And then what?: Briefly on 2006-2011's Justice League of America

The final issue of JLA might have been 2006's JLA #125, but that obviously wasn't the end of Justice League comics from DC. The team has starred in at least one book pretty much continuously since 1960, when they first graduated from a Brave and the Bold feature into the first volume of Justice League of America, so of course we all knew that, despite JLA's cancellation, we wouldn't have long to wait before we got a new Justice League ongoing series.

The "JLA" branding actually continued for a few years after the series ended, thanks to JLA Classified. Launched in January of 2005, around the same time that Kurt Busiek and Ron Garney's "Syndicate Rules" arc was starting in the main title, the secondary JLA book was intended to be an anthology series giving rotating creative teams a chance to tell Justice League stories that weren't necessarily bound to the month-in, month-out continuity.

The title started strong, with Grant Morrison returning for the first arc, in which he was paired with pencil artist Ed McGuinness for a sequel to Morrison's own JLA #24-26. He was immediately followed by the former "JLI" era team of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, returning to their "Super Buddies" concept from their 2003 miniseries Formerly Known as the Justice League. And their arc was then followed by one written by the then still popular, not-yet-disgraced Warren Ellis.

While creators with sizable fanbases would continue to show up for the remainder of the book's run, including the likes of John Byrne, Howard Chaykin, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Dan Jurgens and Gail Simone, the tile seemed to grow increasingly less relevant. Its final issue was 2008's #54. Only a handful of its arcs ever ended up making it into trade paperback collections. 

Whatever the exact provenance of its various arcs—specifically commissioned for the book, inventory stories, repurposed miniseries—it was always clear that Classified was the B-title of the two. 

The actual, official, totally-in-continuity Justice League would return with their own book in September of 2006 in the pages of Justice League of America #0, published just a few months after the last issue of JLA and, perhaps more importantly, the last issue of event series Infinite Crisis, which reset DC's superhero line (and tinkered with its continuity a bit).

The new Justice League series, which was using the Justice League of America title for the first time since 1987, was written by Identity Crisis' Brad Meltzer, pencilled by Ed Benes and inked by Sandra Hope. 

It broke rather sharply from the "Big Seven" formula that powered JLA. Sure, the new line-up featured Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Flash, but that was it of the core JLA team. They were joined by former Leaguers Black Canary, Red Tornado, Vixen and Green Lantern Hal Jordan. Also joining the team were former Outsiders Black Lightning and Geo-Force, the JSA's Hawkgirl Kendra Saunders and former Titan Roy Harper, who changed his codename from Arsenal to Red Arrow for the occasion (ala Kingdom Come).

Most notably missing was probably J'onn J'onnz, who had been in one Justice League or another for at least the previous 20 years, as well as Aquaman, who had been on the team throughout much of JLA (disappearing for a while when he was temporarily dead, and then taking a sabbatical after his resurrection) and John Stewart, the team's Green Lantern for the last three years. Oh, and Plastic Man, who was on the League for the previous eight years or so (a short sabbatical during Joe Kelly's run aside). (I've never reread Metlzer's run—it wasn't very good the first time around, to be honest—and now I can't remember if, when putting the team together, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman offered rationales for why some of their long-time teammates weren't included.)

While it certainly wasn't the League I would have put together in 2006, it was at least an interesting line-up. I was thrilled to see Black Lightning finally on the team, for example. And Wonder Woman was joined by three other women (one of whom, Vixen, was also Black, so neither she nor Black Lightning seemed like a token character). And there was certainly some interesting potential in Roy, like Wally West before him, essentially "graduating" from the Titans to the Justice League.

Not that Meltzer would stick around long to do anything with the characters, though. And his line-up didn't last all that much longer than he did.

Meltzer only wrote the first 13 issues of the series (all of which were essentially one big story arc, devoted to assembling his new team, a crossover with the Geoff Johns-written Justice Society of America falling in the middle of it), and then he left the title.

Meltzer was replaced by Dwayne McDuffie, a comics writer and editor who had been working on DC's animated shows, including the Justice League one, and was thus probably an even better "get" for people who might actually read a Justice League comic than Meltzer ever was. 

McDuffie immediately started tinkering with the line-up he inherited (His first issue featured Green Lantern John Stewart, for example, and thinking about it now, I don't know if Geo-Force even ever officially joined the team or just managed to pose with the others on Alex Ross' variant for JLoA #12, above). 

McDuffie stayed on through #34—missing only four issues, three scripted by Alan Burnett and another by Len Wein—for a total of 19 issues. Benes had stayed on the title through McDuffie's run, although there were obviously fill-ins. A lot of fill-ins. Joe Benitez, Rags Morales and Joe Luis each penciled two issues apiece, while Ethan Van Sciver, Carlos Pachecho, Allan Goldman, Chris Cross, Shane Davis and the team of Ardian Syaf and Eddy Barrows each drew an issue apiece. 

Oh, and then there was issue #25, for which Benes was joined by five more pencil artists, presumably because it was an anniversary issue: Doug Mahnke, Darick Robertson, Shane Davis, Ivan Reis and Ian Churchill.

That is obviously a lot of pencil artists for so few issues, and I remember McDuffie's run as being particularly chaotic, with characters coming and going more quickly than ever, and the increasingly inconsistent art often being rather poor (To be fair, I didn't care for the work of "regular" artist Benes at all, either). 

That chaos was apparently because of what was going on behind the scenes, as McDuffie reportedly kept finding his plans for the title thwarted, characters he might be able to use one month suddenly being off-limits the next in accordance with the goings-on of other comics (Last-minute changes to his plots and scripts would certainly help explain all those guest artists). (I suppose one could speculate as to why McDuffie seemed to get none of the same deference Meltzer did in terms of his plans for the book, given that the latter seemed to have a greenlight to do whatever he wanted in Identity Crisis and his 13 issues of JLoA, but maybe we shouldn't get into that here.)

After McDuffie's final issue, Wein returned for a three-issue fill-in arc drawn by Tom Derenick and several different inkers.

Finally, Starman and Justice League: Cry For Justice writer James Robinson came on with issue #38, and he would remain on the title until it was cancelled with 2011's #60, a total of 26 issues. He was originally paired with pencil artist Mark Bagley and inker Rob Hunter, who drew 15 of Robinson's first 16 issues (only needing a single fill-in, wherein pencil artists Pow Rodrix and Robson Rocha split duties for an issue). 

Bagley and Hunter were then followed by the team of Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund, who drew four issues, and they in turn were followed by pencil artist Daniel Sampere, who closed out the title, drawing the last three issues of the series (one of which he got an assist from Miguel Angel Sepulveda on).

While the creative team was obviously a bit more stable for Robinson's run, the team line-up was more chaotic than ever. Robinson added some fun (and extremely unlikely) characters into the mix, like Congorilla, Starman Mikaal Tomas or Dick Grayson-as-Batman, but his line-up could and would change issue to issue. Even ones whose covers (and scripts!) seemed to promise new line-ups (like #41, for example) could see many of those characters completely disappear within the space of an issue or two. 

At this point, I'm not entirely sure how long Robinson could have kept the title going, but by fall of 2011, it was a moot point anyway, as DC cancelled all of their titles for the new, rebooted (and, ultimately, temporary) continuity of "The New 52."

