair of fill-in arcs, I suppose.

Looking back from 2025, it's now unclear if issue #100, which kicks off the Justice League Elite spin-off series, was intended to be Kelly's final issue of JLA, and DC just waited a few months to print it (perhaps giving pencil artist Doug Mahnke plenty of time to finish it up after the labor-intensive "Trial By Fire" arc), or if that anniversary issue a newly-scripted comic written during the nine-issue gap between Kelly's second-to-last issue, January 2004's JLA #90, and August's #100.

Similarly, it's now impossible to tell if "Extinction" was created specifically for fill-in purposes, similar to the four issues Mark Waid penned in 1998 and the pair of issues in 1999 (one of which he co-wrote with Devin Grayson), or if it was simply an inventory story being repurposed, or if it was perhaps it was originally created as a one-shot or mini-series, of which there were so many since the title first launched, and was simply shunted into the main title instead.

If it was in a drawer at some point, it probably wasn't in one for very long, judging by the characters it features. In addition to Superman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Plastic Man and Batman, all of whom have been on the League together more-or-less since 1998 (with Wondy taking a brief leave of absence during which she was replaced by her mother Hippolyta), the story also features The Atom (who had been an on-and-off guest-star since at least 1998's DC One Million, but started appearing much more frequently after Kelly first made him a part of the replacement league that showed up in 2002) and the Green Lantern is John Stewart, who officially replaced Kyle Rayner in 200's #76. 

Regardless of the line-up, though, the story is pretty much self-contained, not really commenting on or otherwise being influenced by anything else that might have been going on in the DCU at the time of its publication, nor on what preceded it or what would follow it in the pages of JLA. 

Whatever its exact origins, "Extinction" was written by the late Denny O'Neil, a long-time writer turned editor probably best-known today for his time shepherding DC's Batman franchise, and it was drawn by artist Tan Eng Huat, a Malaysian artist whose odd style first came to DC via a run with writer John Arcudi on a short-lived 2001 Doom Patrol series. (Mahnke, as you can see above, continued to draw the covers.)

The story is a decent-enough sci-fi fable, one that's powered by its plot, which includes at least one strong twist. It's because of that twist that the story is more than one issue, I think, although it's not hard to imagine it being a more tightly-written done-in-one, of the sort that might have appeared in one of DC or Marvel's sci-fi or weird story anthologies from the 1950s or '60s (Well, that twist and, perhaps, a smaller, earlier one, that leads to the new character introduced in the story transforming from the more chimp-like form seen on Mahnke's above cover, to the more savage and threatening one on the cover below).

The story need not really feature the Justice League, or any particular superhero or group of heroes, really, and it's not hard to imagine O'Neil tailoring this story to other characters, even original ones or civilian characters (Which isn't to say his characterization of the characters used is necessarily bland or anything, it's just that he didn't really need to put, say, Plastic Man or Wonder Woman in it).

Plastic Man is on JLA monitor duty when mysterious, dangerous phenomena accompany the arrival of a bizarre-looking spaceship near the moon, and some of the various other super-powered characters mentioned above all respond (Batman mainly phones this adventure in, mostly appearing on a Watchtower monitor, save for a single, brief scene with Superman set in the Batcave). 

The ship contains a little monkey which, when it begins communicating with Superman and Green Lantern, takes on a shape that mirrors theirs, so that he looks like something of a small-statured admixture of the pair, complete with a costume that looks a bit like GL's with a "S"-shield on it.

His name is a little hard to pronounce (I don't even know how to type those characters), but Plas calls him "Peppy," and the others all follow suit.

Peppy is apparently a scientist and has come to Earth in search of the rare silver-masked monkey (the shape he was originally in when our heroes encountered him, a monkey that doesn't look much like the one Mahnke drew on the cover of the first installment, by the way). He finds the last one, but just as it is being killed, blown-up as workers clear the Amazon for farmland with dynamite.

Apparently, the silver-masked monkey was supposed to be Earth's dominant life form by now, according to Peppy, so he's surprised to find that humans actually are. He then requests the League show him all around Earth, which they do for several weeks, concerned by his interest in dwelling on all the bad things—wars, impoverished regions, sites of environmental degradation, etc.

He eventually comes to the conclusion that, as he says:

It has become clear to me that your species, homo sapiens, is choosing to become extinct. 

Why this should be the truth I do not know.

