Briefly on whether post-Crisis Plastic Man was meant to be a Golden Age or Modern Age hero

Okay, I know I've talked a bit about this subject before, but I wanted to devote a whole post to it in light of recent reading. That, and there are few things I enjoy writing about more than Plastic Man and DC continuity.

So, in a recent-ish post I discussed 1986's Last Days of the Justice Society of America Special #1, written by Roy and Dann Thomas and drawn by David Ross and Mike Gustovich. I was particularly intrigued by one line from the splash page above, in which the Golden Age Hawkman Carter Hall discusses what the DC Universe shared setting is like after the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, when several previously distinct worlds like Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-S and others have all been combined into a single, new, composite Earth.

As to why I was intrigued, well, it didn't really fit into that particular post, so I thought I would just discuss it in another, shorter post. 

That splash page seems to show a great swathe of the superheroes that apparently occupied the DCU around the time of publication, including the likes of The Outsiders, The (New) Teen Titans, Captain Marvel, Blue Beetle, Blue Devil, Jack Kirby's Sandman and so on. (I recognize everybody on the page except for that all-yellow woman in the lower right corner and the Black guy whose head is overlapping those of Martian Manhunter and Firestorm...unless that's meant to be Green Lantern John Stewart...? That's my best guess, anyway, as it's not like 1980s DC had that maybe Black superheroes. It's hard to know for sure absent any of his costume though, as he doesn't wear a mask.)

The page is part of a long speech that Hawkman is giving to the rest of the Justice Society of America, just as they are about to decide to disband. Here he talks about the heroes of the world, and I'm going to bold the intriguing bit: 

This other Earth has other heroes--younger ones--many of whom bear the same powers, even the same names that we do. 

True, its people remember, even honor the Justice Society...yet it is the more youthful Justice League which has captured their hearts and minds.  

And the Justice Leaguers themselves are but a small fraction of this world's champions now. 

Some of these heroes are our contemporaries...but the vast majority are far younger. 

And their race is for the most part yet to run. 

When Hawkman refers to "our contemporaries", who is he referring to...?

It's hard to tell from the context, as in this comic, Hawkman and his fellow Society members all seem to understand the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths and some of the changes it had on continuity as well as if they had read the series themselves (As was pointed out to me in a comment following my post on the special, that's on account of the characters having been present at a particular scene set at the beginning of time).

So, it's quite possible he's referring here to the likes of Superman, Batman and Robin and Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel, all of whom, like he and his fellow members of the Justice Society, also debuted in the Golden Age of comics, even if these specific versions of the characters are meant to be distinct from the ones that hailed from Earth-Two and Earth-S.

If he's not referring to them, though, who does that leave among the heroes on this page? 

The only ones who might fit the bill would be Uncle Sam, who first appeared in 1940's National Comics #1, and Plastic Man, who debuted in 1941's Police Comics #1. Both of those titles were published by the defunct Quality Comics, whose various characters and trademarks DC had gotten a hold of back when DC was still known National Comics. 

While Plastic Man had appeared off-and-on in various DC Comics prior to COIE, I've never been entirely clear which "Earth" he belonged to, as there would seem to be multiple Plastic Mans on multiple parallel Earths (The one from All-Star Squadron being from Earth-Two, the one from The Brave and the Bold, DC Comics Presents and Justice League of America #144 being from Earth-One, the one from the 1966 revival apparently hailing from and Earth-12, and Plastic Men apparently also lived on Earth-Quality and Earth-X, right?). 

I haven't followed Uncle Sam as closely, obviously, and DC hasn't made as extensive use of that character over the decades, but I know there's a version of him from Earth-X, and there would also be an Earth-Quality version. 

Anyway, however many Plastic Men or Uncle Sams there were, the events of COIE would seem to collapse them all into a single version, either by synthesizing them or erasing duplicate ones, right? 

Now, in the post-Crisis revised timeline of the history of the new DC Universe, when did these characters debut...?

I'm going to ignore Uncle Sam here, as it's been so damn long since I read 1987's Secret Origins #19, which I had found in a back-issue bin some 25 years ago, and I certainly don't want to go searching for it among all my long boxes (Although, if I recall correctly, the story started during the American Revolution, and thus Uncle Sam predates Hawkman and the Justice Society, even if he was also superheroing in the 1940s when they were; I guess it depends on how one understands the word "contemporary" in this context...)

But as for Plastic Man...? 

Well, there seems to have been some initial confusion following COIE as to whether Plastic Man was a Golden Age hero who debuted in the 1940s, or a contemporary hero who debuted in the 1980s. 