It included a new Justice League title, of course, this one simply called Justice League, by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Scott Williams. It resumed a "Big Seven" approach, only with Titan Cyborg replacing Martian Manhunter (J'onn was appearing instead in a new Stormwatch title, for some reason). There was obviously still a bit of chaos behind the scenes, as the book didn't always match up neatly with the continuity of other New 52 titles, some of the plans Johns mentioned in interviews never came to materialize and, if you look at one of the many covers for the first issue, you'll see characters in the background who never ended up appearing in the book (Like The Atom and Element Woman). On, and Lee drew Wonder Woman in the long black pants that were apparently supposed to be part of her new, New 52 costume, but DC ended up backing off of.

That volume lasted 52 issues (of course), sometimes overlapping with other Justice League-branded titles (a new Justice League International, a new Justice League of America, Justice League Dark, Justice League United), and has since been followed by other Justice League books (another Justice League, another Justice League of America, Justice League Odyssey), but I kind of stopped paying attention and/or caring, which "The New 52" reboot seemed to encourage me to do. 

After reading the last few years of JLA and then taking a look at the series that followed it, I confess that part of me considered re-reading this volume of Justice League of America. Like those last few JLA arcs, I had only read Meltzer, McDuffie and Robinson's runs the first time around, as they were originally being released (in large part because I didn't much care for them), and I am a little curious if they read better or worse now, divorced from the context in which they were originally published, and without the weight of expectation being a factor (If I had to guess, I would imagine the Meltzer run might read a bit better, while the McDuffie and Robinson ones, which had to dance around other comics so much, probably aged particularly poorly). 

I looked into my local library consortium's holdings, though, and while Meltzer's run is collected in a pair of trades, the first volume of McDuffie's is only available digitally, and I don't really want to spend the time re-reading comics I didn't like the first time around in a format I dislike. Especially since there are so many great comics out there that I've yet to read. (I'm only eleven volumes into Haruichi Furudate's Haikyu!! as I write this, for example; that means I've still got 34 volumes of it left to go!)

The latest Justice League book, Mark Waid and Dan Mora's Justice League Unlimited series, is fairly promising though...

I'm torn between laughing and sighing, honestly.

In this week's Cyborg #10, writer John Semper Jr. and artists Will Conrad and Szymon Kudranski introduce a pretty neat new villain with a neat power/gimmick, The Rat Lord. They also introduce a new Detroit-based superhero who calls herself The Black Narcissus. She has a variety of high-tech weaponry, including a hoverboard, which is, of course, just another word for "flying skateboard."

This new character is black.

I should note that this was the first issue of Cyborg I've bothered to read since the Rebirth special, and is one of the better of the handful of issues of his solo comics I've read since DC launched and then re-launched a Cyborg ongoing monthly in the last few years.

That said, seeing a back superhero with a high-tech skateboard can't help but bring to mind the late, great Dawyne McDuffie's infamous Marvel proposal for Teenage Negro Ninja Thrashers.

Maybe Semper and company should have considered giving this new hero a jet-pack or rocket-boots instead...?

Dwayne McDuffie reportedly passed away today.

Comic Book Resources has the most thorough of the still-emerging write-ups I've seen so far, and Comics Alliance has begun rounding up industry reactions. I expect to see quite a bit more in the coming days and weeks.

I didn't know Dwayne McDuffie the person at all, but I've long known Dwayne McDuffie the comics writer (and, to a lesser extent, the animation writer), and I spent a lot of time with that Dwayne McDuffie.

Relating the death of a real person with a real family and real friends to one's own personal experience always seems a bit selfish to me, but then, I think the fact that the passing of someone you don't really know can still affect you in some small way can be a compelling indicator of just how important that particular person is to the world. Certainly in the case of McDuffie, he was very important in our part of the world. It saddens me to think I'm never going to read another new McDuffie-written comic book, although I'm somewhat heartened by the fact that there are still chunks of his decades-long bibliography I've yet to experience personally.

Ironically, the post I had planned for today deal with one of McDuffie's works—a recent animated film he wrote—but discussing it seems pretty trivial at the moment. As does saying pretty much anything at all about comics. Other than, perhaps, rest in peace, Dwayne McDuffie, and thanks for all the great comics.

A few words about two new comics I'm probably not going to read anyway

There’s something kind of fascinating about Ultimate Comics X, or, as it appears on the cover of the book, “Ultimate X.” The image above was first revealed in a house ad, and its mainly notable only for the fact that the character being focused on looks to be an original one, albeit an original character with Wolverine’s claws on him.

The Ultimate/Ultimate Comics universe has been rather notorious in its inability to introduce brand-new characters instead of simply Ultimatizing versions of pre-existing Marvel characters.

Brian Michael Bendis’ sole new invention from Ultimate Spider-Man, a mutant high-schooler named Geldoff, immediately became a sort of punchline with which Bendis’ boss Joe Quesada could rib him with.

The Batman and Robin-like characters in Ron Zimmerman and Duncan Fegredo’s 2002 six-parter Ultimate Adventures, Hawk-Owl and Woody, showed some promise (the series wasn’t bad, at any rate). But they never appeared again.

The solicitation for Ultimate Comics X is extremely vague, but it seems to be spinning out of Loeb’s own Ultimatum (Which, sorry guys, I haven’t been able to bring myself to read, even for free from the library), and to deal with new characters in the Ultimate Universe.

Here’s the solicitation in full:

Who—or what—is Ultimate X? The answers and even more secrets arrive in the all new ULTIMATE X ongoing bi-monthly series from the superstar dream team of JEPH LOEB and ART ADAMS. Wolverine is dead. Captain America is a fugitive. The Fantastic Four disbanded. Lives have been destroyed and nothing can ever be the same—is there any hope left? It all begins with a search for a brand new character whose identity will leave jaws on the floor and change the Ultimate Universe forever.

The What the hell is going on here? element of the marketing, along with the promise of something original (well, somewhat original-esque) and the presence of Arthur Adams is sort of intriguing, but pretty much negated by the presence of writer Loeb, a $4 price tag, and the fact that even a bi-monthly schedule is probably way too much wishful thinking from this creative team.

This image really should have smothered any lingering embers of interest in the book though, Adams art or no Adams art:
That’s a scan of a house ad for the book, but it looks like that’s also a variant cover for the first issue (the solicitation mentions four variants, one of which is called a “Spoiler Line-Up Variant” by Adams).

You can’t really get more stereotypically ‘90s in your team make-up than two Bad Boy types (one of which is even badder than the regular strength Bad Boy type), a Sexy Girl and a Big Giant Strong Guy (Here a/the Ultimate Hulk, which may be of some interest maybe?).

I’m sure there’s an audience for ‘90s nostalgia comics, but I wouldn’t have expected Marvel’s Ultimate Comics line to be the place for it (Of course, inter-book crossovers, new numbering, variant covers and “foilogram” covers are similarly antithetical to the Ultimate line’s original reason for being, so perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising).

Anyway, that cover dashed whatever small hope the initial image gave me that this might be Marvel trying something rather radically new with the book.

Finally, I know it’s probably not all that fair to complain about superhero character designs being derivative in the year 2010—after almost 80 years of superheroes, just about every one of them is derivative of some other one—but I can’t really look at this guy, the one behind the blond Wolver-teen,

without seeing this guy
He’s Mongrel, a "darkforce-blasting African American-Vietnamese hero" who appeared during DC’s 1993 summer crossover event.