But it is my duty to assist you--

Which, of course, sounds like he's going to help humanity out, right? Except that, spoiler alert, in the classic "To Serve Man" kind of misunderstanding, what he actually means is that he is going to help humanity become extinct.

The League saves the day, of course, leading to an extremely bleak ending that at least keeps Peppy from ever being a factor in any future comics.

So it's basically a message comic, and, unfortunately, one that probably could have run anywhere between the 1970s and the 2000s...or at any time since (Actually, the way the Trump administration is rolling back various environmental regulations, and the Supreme Court some of the principles upon which those regulations were founded, we may actually be entering a period where our environment could get in much worse shape than it was at the start of O'Neil's writing career...certainly, thanks to climate change, we're closer to an apocalypse than we were 25 or 50 years ago...)

While it probably didn't need to be quite so long—some of the brief action scenes that occur on the world tour, or during the League's first contact with Peppy and his ship read a bit like filler disguised as super-deeds—it's a satisfying enough read. Although it's certainly a change of pace from the big, crazy, Silver Age-style plots and more immediate end-of-the-world threats that had characterized the title up until this point. 

Huat's art certainly keeps it interesting. His work is hard to describe if you haven't seen it before, as it can vacillate between extremely realistic in the rendering of the human form and its postures and expressions to highly exaggerated action...often in the same panel. 

It can sometimes look a little like Jeff Lemire finishing rough layouts from, I don't know, Corey S. Lewis...but not really...? 

Huat's characters are all certainly quite distinct, and it's fun to see them occasionally explode into action here or there. "Extinction" doesn't look a bit like any of the other JLA issues or stories to precede it, that's for sure. 

Where Huat's style is most welcome, however, is when it comes to drawing "alien" stuff, where the weirder things look the better. And so Peppy's ship doesn't really look much like any other spaceship, and the weird energy beams it pummels Superman and Green Lantern with in the first issue are strange and cool-looking.

Huat's best serves Plastic Man, of course, as the character's nature allows Huat to cut loose in a way that just isn't true of the other characters. This is probably most clearly seen in the splash page that opens the story, in which a frantic Plastic Man calls for help from the monitor womb, his limbs stretching and twisting at random as they explode away from his body, which is technically still seated in a chair.

Plas probably comes off as the most distinct character here, as O'Neil writes lots of jokes for him, each punctuated by a transformation (he becomes Albert Einstein in one panel, Alfred E. Neuman in another). O'Neil's Batman is standoffish, imperious, always thinking ahead and always right. Superman, who Huat draws vaguely Chistopher Reeve-ish, is a nice guy who tries his best. The others? Well, they are more-or-less interchangeable, I guess. 

At one point, Peppy refers to a "Book of Lol," which, in his language, means "the truth." That's where he got his information about the silver-masked monkeys, for example. I know 21-years-ago was pre-texting being ubiquitous, but was that acronym already in use online at the time? One imagines that if O'Neil was writing this story today, he would have found another name; he basically just uses it as a random alien-sounding word, not unlike when Peppy says "I lost control of my sneedleyfab" in another panel, but it's curious to see the word in that context here. 

Like the rest of JLA, "Extinction" was collected, and can now be found in 2015's JLA Vol. 7. 

Next: John Byrne, Chris Claremont and Jerry Ordway's "The Tenth Circle" from 2004's JLA #94-99

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 6: Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1

While none of the prose pieces in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus answer the question of why, exactly, the two publishers stopped collaborating on crossover comics after 1982's Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1, a new piece by editor Mike Carlin explains why they eventually resumed a decade and change later.

Carlin's essay notes that several editors and writers had moved from Marvel Comics to DC Comics, including himself, Archie Goodwin, Denny O'Neil, Louise Simonson and Roger Stern, a fact that diminished the sense of "Us Vs. Them" that had previously existed between the publishers.

Additionally, this generation of editors and creators were, unlike those that preceded them, genuine fans of the superhero characters they had grown up reading about, and thus approached something like, say, the possibility of Batman and Spider-Man teaming up for the first time with the same sort of enthusiasm their readers might, rather than simply as a money-making venture.

What Carlin doesn't explain, however, is why in the world DC and Marvel finally resumed with this particular crossover, 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire. It is here that while reading the collection I really started to miss all of those introductions and forewords from earlier in the book, those original to the omnibus and those reprinted from 1991's Crossover Classics, which shared a great deal of behind-the-scenes information and provided a sense of what the publishers were thinking with particular character pairings. 