In 1986's History of the DC Universe, the first official accounting of the then-new continuity/history, writer Marv Wolfman never mentions Plastic Man by name, but artist George Perez does draw him with the other heroes of the 1940s: 

That certainly seems to suggest that he was a Golden Age character, right? 

In September of 1988, Roy Thomas, Stephen DeStefano and Paul Fricke retold Plastic Man's origin in the pages of Secret Origins #30. Heavily inspired by Plastic Man creator Jack Cole's original origin from Police Comics and informed by Cole's later, more humorous take on the character's adventures (and guest-starring Cole creation Burp the Twerp), there's no date given as to when the story is meant to be taking place.

That said, in terms of costuming and technology, it is definitely the 1940s, and its few pop culture references—Fibber McGee, Edward G. Robinson—don't appear to place it in the 1980s. Still, how definitive is this story supposed to be? Well, on the letters page, Roy Thomas writes that this origin story was plotted before the next Plastic Man comic, which we will get to in the next paragraph, which would offer a new origin set in the present day. Thomas' comedic script also telegraphs that these things are all quite fluid, with Plas' narration stating, "Anyway, here's the way it happened... Or at least the way I remember it. Take your pick."

Then two months later came the first issue of 1988 miniseries Plastic Man by Phil Foglio, Hilary Barta and company. In this book Plastic Man seems to make his post-Crisis debut, as Eel O'Brien and his gang's heist at a chemical plant goes awry and he gets his powers and his costume, he meets escaped mental patient Woozy Winks and together the pair decide to embark on a new career for Eel as a superhero. 

By the end of the 1980s, then, it would seem that DC had decided that Plastic Man was a Golden Age hero. Or maybe a modern day hero. Depending on whether you read Secret Origins #30 or Plastic Man. 

After 1994's Zero Hour, the events of which saw all of existence de-created and then re-created in a new Big Bang, altering certain elements of world history/DC continuity, the publisher seems to have settled on an answer. 

The last issue of the series, Zero Hour #0, contained a timeline, and, according to that, Plast debuted "8 Years Ago", around the same time Dick Grayson became Robin (In this timeline, "The New Heroic Age" began "10 Years Ago", with the debut of Superman, Batman and the Justice League of America; according to the timeline, Elongated Man debuted a year before Plas, which comports with when Plastic Man first appeared in a DC comic, even if, in the real world, Plastic Man predated Elongated Man by a whole generation).

The now 30-year-old Zero Hour was a few continuity rejiggerings ago, of course, but as to when Plastic Man debuted, well, that doesn't seem to have changed. Last year's New History of the DC Universe, written by Mark Waid, has Plastic Man debuting around the same time as Zatanna and Animal Man, that is, the 1960s our time, and shortly after Superman, Batman and the Justice League DC time again (And, once again, Elongated Man debuts previous to Plas).

So, despite some confusion in the first decade or so after Crisis, and for at least 30 years now, Plastic Man has definitely been meant to belong to the current, New Heroic Age, rather than the original, Golden Age of superheroes.

Which do I, as a Plastic Man fan, prefer...? 

Well, I mentioned this very briefly on Bluesky, in response to something posted by the Neil who has been a great source of Plastic Man discussion online, but I'm of two minds on the matter. 

As one of the greatest comic book superheroes ever created, I think Plastic Man deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of DC's greats, like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel and the first generation of Justice Leaguers. In that regard, it makes sense that he be a character who is part of DC's eternal "now", their so-called "New Heroic Age", where he is peers with Superman, Batman and company.

That said, because his best comics remain those that Cole and/or his later ghosts created in the 1940s and early 1950s, there's a temptation to argue that all those stories should "count", and the easiest way to do that would be to have those comics all be officially in continuity, but then, that would mean Plastic Man would have to be a Golden Ager.

Now, I think the fact that he debuted in the 1940s doesn't preclude him still being around and young and vital today, without so much as going gray at his temples. After all, does plastic Age? Joe Kelley's "Obsidian Age" arc in JLA had Plastic Man survive for thousands of years in pieces strewn about the ocean floor, after which time he was reformed back into himself with little trouble (Even if he kind of went a little insane for a while there; of course, since Foglio's Plastic Man mini, the character has usually been portrayed as at least a little bit insane, so who could tell, really...?).