Loeb participated in the event, but he didn’t write Mongrel. Instead, he introduced Loose Cannon, a character who was basically The Hulk with a terrible haircut, but instead of green, he could change colors from blue to purple to red. Hey, wait a minute…!


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As long as we’re discussing comics shipping tomorrow that owe a great debt the comics of the 1990s, it’s probably worth mentioning Milestone Forever #1.

It’s a very strange project, and one I have to assume was dramatically scaled back from what DC and its principal creator, writer Dwayne McDuffie, must have originally had in mind.

Check out what DC has to say about it on dccomics.com:

DC Comics and Milestone Media entered into an unprecedented creative partnership 16 years ago this month by producing 14 interlocking, creator-owned titles including HARDWARE, ICON, and the multimedia hit that would best be known as STATIC SHOCK. Now, nine Parents Choice Awards, four Eisner Award nominations, and one Emmy and Humanitas Award-winning hit TV series later, Milestone is back, its continuity mysteriously merged with the DCU.

While we saw the DC side of the story in JUSTICE LEAGUE: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, the 2-issue MILESTONE FOREVER gathers the original artists from Milestone's launch titles – including John Paul Leon, Mark Bright, Chris Cross and Milestone founder Denys Cowan – to complete the tales told in the original runs of STATIC SHOCK, ICON, HARDWARE, SHADOW CABINET and BLOOD SYNDICATE. Milestone editor-in-chief Dwayne McDuffie reveals the final fate of each of Milestone's launch characters in a bittersweet tale that chronicles the literal end of a universe and the birth of something new…with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.

That sounds awfully ambitious, doesn’t it? Completing the stories of at five different ongoing series, while moving ahead with “the birth of something new”?

And yet all of that is going to be accomplished in the space of just two 48-page comics. That’s—wait, let me double-check on a calculator–only 96 pages. McDuffie introduced the Milestone characters into the DCU over the course of about six or seven issues of his run on Justice League of America—the collection of that story folding the one universe into the other is 176-pages long.

What really brought my attention to how, well, skimpy the Milestone book is going to be, the vast disparity between what it is apparently meant to accomplish and how much space is being allotted to it, was that I noticed this week DC is also shipping The Great Ten #4.

The Great Ten is an ideal example of the “Why is DC publishing this?” class of books in their line. It stars a group of minor characters from a 2006 event series that no one seemed particularly interested in reading much more about, it’s written by Tony Bedard, DC’s ill-used, go-to fill-in writer, and it’s drawn by Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens, DC’s main “These guys work fast, drop this in their laps” art team.

It is ten issues long.

So McDuffie and a half-dozen Milestone creators are given just 96 pages to reveal “the final fate of each of Milestone's launch characters in a bittersweet tale that chronicles the literal end of a universe and the birth of something new…with major consequences for the future of the DC Universe.”

And Bedard, McDaniel and Owens are given 220 pages to…I don’t know…keep an IP of dubious value in the public eye for the better part of a year? And by public eye I mean direct market retailers and maybe a few thousand of their customers According to The Beat, the first issue of The Great Ten moved only about 13,160 units, and sales are almost always all downhill after the first issue of a limited series.

THE JUSTICE LEAGUE

...are pretty much going to fuck Hardware.

...

....Wait, what?

Man, sometimes I really don't get superhero comics...

Roy Harper's secret superpower is...

...his ability to put on his costume really, really quickly. He got his shirt, arm stockings and gloves on all in the space of a second! No wonder he used to go by the codename Speedy. (Well, he either put his costume on really fast between that second and third panel, or else he spent a really long time thinking of a retort to Hawkgirl's unfinished statement in the second panel).



(Panel from Justice League of America #27, written by Dwayne McDuffie, pencilled by Ed Benes and inked by any one of four different inkers)

Being Free Doesn't Make Them Any Better Pt. 4: Justice League of America: When Worlds Collide

Justice League of America: When Worlds Collide is the final collection of writer Dwayne McDuffie’s short, ill-fated run on the Justice League title, and it probably represents his best work.

It would be something of a stretch to call it “good,” but, taken in an isolated chunk like this instead of doled out chapter-by-chapter, a month between each, the book’s strange, fluid relationship with the DC Universe it was supposedly set in is no longer such an obstacle.

There is a noticeably dramatic derailing of the overall story that the collection represents, however, when halfway through the book McDuffie stops telling the story he was telling in the previous chapter to spend 22 pages shedding half of his cast, before picking up with the story right where it left off before the bizarre interruption.

It’s easy to see how that could have ruined the book as a monthly, but as a collection it’s just this really weird passage and, oddly enough, once it’s ended and McDuffie has lost access to most of the characters he began his run with—hell, most of the characters this story arc began with—the book actually improves immensely.

Fans certainly complained when all the “big guns” left the line-up, and the Justice League roster dwindled to just Vixen, Green Lantern John Stewart, Dr. Light II, Firestorm II and Zatanna, but that’s a more manageable group of characters, and McDuffie’s writing suddenly felt more focused and comfortable. In the previous story arcs, in the beginning of this story arc, he simply seemed to have too many superheroes on the page at any given time, and thus had a hard time writing them convincingly.

But by the end of this volume, McDuffie was seemingly doing his best JLoA scripting to date—and then he got yanked off the title (If I’m recalling correctly, there was even some confusion over whether or not he scripted this final issues, as DC’s solicitations for JLoA were often off; according to the credits here, he did).

This volume takes its title from a mid-nineties crossover between the Milestone Universe and the Superman franchise, which is apropos, given that the subject here is a crossover between the Milestone Universe characters and the Justice League.

As one of the progenitors of the Milestone Universe and the then-current writer of JLoA, McDuffie was obviously the man for the job, although I’m sure JLoA readers at the time, already sick of the title becoming a place where other books had their storylines pushed, may not have welcomed the crossover all that enthusiastically. It’s also odd that the premise involved the merging of the two universes, the DCU and the Milestone Universe, under very particular circumstances—this was published just a few years after the multiverse rejiggering of Infnite Crisis/52, and concurrently with the mutliverse re-rejiggering of Final Crisis…seems like a more organized DC Universe might have simply included the merging of the Milestone Earth with the DC’s “New Earth” in one of those cosmology reboots.

Sloppy editing and poor-to-decent writing may be chronic problems for JLoA, but it’s still the art that remains the book’s biggest problem. This collection includes seven issues (JLoA #27-#34, excepting #29, a “Faces of Evil” fill-in by Len Wein and CrissCross which at least looks relevant), and yet there are six (6) different pencillers and twelve (12) different inkers. For seven issues. Published over the course of eight months.

It looks about what you’d expect it to look like. The book’s “regular” pencil artist Ed Benes seems slightly improved here over his work in the previous volume (and doesn’t seem to be actively working against McDuffie the way he did during their first arc together), but that could simply be the influence of one or more of his inkers—he clicks better with some than he does with others, I suppose. (This probably isn’t on Benes, but it would have been nice if they redesigned the Milestone costumes to make some of them look less mid-nineties. There are some terrible, terrible looks among the Milestone set, and they seem out of place both in the year 2009 and the DC Universe in general).

The pencil artists are all of varying skill levels and styles, but Rags Morales contributes almost two entire issues to the collection, which coincides with the improvement of the writing. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the characters start to have facial expressions when Morales is drawing them…?