Of course, both Batman and The Punisher were popular characters. The former perennially so, and the latter was, at that point, not too far removed from the zenith of his popularity, I believe.

Both were urban, street-level vigilantes whose focus was often fighting real-world crime, but they had vastly different, opposing philosophies on how to do so. Batman refused to ever take a life, a position he held to such a zealous extreme that he would often risk his own life to save that of unrepentant murderers like The Joker, who he knew would certainly go on to kill again and again. The Punisher happily, regularly took the lives of the criminals he faced, racking up a body count that could probably eclipse that of any mass murderer, The Joker included (At this point in the character's history, though, Marvel was playing the Punisher as a hero, if a deadly one, and not the unrepentant psychopath that 21st century writers like Garth Ennis would depict him as).

The catch with this particular crossover, however, is that The Punisher wouldn't be meeting the "real" Batman at all, but the temporary replacement Batman, Jean-Paul Valley, the Batman ally codenamed Azrael who would go on to assume the mantle of the bat during the 1993-1994 trilogy of Batman events, Knightfall, Knightquest and KnightsEnd. (As for Bruce Wayne, he was busy elsewhere; after Bane broke his back in the climax of Knightfall, he was relegated to a wheelchair but nevertheless pursued the kidnappers of his girlfriend at the time, Dr. Shondra Kinsolving.)

It's not entirely clear to me why Marvel Comics would necessarily want a crossover with the substitute Batman rather than the real deal or, you know, any other DC character at all, but then, this was long before I paid attention to things like sales charts, so I couldn't even guess how popular the "AzBats" Batman was at the time, and if the Punisher crossover sold well or not. (Ask Mike Sterling, maybe.)

It is clear reading this in this collection and then, immediately afterwards, reading its same-year sequel Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights, that the publishers must have planned both comics around the same time, always intending to follow up the Punisher's meeting with the Jean-Paul Valley Batman with another story in which he met the Bruce Wayne Batman (despite the fact that the books have two entirely different creative teams).

Rather late in the game of Lake of Fire, The Joker appears, coming to the aid of Punisher villain Jigsaw (Who, as far as I can tell, was, like, the only Punisher villain, given Frank Castle's habit of executing his foes).  The Joker is only in five panels of the entire book, presumably because he was being teased for a lengthier, more substantial role in the sequel. 

Though Lake of Fire was the first of what would end up being about a dozen such DC/Marvel crossovers in the next half dozen years or so, it doesn't read as too terribly special a book. It's only 48 pages long, the shortest DC/Marvel crossover to date, and thus lacks the larger scope and more epic feel of the original round of inter-company crossovers. 

It's also somewhat confined in focus, mostly just featuring the two title characters, and not doing much of the way in terms of exploring their home cities, supporting casts, interior lives or even their differing crime-fighting philosophies (Although it's worth noting, I suppose, that this more violent, more brutal version of Batman isn't quite as opposite the Punisher that the Bruce Wayne Batman is; while Jean-Paul Valley and Frank Castle find themselves coming to blows by the end of their team-up, Valley is far more sympathetic to Castle than Wayne would have been).

As for the creators, the publishers chose writer Denny O'Neil and artists Barry Kitson and James Pascoe.

O'Neil was obviously a solid choice, having worked extensively as both a writer and editor for both companies. He had written both Batman and Punisher before and was, at the time of this book's publication, the editor of DC's Batman line. In fact, he had created the Jean-Paul Valley character (with artist Joe Quesada in 1992's Batman: Sword of Azrael) and obviously had a great deal of affection for him, going on to pen a 100-issue run on an Azrael solo title after the KnightsEnd conclusion. 

Kitson had likewise drawn for both publishers at that point in his career but wasn't particularly associated with either character (O'Neil must have thought the two worked well together, though, as Kitson would go on to draw a large chunk of that Azrael series). 

Though I appreciate Kitson's talents and have read and enjoyed some of his later work, I can't say I was particularly dazzled with his work here. The book opens with a two-page spread set in hell, as it was being dreamed by Valley, who was raised and hypnotically programmed by the crypto-Christian cult the Order of St. Dumas (When he eventually starts to lose it in the Batman storyline, a process that seems well underway by the time this crossover is set during, he increasingly has visions of St. Dumas.)