And as for Woozy, well, perhaps the same magic spell that gave him the protection of nature whenever he was in danger—a "super power" that would come and go in the character's early years, and is now mostly forgotten—also made him functionally immortal, so that, like his pal Plas, he could still look and act the same in 2026 as he did in the 1940s. 

I think either approach works. But I do really like the way Grant Morrison handled the character during Morrison's JLA run. When exactly Plastic Man got his powers never comes up in those stories, and there's never any point in which the length of Plastic Man's career comes up. Why would it, really? It was never important to any of the stories Morrison told during that time.

Still, Morrison did seem to hint that Plas could have been around for a very long time indeed, though.

For example, in the four-part "Crisis Times Five Arc," which teamed the JLA with Captain Marvel and a new, emergent version of the Justice Society (one that would soon evolve into the JSA of their own title), Morrison has Golden Age hero Wildcat say that he knew Plastic Man, at least in his Eel O'Brien identity, back in the day:

Plas' weird "joke" here isn't particularly funny, which is par for the course with Plas' JLA era appearances, but the fact that Wildcat and "O'Brien" have history is notable. 

Were they both kids at the same time? Was O'Brien a kid when Wildcat was an adult? Unclear, of course. (In the very next panel, Wildcat grabs Plas by the throat and says, "You were full of it then and you're full of it now...So let's just try to be professional." Plas' response? A "WAARK" followed by "Everyone's a critic" in a much smaller font).

Later, in Morrison's climactic "World War III" arc, Plastic Man is instrumental in formulating a plan to foil the Queen Bee, and, in introducing it, Plas mentions his association with another Golden Age hero, The Red Bee:

Red Bee, by the way, was another Quality Comics hero. 

The lesson, I think, is that it's more important to tell awesome comics than to get hung up on continuity, of course, but Morrison used continuity quite well throughout JLA, and, in these two examples anyway, wrote Plastic Man in such a way that he could either be a long-lived Golden Age hero or a modern day hero who just happened to have had off-panel associations with some Golden Agers. Whatever, I guess, the reader decided to read into those lines of dialogue. 

Two Justice League stories of note from the pages of Secret Origins

I wish DC Comics would get around to collecting the 50-issue, 1986-1990 Secret Origins series, perhaps in an omnibus or two, or a couple of DC Finest collections. And I hope they do so before I manage to track down all of the issues of interest to me before I find them in back-issue bins or on Comixology. (Oh, and I just found that a bunch of the stories featuring Golden Age heroes collected in 2017's Last Days of the Justice Society of America trade.)

I recently read two issues, 1988's Secret Origins #32 and 1989's Secret Origins #46, both of which feature stories starring the founding members of the Justice League of America...or at least the post-Crisis founders, meaning that Black Canary had replaced Wonder Woman in the line-up (This version of the team is the one that starred in Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn and Barry Kitson's 1998 maxi-series JLA: Year One; it was the canonical original line-up between 1985-1986's Crisis On Infinite Earths, which removed Wonder Woman as a founder during the publisher's first major continuity rejiggering, and 2005-2006's Infinite Crisis, which restored her status as a founder). 

Now, one of the things that fascinates me about this volume of Secret Origins is the covers, which more often than not depict the characters whose origins are featured within interacting in some way, even though they do not actually do so within. This often means the covers suggest unlikely team-ups, like Adam Strange and Doctor Occult or Black Lightning and Miss America, or unlikely match-ups, like Green Lantern and Poison Ivy or Animal Man and Man-Bat. My favorite is, of course, is Ty Templeton's cover for Secret Origins #30, depicting a Plastic Man/Elongated Man meeting of sorts.

Because of this, I expected Secret Origins #32 to contain origin stories for both the original Justice League of America and the Justice League International, given that both teams were on the cover. As it turns out, however, the entirety of the issue is filled with a 38-page origin for the JLoA, and the JLI is limited to the cover appearance*. 

The story, entitled "All Together Now", is the work of Keith Giffen, Peter David and Eric Shanower, providing the plot, the dialogue and the art, respectively. Gardner Fox also gets a credit for "Story", as this story is a retelling of he and Mike Sekowsky's 1962 Justice League of America #9. 

In Gardner's original, Snapper Carr arrives at the Happy Harbor headquarters to find the Leaguers preparing for a party to celebrate the anniversary of the team's founding, and they relate their first case to him, in which they faced off against bizarre alien creatures from the planet Apellax, each of which was wildly different from the next, and had the strange ability to transform victims into the same material as them (stone, wood, mercury, yellow bird, etc.)