Having finally tied up the loose ends that previous writer Brad Meltzer left for him to deal with, McDuffie is able to move on to something new-ish here, although new is sort of relative. The story is a fairly standard superhero team-up one, what with the misunderstanding and the fighting.

Dr. Light II comes home from a hard day’s work at S.T.A.R. Labs to find the superhero team The Shadow Cabinet waiting for her. This Milestone team consists of Icon, Hardware and a half-dozen superheroes with terrible names and costumes, none of whom I had ever heard of before (DC should give this Twilight guy his own book, though…I bet the accidental sales that title alone would generate would make it worthwhile).

They are on a secret mission that involves breaking in to the Justice League satellite and stealing the mortal remains of Dr. Light I. The mission is so secret, they can’t tell the League about, and so fighting ensues. (And, oddly, it lasts a few pages, despite the fact that either The Flash or Green Lantern could have taken out everyone who isn’t Icon in about a second or two). Hawkman and Shadow Thief get involved.

Then, suddenly, Justice League #31! Black Canary calls Hal Jordan and her husband Green Arrow into a meeting, punches her husband and calls them both faggots (I’m paraphrasing) for some reason (In the original issue, there was a little yellow box saying that this issue was set after Justice League: Cry For Justice, a miniseries that hadn’t even begun when this was published as a monthly. Here, nothing). Then Hal mentions that the Martian Manhunter and Batman are dead, which is kinda weird, since I just saw Batman 12 pages ago and he looked fine.

Between the chapters of this collection, apparently all of Final Crisis and at least the first two issues of Justice League: Cry For Justice happened. Oh, and the start of World of New Krypton too. I could kind of make sense of this while reading, because I blog about this crap every day, but it’s gotta read weird to someone picking it up cold.

Anyway, this issue consists of 22-pages of people quitting left and right—including Oliver Queen, who wasn’t even on the team! The excuses for most of them are vague and nonsensical, amounting to “I can’t be on the League anymore, because of the events of my own book and/or an upcoming crossover series.”

McDuffie handles most of it pretty well—beyond the weird bit of spousal abuse and calling Hal and Ollie gay—although there’s not even room for some of them to be explained away. Black Lightning, a character who just joined the Justice League within the past few years (just three story arcs ago, at the pace the title moves) after hanging around the DCU being one of its most eligible black superheroes for about 30 years, gets a three-sentence send-off—he left the League to lead the Outsiders, because “it was one of Batman’s last requests.”

That interruption over, the cast has been whittled down to a more manageable five characters, and McDuffie picks up where he left off with the Shadow Thief and Milestone characters. These last few chapters are I think the zenith of his run, featuring solid art by Rags Morales for the first two-ish and a Benes-free final issue by Adrian Syaf, Eddy Barrows and five different inkers (Jesus), nicely written, individual characters with dynamic relationships to one another, and a serious, League-level threat that, for the first time in the book’s 34-issue run, actually seems like something the Justice League might need to spend it’s time on.

It was kind of weird reading these final few issues in December of 2009 though, after McDuffie has left the book, and he’s made so many details about how frustrating his experience on the book actually was (editors snatching away characters mid-story and scenes being re-written after the art was finished are clear on the printed page, so one can only imagine how much worse it must have been behind the scenes).

I still don’t understand why continuity between this book and the rest of the DCU was enforced so rigidly. It’s generally assumed that the books aren’t occurring in real time, and DC’s usual policy is to just have readers and writers slot the stories together once they’re finished—if continuity is being enforced at all (For example, there have been at least two completely different Jokers in Grant Morrison’s Batman writing and Paul Dini’s). It’s especially problematic here, because Final Crisis’s rejiggering of the mutliverse renders the conflict that it bisected here irrelevant. Whatever the state of the DCU and Milestone Universe at the beginning of the arc, Final Crisis would have completely changed it when it occurred, despite the fact that the second half of the arc proceeds as if Final Crisis didn’t re-re-recreate the multiverse. (Did I lose you? I lost myself in there somewhere…)

Anyway, by the end of the volume, the Justice League is John Stewart, Dr. Light,Vixen, Zatanna and Firestorm…although they’re hanging out with Hardware and Icon…and a Bruce Wayne from a different dimension where he went to see a cowboy movie instead of a Zorro movie the night his parents were killed and ended up a gun-toting vigilante named Paladin. All three are in the position heroes usually find themselves in when someone on the team says, “Hey, we worked pretty well together, would you consider joining the team?”

Having a Justice League led by Icon, who is basically Superman only black, might have lead to some interesting, exciting stories. Instead, McDuffie was off the book, Len Wein and another small army of pencillers and inkers came in to fill the pages for three months, and James Robinson and Mark Bagley finally came in to fill the void.

They’ve done three issues so far—each full of little more than the few remaining Leaguers getting the holy hell beat out of them and/or threatened with sexual violence.

So far at least, the quality of the book seems to have turned around—it was practically unreadable due to poor writing and bad art, now it’s practically unreadable due solely to repulsive content.

Being Free Doesn't Make Them Any Better Pt. 1: Justice League of America: Second Coming

Earlier this week, three collections I reserved at my local library became available on the same day. What all three had in common was that they were bad comics I had started reading in comic book format as they were being published, but I quickly abandoned due to their exceptionally poor quality and my desire not to reward the publisher for producing them with my money (even though I felt some need to read them to keep up with the goings-on in the fictional universe in which they’re set).

As I discovered, even getting the comics for free, and reading them in big chunks without a month between every 22 pages to consider their faults didn’t do much of anything to improve their quality.

I’m going to review one of them at probably too-great length each day this weekend.


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DC has been publishing Justice League comics for just under 50 years now, and those that they've been publishing since 2006 or so have been the absolute worst. I know that sounds pretty harsh, and some modern readers probably think it insane to say the current volume is worse than the original Silver Age comics with their rudimentary, written-for-kids plots and dialogue, and the stocky, blocky art, but even those comics had a certain degree of professionalism and competence about them, as did any of the previous eras of Justice League comics readers are likely to point to as the nadir of the franchise (the early Extreme Justice run, when DC was trying to turn the Giffen/DeMatteis team into something Rob Liefeld fans might enjoy, or the Detroit League, when stabs at a new generation of heroes replaced the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman).

The current volume was produced from the start by people who just honestly didn't give a shit about what they were doing. Original writer Brad Meltzer may have had some interesting ideas here and there among the professional fan fiction he wrote during his brief run, but there was a very basic, fundamental level of not-caring emanating from the scripts, to the point where the 1939's World's Fair occurred in Washington DC instead of New York City (a fact Meltzer or editors would have known if only from reading the other DC super-comics they were referencing in the story) and the dead character Aquaman was used as a living character, but drawn by the artist to resemble a completely different character (who was alive).

There was a certain level of contempt for the material and the audience expressed by Meltzer and/or his editors that made reading the comics actively unpleasant, a contempt never better evidenced than in the choice of artists on the book, the most regular of which was pencil artist Ed Benes.

I've complained at such great length and detail about how poor Benes' art is that even I'm tired of hearing me do so, but, to quickly recap, Benes is a fairy decent pin-up artist who can draw big, brawny bosomy super-babes in suggestive poses and ridiculously muscled men with painted on costumes, and absolutely nothing else. Those are the only two designs he's capable of, and he has no range at all with them—the women can look sexy, the men angry, and that's about as far as Benes' "acting" skills go. He has no command of mis en scene, page design, panel-to-panel continuity or background. He's pretty much the last artist you'd want on a comic book about a dozen or so superheroes, whether they're actually having big adventures, or just having action-packed conversations like characters in a Brian Michael Bendis comic book.