"Draw hell" seems like a great, compelling prompt for an artist to get, affording them a chance to really go to town, but Kitson's splash is a let-down. His hell is cavernous, with seemingly naturally occurring pillars holding a roof aloft, while untold numbers of suffering humans fill the infinite space. But Kitson only draws about 15 of the people, including a busty lady in a torn dress reaching up and screaming and a muscular, pupil-less bald man reaching out and doing...something to another pair of figures, the rest of the horde simply suggested by a brown mass filling most of the cave, little circles here and there intimating heads. 

As far as comic book depictions of hell goes, it looks uninspired and, given the page real estate afforded the image, lazy. The book is not off to a great start.

Valley awakes from his dream, having fallen asleep in the Batcave, wearing his particularly uncomfortable-looking version of the Batsuit. He tells readers that the computers have intercepted and decoded a message from the Pentagon about a formula for rocket fuel that was stolen by an associate of a known Gotham criminal named Bressi. He dons his helmet and rushes into action. 

Meanwhile, a big man in a big overcoat is narrating in PG comic book tough guy language: "Few places are worse than New York. Gotham City is one. I'm here because it's where the trail of a mook named Jigsaw took me...It's cruddy. That's okay. I'm used to crud."

This is, of course, The Punisher, who gets in a barfight looking for information on Jigsaw and ends up getting a lead pointing him to a church downtown. The lead, coincidentally, comes from the guy who has the rocket fuel plans ("You seem real interested in what's in this case. Papers...maybe I'll like 'em as much as you").

Meanwhile Jigsaw, who Kitson draws as a particularly big guy with a face like a quilt and a big, metal neck brace of some kind, explains his plans for the readers' benefit: The new rocket fuel has the ability to ignite water, and Jigsaw plans to use it on the city reservoir and then charge the city an astronomical fee to repair the damages and, I don't know, restore the reservoir somehow...?

The sub-title of the book thus has a double meaning, referring both metaphorically to hell and literally to what Jigsaw plans to do to Gotham's water supply. 

The church lead turns out to be a trap, and The Punisher is splashed with drugged holy water and the building is set on fire. The new Batman comes to the rescue, bursting through a stained-glass window, and getting The Punisher to safety.

After introductions, and The Punisher convincing Batman that he needs him to track down Jigsaw ("I know Jigsaw...How he lives, thinks...breathes."), and some threats (Batman: "We are allies until Bressi is caught. Then— You become prey." Punisher: "Well...Somebody does."), they climb into the Batmobile and drive to a steam bath full of Russian criminal types in towels for a fight scene.

The Punisher manages to slip away from Batman, and they continue their investigation separately. In the end, The Punisher throws Jigsaw out of a window, and Batman is swinging by just in time to catch the villain, who he leaves tied up (For, it turns out, The Joker to discover and free). 

Then it's time for the big fight, which I guess O'Neil makes feel somewhat unexpected by placing it after the cooperation portion of the team-up. It only lasts three pages before The Punisher finally pulls a gun and puts a couple of bullets into Batman's armored chest. That doesn't stop the new Dark Knight either, so The Punisher pulls a gas grenade from Batman's utility belt and detonates it in his face, allowing him to retreat, but not before offering the defeated Batman rather lame goodbye: "Hey, man...I cheated, okay?"

And that concludes the first DC/Marvel team-up in many years...although, as I said earlier, it wasn't exactly the end of Batman/Punisher story. The two would crossover again almost immediately, but next time it would be Bruce Wayne in the cape and cowl.

Next: 1994's Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights

Reveiw: Batman: Birth of The Demon

I can’t tell you exactly why I didn’t read original graphic novel Batman: Birth of the Demon in 1992, or at any point during the next two decades.

I recall seeing a full-page house ad for it in Batman comics of the time, featuring a rather shocking image from the climax of the book that, at the time, I didn’t really process as representational, given its content. And it featured fully painted art by Norm Breyfogle, who was then one of my favorite comics artists (and he remains the definitive Batman artist for me).

I suppose it might have had something to do with the villain, Ra’s al Ghul, who I never really cared for, or the fact that it was presented as the concluding part of a trilogy of …Of The Demon books I hadn’t read or been at all interested in (1987’s Son of The Demon and 1990’s Bride of The Demon, if you’re curious; Mike Barr wrote both, while Jerry Bingham provided art for the first and Tom Grindberg for the other).