In the Secret Origins version, this adventure isn't presented as a story within a story, but simply as a story. It opens on Apellax with the same basic backstory, although in this version the Apellaxians are all more-or-less identical, and the strange shapes they take on Earth are presented as special "battle forms." 

Each of these end up encountering a different superhero, the five on the monitor on the cover. These five heroes all convene at the site of a sixth Apellaxian, and work together to defeat it. There is a seventh one that Superman deals with, although he does so off panel, and he himself is barely in the story.

The main difference here is that Black Canary has replaced Wonder Woman, of course, and that Batman, who only plays a very minor role in Fox's story, is completely MIA. Giffen also switches the alien battle forms around a bit. Here Aquaman fights a mercury creature rather than a glass one, while Canary fights the glass creature rather that the mercury one that Wonder Woman had originally fought. This is presumably because Black Canary's canary cry power is a good fit for fighting a shatter-able glass creature.

Interestingly, David's script, most of which involves the heroes thinking or talking to themselves, has each character express the desire for allies of some kind at one point or another. 

"It would be so nice to have friends, comrades, who I know would accept me as I am," Martian Manhunter thinks while assuming his green-skinned form and flying away from the police station he works at in his disguise as human being John Jones. 

"Speaking as a newcomer, I'd love the idea of working with more experienced people," Black Canary tells the others on the penultimate page. (This adventure apparently occurs during her very first patrol as the new Black Canary; that's a heck of a first day on the job.)

Aside from the way the story rewrites a classic one from decades prior, this story is mostly of interest because of Shanower's superior artwork. It's as stately as that of Sekowsky, but much more realistic while also being a great deal more dynamic.

Shanower shows a particular facility for expressions, and there are several panels I lingered over just to admire the way he showed, say, Hal Jordan reaction when he realizes his opponent is yellow, or J'onn J'onnz pondering the reaction of civilians who lay eyes on him in his Martian form, or Flash slapping himself on the forehead when he realizes something. 

It's really some of the best Justice League art I've ever seen.

A few more things seem worth noting. In the original, after they defeat the wood Apellaxian, the heroes all travel to Greenland, where Superman and Batman are fighting a diamond Apellaxian. There, Batman suggests they form "a club or society", to which Flash responds, "A league against evil! Our purpose will be to uphold justice against whatever danger threatens it!"

Here, the heroes learn that there is a final Apellaxian in Antarctica, and arrive to find Superman dusting off his hands while standing above what looks like a pile of ashes, having apparently just defeated the alien. As they approach the Man of Steel though, he takes off without ever even acknowledging them. David's thought balloons let us know what's going on inside his Kryptonian noggin:

Just my luck! Lois was about to give poor Clark a tumble--and suddenly I had to make excuses and fly off!

If I hurry, I might still be able to salvage this--

I guess the implication is that he is so distracted thinking about Lois that he doesn't notice the other superheroes over his shoulder, but I'm not sure I buy that. How does a guy with super-hearing and super-vision not notice the big green guy, Green Lantern, and three other colorfully dressed characters being towed in a big, glowing green orb...?

"He didn't even notice us!" Flash says in the panel after Superman departs. "Bet the 'S' stands for 'Snob.'" Aquaman defends Superman, though: "Oh ease off," he says. "He probably had something really cosmic on his mind."

Nope. He's just thinking about his work crush. 

The scene reads a bit awkwardly, and I imagine the story would be improved had Giffen just left Superman out of it entirely, given that the Man of Steel wasn't going to end up joining the others in forming the Justice League.

Instead, Green Lantern flies them back to a city, and Flash proposes they form a team, during which David makes what seems like a rather customary Peter David groaner of a joke:

On the final page, a splash, they settle on Justice League of America, and a broadly smiling Hal Jordan asks, "Do you think anyone else will join?" That's the image at the top of the post.

If you've never read this story before, do take a moment to scrutinize the heroes floating in the sky above, their presence apparently meant to answer Hal's question.

In addition to Batman, Green Arrow, The Atom and Snapper Car, we see the heroes who will join during the "Satellite Era" (Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Elongated Man, Zatanna, Red Tornado and Firestorm) and the "Detroit Era" (Steel, Vixen, Gypsy and Vibe). Even The Phantom Stranger, whose membership status has always been a bit equivocal, is pictured. 

As no one from the post-Legends League is up there, it seems clear that the creators have drawn a bright line between the Justice League of America and the Justice League International (Even if the JLI first appeared in a book called Justice League, before the book changed its name to Justice League International...and then changed it again to Justice League America).