That only added up to Benes being a poor comic book artist, of course—what was worse was his focus on the sexiness of the handful of female super-characters at the expense of everything else. Often times, he was drawing an entirely different comic story than his writers were writing, and the meaning of scenes was completely changed by the way he staged and rendered them.

Anyway, the Meltzer/Benes Justice League of America comic book of 2006 was a terrible, terrible comic book, and my mind remains boggled that one of the biggest publishers of comic books proudly produced that during a time when comics as entertainment and art have never seemed stronger.

When Meltzer left as planned in the middle of his story, Dwayne McDuffie was brought in, and the quality of the book dipped even further, with even worse fill-in artists (Joe Benitez) and a change of focus away from telling Justice League stories to telling tie-ins to other comics—for a couple months, every issue of JLoA was like a red skies tie-in to something, only instead of acknowledging something important to the DC Universe like Crisis on Infinite Earths, they tied in to Tangent and Salvation Run (itself a tie-in...to Countdown, a prequel in name to Final Crisis).

The fifth collection of the current volume of Justice League of America is entitled The Second Coming. I'm not sure why, beyond the fact that McDuffie quotes lines from William Butler Yeats' poem of that name in the titles of the individual chapters (Oddly, DC is also currently publishing a Batman miniseries titled after a line from the poem—Batman: The Widening Gyre). It could refer to the return of Red Tornado to a body, but as the character himself notes this is like the eighth time he's been reborn in a new body (the second within the first two years of this very series!). It could refer to the return of Amazon, but this is more like his twenty-second coming than his second. Perhaps DC had a big retreat where they all talked about Yeats, and his poetry is just filtering into the comics...?

At any rate, this is also a terrible, terrible comic book.

This is due in large part to the continued presence of Benes, whose deficincies are made so clear in this issue that it's actually kind of hilarious. For example, Red Tornado's significant other Kathy, who is blond, is distinguishable from Black Canary only in that the latter wears fishnet stockings. That's the sort of poor work a reader might expect from Benes as his off-and-on tenure on the book reaches its second year. But the first issue collected here contains this image of Professor Niles Caulder, the elderly, wheelchair bound leader of The Doom Patrol. Benes draws him just like Superman, in a fake beard and wig:

(I know I made fun of that image before, but it still makes me laugh).

Benes hasn’t become any stronger of an artist in the issues collected in this volume than he was in the issues collected in previous volumes (although, according to the credits, he’s now inking his own work). The art is still confoundingly amateurish, with odd panel to panel slip-ups like, say, a mace appearing in and out of Hawkgirl’s hand from panel to panel, and still suffers from Benes’ insistence of reducing everything he an to a picture of a sexy lady. Perhaps the most egregious example in this volume is a two-page spread in #26, in which the entire Justice League squares off against an entire Justice League of alternate versions of themselves. There are over 20 superheroes in action on the page, but Benes draws a super huge close-up of Wonder Woman in the immediate foreground, blocking the bulk of the battle from view.


The art isn’t the only problem with the book, however. Because writer Dwayne McDuffie has been so vocal about his dissatisfaction with the way the book turned out and the constraints put on him during its writing (and by “so vocal” I mean that he talked to anyone about it at all, which is somewhat unusual among Big Two comics writers), I think there’s temptation to forgive him for the lack of quality in the work, to assume he was simply shafted by his editors and by not having a real artistic partner (In addition to doing poor work, Benes had some serious deadline issues for someone who rarely even draws backgrounds—six other pencillers and eight other inkers are needed during this five-issue run).

McDuffie has a few moments of life within these issues—notably the inclusion of The Brown Bomber, a character up for behind-the-scenes consideration for DC’s first black superhero that ultimately evolved into Black Lightning—but the quality of work is overall quite poor.

The story—if it is a story, rather than just five issues of the comic chopped into a unit for collection’s sake—isn’t about anything at all. There’s literally nothing to the book other than familiar characters going through familiar motions to no discernable effect or impact. In short, there aren’t any ideas in the comic; it reads like tiresome pay check-collection on McDuffie’s part.

It’s possible that may be due simply to McDuffie operating in clean-up mode, trying to honor Meltzer’s run by wrapping up all the storyline’s his predecessor left unresolved before doing what he wanted. The arc opens with Red Tornado about to put into another new body, and still struggling with his Am I robot or a man? issues that Meltzer had him dealing with in the first few issues of JLoA. It closes with Vixen getting to the bottom of why her powers aren’t working right anymore, another conflict Meltzer introduced and then abandoned. In between, there’s some talk about the Roy Harper/Hawkgirl relationship Meltzer initiated.

If that is the case, it’s unfortunate it took McDuffie over 100 pages to deal with it in this book.

As for the superheroic stuff, it feels incredibly small, claustrophobic and tired. See all those characters trying to hide their feet on the cover? They and John Henry Irons must pool all their powers and abilities to combat Amazo, an android enemy the League’s been fighting about twice a year since the early sixties. McDuffie doesn’t do anything new or interesting with the character the way, say, Tom Peyer did repeatedly throughout his Hourman, or even Mark Millar did in his one-issue fill-in during Grant Morrison’s run on JLA. It’s just one more the Justice League-battles-a-robot-with-all-their-powers fight, lasting far too many pages.

Once Amazo’s defeated, the League tries to solve Vixen’s power problems, which involve a trip within her magical Tantu totem, where they encounter Anansi the West African spider god who functions as a stand-in for the writer. If there is a hint of freshness to the idea, McDuffie spoils it himself by involving Animal Man, and reminding readers of Grant Morrison’s insertion of the comic book writer into the comic book superhero narrative back in…Jesus, the late eighties? Early ‘90s? (And then again more recently in 52).

McDuffie does do a fairly admirable job of giving each character a moment of some sort, but he’s dealing with so many characters that all they get is a moment—a few pages of narration, a few lines of dialogue, a single scene to shine in, and then they completely disappear.

McDuffie’s Justice League appears as alien and remote as Morrison’s did, but not because they’re written that way, simply because McDuffie can’t find room for them all in the storyline. That may be in part due to a lack of ambition—should it take 20 superheroes and three issues to fight Amazo?

The sad part is that this is apparently the best part of McDuffie’s run on the title. The previous issues were the ones in which a co-writer was called in to help him handle the tie-ins to Salvation Run and Tangent, and the ones that follow this will deal with the since aborted attempt to integrate the Milestone Universe into the DC Universe for some reason, to reconcile the title with the changes of Final Crisis (in which Hawkgirl died, but then editorial told McDuffie she was still alive after an issue in which her death is being mourned had already been written and drawn, and to deal with the fall-out of the Justice League: Cry for Justice miniseries, which was so late it had yet to begin while McDuffie was writing its aftermath.

This then represents McDuffie at his least interfered with, and—even if you ignore the inappropriate, amateurish art completely—the results were terrible.

It’s really a shame. McDuffie’s a pretty talented writer, and as his work just prior for Marvel Comics proved, he’s adept at marrying big, crazy cosmic superhero adventure with lighthearted humor and solid character work. He should have been perfect for JLoA, but…well, whatever went wrong, to whatever degree he or whoever else was responsible, the comic books that resulted were shockingly bad.