I suspect a lot of it had to do with the simple fact that graphic novels of any kind seemed rare, strange, even alien in 1992, certainly to Teenage Caleb, who could regularly find 22-pages of Batman in any number of places—book stores, drug stores, grocery stores, comic shop—for around two bucks then.

I saw Breyfogle’s name on the spine in the library a few weeks ago though, and picked it up. I’ve missed Breyfogle’s art a lot since he sort of drifted out of the Bat-books during the early bits of the “Knightfall” storyline, and I’ve missed his work even more in the last few years, when DC started handing plum art assignments like Grant Morrison’s Batman run or relaunching Detective Comics to fairly terrible artists. (And the recent-ish DC Retroactive: Batman—The ‘90s #1 made me feel all the more nostalgic for it).

Birth of The Demon seems to be only nominally part of the …Of The Demon books; it’s not by Barr, but by Denny O’Neil, who created the Ra’s al Ghul family of characters and was then editor of the Batman line. Additionally, it’s Ra’s origin story, so much of it is set well before Batman was even born, and thus well before the events of the other two graphic novels, although Batman does appear in the framing sequences that do seem like they are climactic of an ongoing conflict between Batman and Ra’s.

It’s a hardcover, and an over-sized one, eight inches wide and eleven inches high. Breyfogle’s art is fully painted, which, along with the hardcover, high quality of paper and dust jacket, contributes to the special-ness of the book’s presentation. While trade collections and even original graphic novels weren’t unheard of during 1992, the were still awfully rare compared to today, and DC seemed to approach this as something special.

I was such a fan of Breyfogle’s pencil work, that I was unsure if what I liked about it would necessarily translate to painted comics work (note that, other than the basic figure in the pool in the immediate foreground, the cover doesn’t really look like a Breyfogle image).

It looks amazing. The figures, the faces, the action, it all looks, moves and flows like Brefygole’s comics, the main difference being a softer, rounder look that moves the needle ever so slightly toward representational, and the coloring is just lovely. It’s neither the flat, bright “comic book-y” coloring that can be found on the bulk of Breyfogle’s pencil work from that decade, nor is it that sickly, computer effect-driving faux video game or airbrushing look of most modern super-comics.

The palette is often quite limited—the pages not set at night or in a desert really jump out because of the amount of different colors in them.

The panels are essentially border-less, with thick white gutters separating them from one another. The format of the pages then doesn’t really look like anything of Breyfogle’s I’ve seen before, or anything from the monthly super-comics of the time. I’m trying to think of other painted-projects that used this technique, but I’m coming up empty—it seems usually the gutters are black in painted projects.Of course, the way in which this is painted is itself kind of unique, I think. Unlike, say, the work of Alex Ross or Daniel Brereton, it looks more like Breyfogle penciled a Batman comic as he normally would, but colored it himself using paint, rather than having constructed the panels as individual paintings. Does that make sense? If not, the point is this: It’s a really beautiful-looking comic, and unlike anything else that I can think of off the top of my head, at least in terms of superhero comics.

The story is this: Ra’s al Ghul is elderly, ill and near death, and his followers are trying to prepare a Lazarus Pit in which, will restore him to youth and health. Batman is stopping them.

At one, he meets Talia al Ghul and they discuss Ra’s’s before-this secret origin, which occurred in ancient times in a Middle Eastern locale that Ra’s had obliterated from human history.

Broadly, the man who would become Ra’s al Ghul was a physician who had discovered a secret power within the earth, accessible via certain points (which would become known eventually as “Lazarus Pits”), that can heal the sick, and restore even the dying and dead, with the unfortunate side effect of the person emerging being temporarily insane with rage.

Ra’s is caused to suffer greatly because of his discovery and the wicked rulers he serves, so he rebels, destroys them and their city and then embarks on his centuries as an immortal.

Back in the present, Ra’s arrives, and he and Batman take off their capes and shirts for a shirtless fistfight to the death.

It’s pretty brutal. Both Batman and Ra’s al Ghul are kinda crazy and desperate by the climax of the story, and Batman takes probably the most brutal beating of his life, up to and including that one time Bane broke his back.

Ra’s pushes him into a fire, which they role around in, and then Ra’s hits him in the face with a torch, setting his hair on fire. Then a sandstorm kicks up, and while Bruce Wayne is clearing the sand out of his eyes, Ra’s hits him across the face with a shovel and then stands above the prone Wayne and then, pausing only long enough to look at Talia as she begs him not to, he does this:Holy shit, Ra’s al Ghul just totally killed the hell out of Batman!