Three questions I had after reading Icon: A Hero's Welcome

1.) What's up with Icon's mask? It is a little mask; there are a few panels where they show him either taking it off or putting it back on, and it's a tiny, rather stylized domino mask that covers both of his eyes and stretches across the bridge of his nose. But when he puts it on, the middle of it completely disappears, and it simply looks like he's wearing eye make up, or little mask-patches over each eye. Is his mask made of some sort of alien material that makes the middle of it disappear? Does he knit his brows so intensely that part of his forehead completely covers the middle of the mask? Or does pencil artist M.D. Bright just never draw it as some part of the intentional, stylized exaggeration he brings to the work (like how Icon has a cape big enough to smother Spawn and Kelley Jones' Batman)?


2.) Is Reginald Hudlin's introduction as embarrassingly terrible as I think it is, or am I being too harsh in my assessment? If you haven't read the new-ish Icon trade (and I think you should all read it, if only to encourage DC to put out more trades of it for me to buy), here's a sample:

Some of you might sneer at attaching such importance to creating comic books (it shows a certain success for Milestone that you are reading this introduction, anyways), but for people who have suffered with "a dream deferred" for too long, having our collective fantasies delineated and distributed across the country is empowerment indeed.

But none of that would matter if the books were wack.

Fortunately, ICON is dope.

Ugh.

Also:

The whole thing is so exciting, I even considered quitting my day job to join Milestone. But then, I thought, how will I make the movie version if I quit directing?

3.) Here's a hard one: Is Icon black? When we first meet the being who will become Augustus Freeman/Icon, he's a blue-skinned alien. When he lands on Earth in the second half of the 19th century, he is transformed into a little black human baby.

He later explains that the lifepod worked to alter his DNA to "match that of a sentient native."

So, is Icon really black, or is he just a blue-skinned alien disguised as a black man? The fact that his disguise is based on altered DNA would seem to indicate that he is, for all intents and purposes, actually a genetic match to the woman who found him—and African-American slave in the American south of the 1860s—yet he seems to be functionally immortal (he's over 120 when we first meet him), and has all sorts of superheroes, so he's clearly not an exact DNA match of a human being.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. Superman's not technically human at all, yet he's usually considered to be white based on the color of his skin, rather than his genetic make-up. Likewise, Icon's black based on the color of his skin...he identifies himself, and can be identified as, African-American, even if he didn't actually come from Africa, nor did his ancestors (Actually, I guess that makes both Superman and Icon Outer Space-Americans, huh?).

I was only curious about this at all due to the relative dearth of good black superhero comic book characters throughout the history of the medium. Icon's a great character—and Icon is a pretty great comic book—but I was wondering if he can technically be considered black or not, based on his origins, if he is indeed an answer to the question, "Where are all the great black superhero characters?"

I suppose if we consider alien Superman, Atlantean Aquaman and magical clay golem Wonder Woman white folks, than Icon is a black man. Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

The patrons of the Hold It Inn bar in New Jersey aren't very bright

Okay, so a huge, heavily-muscled, pissed-off guy with weird hair, a pair of some kind of crazy shoulder pads and a wrist-mounted crossbow comes into the bar and their first impulse is to make fun of him?

Granted, he hasn't quite made it apparent that he's completely insane just yet—he has two personalities, a fancy-talking smart guy named Donald and a violent, stuttering thug named Roadpig—and he did live his huge-ass cinder block-topped club outside with his motorcycle, but still, dude doesn't exactly have the Safe To Fuck With aura about him, does he?

Now, in the defense of the Hold It Inn patrons, Donald/Roadpig did order a plate of chocolate doughnuts from a bar. What kind of bar serves doughnuts? By the plate full, no less?

At any rate, three panels and a SPLAT! CRUNCH CRACK! later, two of Roadpig's tormentors go flying through the front window and the others are eating his boots and fists.

*********************

That scene was from 1989's G.I. Joe #83, by Larry Hama, Ron Wagner and Fred Fredericks. It was in the stash of old comics I received last week, and one of the handful of issues of Marvel's old G.I. Joe comics I actually bought and read as a little kid.

I remember it very clearly, because of this particular panel:


I thought that panel was totally hot when I was 12. Not only could you can see Zarana's bare mid-riff and left shoulder as usual, but you could also see a small part of her left breast! Wow!

While Young Caleb had a thing for Zarana, the pink femullet-ed Dreadnok and sister of Zartan, it paled next to the crush he had on his true love of the G.I. Joe universe:
Lady Jaye, seen here in a one-panel appearance in the very same issue.

The cartoon version of Lady Jaye was even hotter than the comic book version, as she had a much cooler hair cut on the TV show:
See?

I'm hopeful that IDW will eventually collect the entire 155-issue Marvel G.I. Joe series, in large part so I can find out what happens in this particular issue:
It sure looks promising.

********************

Found in another old issue of Marvel's G.I. Joe series:

This was on one of Marvel's Bullpen Bulletin pages. You can read his responses to a variety of questions if you click on the image. I didn't realize just how long Dwayne McDuffie's been working in comics. It was very cool to read this and see that he had listed his "greatest unfulfilled ambition in the comics field" as writing Fantastic Four. About 20 years later, he got his chance to do so during a short but very successful post-Civil War, pre-Mark Millar/Bryan Hitch run on the title.

Miscellany

This week former Massachusetts governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was on Meet The Press to discuss the state of the Republican Party with South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and host David Gregory. Looking at Romney, I couldn't decide whom he reminded me of more:

HAL JORDAN...



...or REED RICHARDS?

These are the types of things I think about while watching Sunday morning political talk shows.


******************

If you don't already make a point of reading Tucker Stone's This Ship Is Totally Sinking columns over at Comixology already, don't miss this week's column, in which he interviews Comics Journal blogger Dirk Deppey. That's right, it's one of my favorite comics bloggers, interviewing another of my favorite comics bloggers!

I think I found it particularly interesting because while I spend some time with Deppey five days a week, I don't actually know anything about him beyond his opinions on a lot of comics-related stuff, and the way he sounds in writing. Like, I know his voice really well, but I don't actually know a damn thing about him.

Now I do!

I really liked this passage, in which Deppey answers a question about whether he would like to do more frequent longer-form reporting and/or op-ed pieces:

On the one hand, I love writing and can't seem to keep from knocking out long essays when a short note would often do just as well. (Maybe you've noticed.) On the other hand, there's always the danger of turning into a Keith Olbermann-style blowhard – or worse, a Dave Sim-style crank – if you feel obliged to keep churning out 14,000-word essays three or four times a week. This became clear to me through the course of that Mary Jane Statue fiasco a while back; the more I wrote, the more I found myself circling around to points that I'd already made. Now, in a certain sense this is inevitable in blogging. Since almost everything I write is a mildly edited first draft, I find myself narrowing in on cogent points over the course of several days, refining my arguments as I read responses and get the chance to think more about a given subject. Still, it's a gateway to intellectual stratification as well, since the further you go in defending a point, the more you feel in your bones that You Are Inarguably Correct in whatever it is you're talking about. The longer I do this, the less I trust in such positions.

There's also the fact that I only have so many things to say in a given period. The comic-book industry tends to be very conservative, insofar as it cruises along on the same set of business practices until circumstances force it from its collective lethargy. While it stands still, there's only so many ways you can describe it, and I strongly suspect that repeating yourself too often can bore a readership to tears.