And, as you can see in that last panel, Ra’s hears someone say his name in a small, rough voice and he turns around, shocked to see:Batman got back up. With a shovel still in his chest!

And then he stalks over to Ra’s, grabs him by the throat and they both plunge into the Lazarus Pit and are restored to life (Ra’s and Talia have disappeared by the time Batman wakes up, his skin and hair re-grown).

That’s a pretty big, intense moment in Batman history, and I felt weird reading it for the first time so many years after the fact. I didn’t realize Darkseid wasn’t the first person to “kill” Batman…

O’Neil’s Batman is a pretty idiosyncratic one, although it was a lot of fun to revisit his take on the character after being so far removed from the O’Neil-written and/or O’Neil-edited Batman.

For example, the book opens with some hired thugs trying to uncover a pit, only to be interrupted by a very dramatic appearance by Batman, first as a voice from nowhere saying “Go Home,” then as a weird shape silhouetted against the night sky. He warns them to leave, he lets a few bullets bounce off of his bulletproof cape to scare them, and warns them again.

O’Neil’s Batman is obviously capable of sustaining and dishing out a lot of violence, but he’s very slow to do so, only fighting when he’s attacked, at which point he quickly and efficiently dispatches his enemies, and he is, in fact, so eager not to hurt them that he leaves himself open to an attack, getting hit with a shovel and knocked down a hill.

In addition to being a kind of scary Zen-like reluctant warrior, O’Neil’s Batman is also fallible and vulnerable, which makes the climactic battle so believable, even if the injuries get so unbelievable the reader knows Batman will be in a Lazarus Pit before it’s over.

O’Neil also goes to the trouble of characterizing the bit parts of the Guys Who Fight Batman in the opening scene. Thugs for hire, they’re in no hurry to fight Batman either, and only decide to do so for desperate, financial reasons.Sure, they’re only given a character trait or two, but man, that’s a hell of a lot more than characters like that tend to get in scenes like that in stories like this.

The bits in the distant past are pretty far-removed from what we normally see from O’Neil, but because he goes so far as to make Ra’s a character from a fantasy culture, it doesn’t have to read like anything more than a broad, melodrama, which is easy enough for O’Neil to accomplish.

All in all, it’s pretty great stuff and, surprisingly so, given how far from the creators’ respective comfort zones so much of the book is, and how little one seems to hear about it these days. I’m still not terribly interested in tracking down Barr’s two …Of The Demons graphic novels—although DC will be making it awfully easy to do so, packaging the them along with Birth in a huge, 300-page collection due out in March—but I’m now kind of curious to see the goofily titled 2005 series Year One: Batman/Ra's al Ghul by Devin Grayson, Paul Gulacy and Jimmy Palmiotti, which presumably told some form of parts of this story.

How am I supposed to read this comic when all the characters keep shouting at me?!

It-- It is? Did I say that? How did Batgirl hear me...?

Okay if you say so Batgirl, but-- Wait, what?

Superman?! Grab hold to what--? Wh-- Buh-- Can you guys see me out here or what?! AAAaaaaaa!!



(Superman, Batgirl and Caleb—a fat, bald, bearded gold prospecting/hobo type in a tuxedo and cummerbund—face the awesome bird-headed villainy of Dr. Horus and his interdimensional, evil-emanating house in DC Comics Presents #19 by Denny O'Neil, Joe Staton and F. Chiaramonte, which is handily collected in Showcase Presents: DC Comics Presents—The Superman Team-Ups Vol. 1, which I promise to quit blogging about, since three posts in as many days is probably kind of pushing it, huh?)

Satellite Spotlight: Justice League of America #78-#79

Last month we took a look at Justice League of America #61, by Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky. It was the first issue collected in Showcase Presents: Justice League of America Vol. 4, and I talked a little bit about how interesting that particular volume was, as it contained between its covers the the transitional issues in which the Silver Age slowly became the Bronze Age, how a reader today could pick up this volume and see the characterizations and relationships that defined these characters coming to be, and, perhaps more interestingly, watch writer Denny O'Neil struggle with the conventions of his medium as he tried to tell more sophisticated, relevant stories.