Deppey expresses my own worry about blogging almost exactly. Right now I write about 14 posts about comics a week, at least a couple of which are long essays, and plenty of which are reviews, and while I love writing and like the way blogging offers a way to do it almost constantly, I do worry that I spend way too much time saying the same things over and over. Part of that is because blogging requires daily or at least daily-ish posting, and I have a tendency to resist or reject doing short, punch posts in favor of blabbing on and on for paragraphs.

Anyway, go read that interview. If you want. Sorry, that sounded bossy. If I were you, and I haven't read it yet, I would go read it.

********************

David Brothers at 4thletter.net has an extremely depressing post linking to an extremely depressing post of Dwayne McDuffie's in which the outgoing Justice League of America writer rounds up some of the "Insightful Racial Commentary" he found in the comments section below a preview of JLoA #34 that Newsarama.com ran.

It's pretty sad stuff, particularly coming from what I assume are superhero fans. I mean, I'm not under any illusions that a lot of superhero fans don't fall into the categories of "babymen" (to use Mike Manley's phrase) or "kidults" (to use Deppey's), but for some reason I always expect better from people who spend so much time, energy and money following the exploits of paragons of justice and virtue, you know?

Like, secretly wish Hal Jordan was your boyfriend if you want, rend your garments at plot developments you hate, and by all means, feel free to mention a comics creator, editor or company raping your childhood—fine. But complaining about the fact that there are too many black people on the fucking Justice League? And using the sorts of words and language that some of these posters do?

It makes me ashamed I even share a hobby with some of these assholes.

As someone who spends a significant amount of time at Newsarama.com and Blog@Newsarama.com, I advise reading the content and steering clear of the comments sections all together, as no good ever comes from reading the comments sections. At least on the main site; do read the comment threads over Blog@. And feel free to comment. About how much you love me.

********************

To end on an up note...

This week's DC Nation column features Wednesday Comics, DC's fascinating comics-as-your-grandfather's-newspaper-Sunday-funnies experiment. I like the newspaper-like logo, and I was really intrigued by the individual logos of some of the characters/features (Follow the link above for a bigger, better look at 'em all).

Many of them match the logos of the characters' current or more recent books (Superman, Supergirl,Hawkman, The Demon and Catwoman), while others feature classic logos (Metamorpho, Metal Men. Several of the characters have new logos (Deadman), but a couple of those with new logos are characters who are currently starring in ongoings with very different looking logos.

For example, for the Teen Titans strip/feature uses the Teen Titans logo from the television cartoon, not the logo from the current Teen Titans ongoing. Does that reflect the content or the spirit of the feature? (The character line-up is one from recent comics, not the cartoon).

And check out the Wonder Woman and Green Lantern logos; both are extremely different from what you see on the Wonder Woman and Green Lantern comics. I wonder if and/or how these might reflect how different the stories are? The Green Lantern logo definitely has a '50s-ish, Vegas feel to it, which calls to mind Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier, probably my favorite Hal Jordan story. The Wonder Woman logo looks completely unfamiliar to me, but then her logo has changed so much over the years it's quite possible that's simply an old version I've never seen before. But then, that looks more like a young Wonder Woman than the current busty, muscley one, so maybe it's the adventures of Wonder Woman when she's a girl...?

Anyway, I guess we'll find out in six more days...

Dear Dwayne McDuffie,

Congratulations on your new gig!

Even a few years ago, I probably would have greeted the news that Dwayne McDuffie was going to be writing JL(o)A with a "Who?" instead of "Woo hoo!" (despite having enjoyed so much of your past Milestone work, back when I didn’t pay much attention to the credit boxes).

But is it just me, or have you seriously stepped up your game lately?

As someone who doesn't really pay much attention to the names of television writers on shows I watch (I have no idea if you were the genius who had Flash-in-Luthor's-body not wash his hands after going to the bathroom because he was evil or not, for example), I'm not even referring to any work you may have done on the generally excellent Justice League Unlimited. I mean instead the last few issues of Firestorm (including the sublime Orion vs. Stompa fight), the wonderfully old-school Beyond! (which took a handful of characters I didn't care the least for and weaved a highly entertaining story around them), the tons of fun Fantastic Four and, hell, even last week's Avengers Classic back-up.

Now, from what Dan Didio has said, it sounds like you'll be whittling the cast of JLoA down somewhat, as it's rather large for your (or his?) taste. Which I was surprised to hear, seeing as there are only ten people in the League at the moment, eleven if you count Geo-Force, and the best runs on the team have been those with the largest casts (Giffen/DeMatteis had two teams spread over two books and a quarterly; Morrison’s team swelled to around a dozen).

While everyone has their own ideal League line-ups, I'll try my hardest not to bore you with mine here. I did want to share some advice with you, though. Not that you need it, but rather because if there's one thing we at EDILW like doing, it's sharing advice about Justice League comics that no one ever listens to.

So, regarding that line-up: It's integral to remember that the Justice League formula that works the very best is “The Big Seven” plus a few more. The Leagues that have worked the best financially and critically without that foundation of the Big Seven (i.e. the Giffen/DeMatteis run) did so despite rather than because of the deviation from the Big Seven plus more formula, and they did have the advantage of Batman going for them (If you're only going to use one of the Seven, that's the one you want, especially around the early '90s).

The argument is often made that it's hard to tell League stories with these seven characters because so many of them have their own books, or, in Superman and Batman's cases, whole lines of books, and will thus not only remain static but, if they're to change/develop at all, it will be in those books, not JLoA. To that I say: “So what?” JLoA doesn't need to focus on the superheroes as characters, but rather on the interaction between them. There are a lot of books about Batman, and one about Wonder Woman, but this is the only book about the Batman and Wonder Woman's relationship to one another.

Now, I understand the line-up you'll be inheriting is devoid of three of the traditional Big Seven (again, the fact that this is DC's bestselling book is despite rather than because the variation of the formula; I don't think anyone believes Geo-Force, Roy Harper and Red Tornado are more popular than Flash, Aquaman and Martian Manhunter, and the current line-up still has the three biggest of the Big Seven on it). Ideally, you'll want to add the Flash, Aquaman and Martian Manhunter as soon as possible, but that might take a while. We don't know who the Flash will be (Wally's an immediate in; Bart and Barry might want to wait a bit), Aquaman's dead for the moment and Martian Manhunter is more unlikable in his current costume and characterization than he's ever been.

So that gives us the Big Seven Minus Three, meaning you can add at least three. Roy Harper is a must-keep, if only because Meltzer made such a big deal about it, changing his name and costume to get him there. Black Lightning is also a must-keep; some of us have been waiting forever to get him there and, again, he just joined. Hawkgirl and Vixen both seem like good candidates for sticking around, in part because they just re-upped; the former is more iconic, but the latter is more unique. Tough call.

As for trimming, no one would mind if Geo-Force decided he didn't want to stick around after all. Seriously, I can't think of a single person in Internetland who likes Geo-Force, or at least hasn't made fun of him repeatedly. (Here are some of my favorite jokes at Geo-Force's expense).

Red Tornado is similarly annoying, particularly as Meltzer has written him, although he has a larger fan base (that is, he has some fans). I could take or leave him, personally; if he sticks around, I do hope you'll find an interesting way to write him. The whole Pinocchio Syndrome Android-with-human-emotions-who-wishes-he-was-real plotline has been something pretty much anyone who's ever touched Red Tornado and Marvel’s Vision has hammered on over the last, what, 30 years now? That’s kind of…tired.

Black Canary has fans and certainly belongs in the League more than Geo-Force, but, at the same time, I don't think she brings much of anything to the team. If they need someone to beat someone up without using superpowers for some reason, they could just have Batman do it. He loves beating people up. Her upcoming nuptials will give her a good excuse to step down for a while too, or put herself on reserve status, or maybe just be like the Phantom Stranger, and just show up when she feels like it or is really needed.

Which is the advantage of a gigantic line-up. The more people on the League, the better, even if we don't see them all the time. For example, I love Steel and, in a DCU that operates on a sort of logic beyond "That Which the Person Writing Likes Is What Is," I don't know why he would have quit the League after Morrison’s “World War III” or why no one's asked him to rejoin. How many brilliant inventors and super-engineers who can also catch falling jetliners and knock giant robots' heads off with their big ass hammers are there in the talent pool? And while the Trinity are all scientists, I think the League needs a dedicated tech guy. I'd be happy to see Steel on the team, even if he's only there doing tech support, monitor duty and joining them for, like, one out of every fifteen fights. I think that's how a lot of fans feel; they want their favorites in the League, even if those favorites don’t actually star in every single issue.

So big rosters are great, and, barring that, a large number of official reservists who occasionally guest-star and/or just check in is definitely the next best thing.

Other add-ins to consider, beyond Aquaman, a Flash and J'onn? Well, obviously Plastic Man and Captain Marvel, once the Judd Winick experiment is scrapped and things get back to normal with him. I know those two superheroes belong among any gathering of The World's Greatest Heroes just as much as any of the Big Seven, you know they belong among any gathering of the World's Greatest Heroes just as much as any of the Big Seven, so why not finally officially make it so?

Oh hey, and the Green Lantern situation? Who should be the Green Lantern? It's Hal currently, which never made much sense to me. Though a founder, he was on the League less than Kyle and Guy. He was also evil for a long stint, so evil that he actually destroyed the universe temporarily, and even killed Batman temporarily before undoing all of creation (yeah, yeah a space bug did it; whatever) and he was a member of "The Power Pact" which was less than ethical (another strike against Canary, come to think of it), and his coming on seemed a little unnatural. I mean, they were just working with John, who was place-holding for Kyle, when Hal came in. Did they just fire John? Stop returning his calls? Was he so deep undercover as Hunger Dog that he couldn't join the new Meltzer-ized League? It should have been John, as we all know (Kyle's life seems even more complicated now then when he asked John to replace him, and the League needs a Lantern in it's line-up, not an, um, Ion…whatever that is exactly).

Of course, now the problem is that Hal's there, and they'd have to kick him out to make room for John. I'm not sure how to handle this, or how quickly it should happen, but I have faith that you'll find a smart, believable way to do it. John is currently the only book-less Lantern, and JLoA is the ideal place for him now. If Hal gets the monthly, Guy the Corps book and Kyle all the stupid Countdown spin-offs, then let's get John back in the League, huh?

Thanks for your time, and good luck.

Sincerely,
Caleb

P.S. Zauriel! Scott "Mister Miracle" Free! Steel! J'onn! Aquaman! Plastic Man! De-Winick-ified Captain Marvel! Moon Maiden! Janissary! Maybe even Cyborg!

Tony Stark...

...is in denial.



That’s from this week’s Avengers Classic #1, from a story by Stan “The Man” Lee and Kevin “Kevin” Maguire.

And you know what? It’s not even the best part of the issue.

Neither is this exchange



from a story by Dwayne McDuffie and Michael Avon Oeming (But that is pretty awesome).




No, this is the best part:

J. Torres prefers blondes

I probably don't need to post links to Newsarama.com here, since 'rama has slightly better traffic than EDILW, but what the hell, it makes for easy content.

I've got two interviews with J. Torres up at the moment, including a brief chat about his upcoming Wonder Girl: Champion miniseries and a talk with both he and editor Jann Jones about the Black Canary Wedding Planner special. Both look and sound pretty interesting, particularly the latter, which will feature Christine Norrie work. (I think the Amanda Conner image above is actually from the Wedding Special itself, but it is a really nice image.)

There's a ton of superhero news up from all the convention announcements today. So much so, in fact, it's hard to even keep up.

But the two big ones for DC readers seemed to be:

1) The Flash shenanigans, which seem to hint very, very, very strongly that Barry Allen is coming back to life to star in the book, which I think is The Second Worst Thing DC Could Possibly Do (They've already done the first, which was resurrect Jason Todd)

and

2) Brad Meltzer's replacement of JLoA is Dwayne McDuffie. I'm enormously excited about this, and look forward to really enjoying what used to be my favorite title again. It does cast Meltzer's run in an even worse light. There was an awful lot of leeway given to him to basically do whatever he wanted with the team—cancelling the last volume of the book and launching with a new number one, changing the title, changing the line-up, changing the headquarters, a fold-out showing the bold new line-up in all their glory— all of which seemed to signal the start of a new Era for the League, something to follow such easily identifiable ones as the Satellite Era, the JLI, and the Big Seven leagues. I honestly expected an announcement that Geoff Johns would be taking over, with Meltzer to return for another brief stint next year.

Instead, we got all that build up for what amounts to only three or four stories. Spending eight issues putting a team line-up together seems kind of excessive no matter what the length of a run is, but when the run amounts to 14 issues, after which the line-up is going to change anyway, it sounds downright ridiculous. That's from a reader's perspective though; from a business perspective, it doesn't matter how bad Meltzer's run has been, only that it's super-popular, and I hope DC isn't going to fire McDuffie if he's unable to keep the book over 100,000 each month.

The big Marvel news, at least the news that struck me with the most impact, was folding all the Spider-Man titles into one, single almost-weekly series. I think it's smart, and not as radical a move as it sounds (the Superman titles were all essentially one big weekly during the old "Triangle" numbering, and most of the franchises switch to that format during crossovers periodically). I'm not sure why it's three times a month and not four though. "Tri-monthly" seems kind of arbitrary. The downside? I was really, really, really, really hoping to see an announcement about Dan Slott being named the new Amazing Spider-Man writer. While it's possible he could be writing all three issues that come out each month (Hell, you know Brian Michael Bendis could do it), I have a feeling that it's going to end up being closer to the 52 or Countdown model, with a team of writers and artists switching off far too regularly.

Oh, and this sounds pretty peculiar. The origin of the Ultimate Universe? Is it, like, different from the origin of, say, our universe? Was there a younger, hipper, possibly minority version of the Big Bang in the Ultimate Universe?

I like Bendis' UU work quite a bit though, and have always liked Jackson Guice's art, so I'd probably check this out if it were Ultimate This One Guy Bendis Knew In College. I'm not sure what to make of Bendis' description of Guice's art as "a mix of Bryan Hitch and Greg Land." What does that mean exactly? It's very detailed, almost photoreaslitic pencil art, but it looks like traced-over photo reference poorly integrated into the page design?

Anyway, actual original content returns to EDILW tomorrow. And by "actual original content" I mean, of course, out-of-context panels paired with bad jokes and/or complaining about superhero comics.