The two-part story that ran in JLoA #78 and #79 is a pretty good example of this phenomenon, as it's chockful of instances of the title's growing pains. In the preceding issue, O'Neil did away with the team's longtime sidekick Snapper Carr and the original Happy Harbor headquarters, and in #78, he unveils their new HQ, making this issue the very dawn of what we now refer to as "The Satellite Era."

So let's take a look at this important moment in Justice League history, starting with "The Coming of the Doomsters," featuring art by Dick Dillin and Joe Giella, and a not-terribly-representative-of-the-actual-contents cover by Gil Kane.

I mean, yeah, Vigilante does appear in the story, and the JLA do beam themselves up to their new satellite HQ, but it wasn't to quit earth while people were passing out all around them. If I had paid fifteen cents for this in 1970, I would have been so pissed off! And then I would have gone to visit my dad in high school.

It opens with the sort of purple narration I wish I could say I never see in comics any more: "Night has fallen on Star City...a night as bleak and chill as a dream of death! A solitary figure moves through the jungle of the slums, vigilant, alert..."

This vigilant, alert, solitary figure belongs to Green Arrow, who is frustrated by all the smog, which makes it "like a patrolling in a sack;" he can't see a thing! Of course, it's also night time. That might have something to do with the poor visibility.

The be-goateed hero can still hear though, and the sound of gunshots draws him to a nearby factory, where a night watchman is battling some armed thugs, and doesn't seem to be in need of any help from GA. Nevertheless, our hero decides to shoot a flare arrow up into the air, to "shed some needed light on the smoggy situation," but, unfortunately, it falls into a nearby river, and sets the polluted water ablaze, Cuyahoga River style!

Way to go, hero. Green Arrow calls his more effective friends Superman and Green Lantern, and they put out the blaze. Together the trio fly off, leaving the watchmen running after them with a briefcase, thinking, "They didn't hear!" That seems rather unlikely, since Supermman has super-hearing.

"Dang...I gotta find 'em," his ominous thought balloon continues ominously, "The whole future of the human race may depend on it--!"

Meanwhile, Superman and Green Lantern take Green Arrow—and through him, the readers—through the process of commuting to their new satellite headquarters. Where to find half of a Thanagarian Relativity-Beam System, how it will verify his identity and teleport him to the satellite in geosynchronous orbit 22,3000 miles above the United States, showing him a map of the joint, and so on.

I like this sequence because it means that the whole Justice League got together and decided to build a brand new headquarters in outer space and no one even told Green Arrow until it was completely finished.

Just then, the Atom reminds GA that they have to make a public appearance in Star City, and Black Canary heads towards the teleportation cylinder, saying "Will someone descend with me? I'm still spooked by super-scientific gadgets..."

Green Arrow sees an opening:
He's so smooth, it's no wonder she ended up marrying him. Actually, dig how completely unimpressed whe is with him in that panel, despite how intense his face is while he delivers his come-on/joke.

Back in Star City, it's a very slow news days
so the Star City Gazette goes with a headline-only front page, which is lucky for the night watchman, who was looking for the JLA.

Less lucky for him? A car full of thugs with machine guns attack him, but he's able to shoot out one of their tires and make his escape.

Cut to the ballroom of an expensive hotel, where a $100-a-plate charity banquet is being held, featuring the Justice League:
Apparently, this is shortly after Green Arrow changed costumes and grew his goatee, as everyone keeps talking about it.

Superman introduces the League's newest—and prettiest—member:
This story apparently takes place around the time when Superman was still crushing pretty hard on Black Canary.

The crowd calls for a speech, but Canary's just a dizzy dame, how could she possibly string together enough words to deliver a speech?
In fact, she's such a dizzy dame that a halo of dizziness emanates from her head.

Canary is saved from public speaking when the night watchman rushes in, demanding that the League "powwow" with him about "a mess of owlhoot," owlhoots who are right behind him, with guns drawn. The League vanquishes them, and Superman's x-ray vision reveals they are actually robots who are about to self-destruct.

They take the night watchman up to the satellite, and learn that he's really Greg Sanders, the retired crime fighter who used to go by name The Vigilante. Apparently, he got sick of being a cowboy-themed superhero, and decided to move to Star City and become a night watchman for some dumb reason.

The factory he worked at was might strange though. It was always running, day and night, shooting soot into the air and dumping waste into the river. Eventually he learned that the pollution wasn't a byproduct of production, it was production: He was guarding a pollution factory!

He managed to get his hands on some documents, including the formulas for the pollution the factory was making, and a star map.

The team decides to split up, with GL and Superman seeing where the map leads, and Vigilante and the others checking out the factory. Green Arrow decides that rather than do any of that, he'll take the opportunity to tell off the city manager of Star City.

The city manager's second-in-command Jason Crass isn't terribly impressed by Green Arrow's claims that the factory is actually a pollution factory operated by robots at the behest of aliens from the Sirius star system.

Crass (Ha ha, subtlety!) takes the opportunity to make fun of Ollie's beard, making a point of saying he has time to shave, which seems odd, since Crass has a mustache himself.

GA commences with a sermon about pollution, which doesn't have much of anything to do with the sinister alien pollution factory in town: "Man, you are stupid! Look...in some cities the air is so foul that breathing is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes... And cigarettes are hazardous to health!"

Eventually Crass orders the city hall security guards to put GA in the slammer, although they ultimately let him go, despite his insinuation that they were Nazis.

Batman, Atom and Black Canary take Sanders to "a local western goods shop" where he finds everything he needs to reassemble his costume.
Black Canary tells him he looks very handsome in his costume, which may not actually be a compliment, considering the fact that his costume consists of a mask obscuring most of his face.

"At that instant, many light-years distant," GL and Superman arrive at the fifth planet from the sun Sirius, a one-time earth-like planet which has been changed to "a gigantic trash-can!" What could have caused this devastation, and could it provide a teaching moment about the environment to the kids at home?

Maybe!

At the factory, Vigilante and the gang get captured, put in a big net, and are being slowly lowered into a vat of "bubbling, noxious...death." And that's where the issue ends! With a cliffhanger! Holy shit, is this the end of the Justice League?! Or at least three of 'em, plus Vigilante?!

No. Not it's not, as we discover in "Come Slowly Death, Come Slyly!" by the same creative team.
(This next issue's cover is by Neal Adams though. The focal point is clearly the dying Superman, directly appealing to the reader to stop pollution, but look at Hal in the background: He looks like he's going out big with a death scene he learned in an opera, but that's silly. Hal Jordan would never see an opera).

After a brief recap of the events of the previous issue, we follow Green Arrow as he runs from city hall to the pollution factory, arriving just in time to rescue his allies from the net-dipped-in-a-vat-of-death trap.

Once free, they attack the, um, the Doomsters. Check out this page:
Note how the characters can't simply crack wise while fighting the robots called the Doomsters who run a pollution factory for an alien, but they have to talk about how weird it is to be cracking wise, and justify and rationalize the comic book convention to each other.

Defeated, the Doomsters escape to a portion of the factory which is actually a rocket ship and blast themselves into space.

Even further out in space, GL and Superman finally find a survivor on the ruined planet in the Sirius system. This humanoid alien in on the way out too, but he has time to tell the story of his world and the Doomsters.

Once, the people of Monsan—that's the name of this planet, I guess—gloried in their industrial might, creating goods like crazy. Scientists warned that the were destroying the planet with pollution, but the government didn't pay any attention...until people started dropping dead and the planet dying. The evil leader Chokh (Get it?! Chokh!) used a radiation bath to transform himself and his followers into "Doomsters," able to survive in such an environment. Now they travel the galaxy for new worlds to pollute and conquer.

When that dude dies, Hal considers destroying the planet with his ring, but Superman wants him to leave it as it is, "a monument to mortal ignorance-- and a warning!"

Back in our own solar system, Chokh and his Doomsters seed the earth with pollution bombs that, in one hour's time, will release "total pollution!"

GL and Superman return, beat the shit out of all the Doomsters on their ship-disguised-as-a-factory, but they missed Chokh himself, who attacks the JLA satellite, and gets the upper hand. Waving a gun at them, he demands they open the airlock and throw themselves into space.

The Atom asks Batman to distract Chokh, and shrinks out of sight.

Bats and GA decide to distract the main Doomster with some soap opera shit:
That gives the microscopic Atom the one panel he needs to sneak across the room, enlarge and, ZOKK, punch out Chokh. The alien begs Green Arrow not to remove his mask, but GA does so anyway, and Chokh immediately chokes to death. See, fresh air is poisonous to him! Irony!

Finally, the earth is saved...

...or is it?!