There are two pretty notable characters missing: Superman and Wonder Woman. 

Given that Crisis changed continuity so that Diana didn't come to Man's World until right then, in the late 1980s, it of course makes sense that she's not there (I guess in the post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis continuity, Wonder Woman didn't join the Justice League until 1989's JLI #24, after which she was on Justice League Europe for, what, one issue...? She would rejoin the League around 1993, though, and stick with the team until the JLA relaunch, during which she was of course a member).

And Superman? Well, I never read John Byrne's Superman comics, but based on this comic, it would appear Superman was never on the Justice League of America, at least in the post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis continuity, and thus I guess he didn't actually join any incarnation of the Justice League until Dan Jurgens took over Justice League America in 1992...?

Oh, and if you're wondering what the current status of the Apellaxian invasion/founding of the Justice League is today, in 2026, after more continuity reboots than I can easily recall, well, according to Mark Waid's New History of the DC Universe, sometime after the events of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's 2011-2012 Justice League #1-6, "The Justice League wasn't formalized as a team until a subsequent alien invasion from the planet Appellax caused J'onn J'onnz, a.k.a. Martian Manhunter, to step into the limelight and brought Dinah Lance, the Black Canary into play when she assumed the costumed identity of her mother." (The timeline in the back of the collection also places JLA: Year One in continuity, saying that Wonder Woman, like Batman and Superman, would rejoin the team sometime later, after its "formalized" founding).

This story has only been collected once, and so long ago that finding that collection probably isn't any easier than finding this issue. That collection was 1990's Secret Origins of the World's Greatest Super-Heroes trade paperback, with the extremely fun Brian Bolland cover showing Superman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter, posing in the background in their heroic identities, while their civilian secret identities interact in the foreground. 

That trade, by the way, was 150 pages and sold for just $4.95, if you need a good reminder of how much things have changed since 1990. 

As for the JLoA story from Secret Origins #46, it is one of three from an interestingly thematic issue of the series, telling the origins of various superhero headquarters: The League's original Happy Harbor base, the Titans' T-shaped Titans Tower, and the Legion of Super-Heroes' original crashed rocket ship-looking base. 

I'm only going to address the Justice League story here, as that's the only one I've read so far (I have a hard time working up any interest at all in the Legion or this iteration of the Titans, even though I know the Marv Wolfman/George Perez run on the team is widely regarded as the best; I will point out that the Titans story features artwork by Vince Giarrano, which is in an entirely different style than that he employed during the '90s on Manhunter, various Batman comics and other works, more David Mazzucchelli than Rob Liefeld or Erik Larsen. Oh, and the LOSH story is the first appearance of Arm-Fall-Off-Boy, by the way). 

The thing that most interested me in this story was that it was written by Grant Morrison, and was thus Morrison's first Justice League story, written eight years before JLA. Prior to this, Morrison's only DC work was the earlier issues of Animal Man and Doom Patrol and Arkham Asylum. Members of the JLI made appearances in Animal Man and Doom Patrol (Buddy Baker was briefly in Justice League Europe, remember, and Blue Beetle and Booster Gold show up in Doom Patrol #28, with more heroes appearing in #29, cover dated after this issue of Secret Origins), but this was Morrison's first story in which the League were the featured characters. 

Morrison could hardly have asked for a better collaborator, as the artist for the story was the legendary Curt Swan, here inked and colored by George Freeman. The art is thus, unsurprisingly, gorgeous, and the Justice League has rarely looked better (Stylistically, Swan and Freeman's Justice League art is fairly similar to that of Shanower in the first Justice League story discussed in this post). 

The 14-page story opens with a splash page depicting a bizarre milieu: The Justice League battling their own costumes. The scene recalls classic, Silver Age DC Comics, like the team battling their own weapons on the cover of JLoA #53 or, more directly still, "The Battle Against the Bodiless Uniforms from JLoA #35 (The empty costumes also reminded me of The Invisible Destroyer from 1959's Showcase Presents #23).

After the title page's splash, we open in Central City, "Some years ago," where Barry Allen is literally pushing a particularly hot-looking Iris West out of his apartment while making a lame excuse; in reality, he's running late for "the first real meeting of the Justice League of America." 

Once his Flash costume pops out of his ring, however, it displays a quite creepy life of its own, pausing long enough to laugh "HA HA HA" and then streaking away at super-speed; Barry dons a spare costume and gives chase, following it to Rhode Island, where the rest of the nascent League is assembled, their similarly animated empty costumes encased in a green force bubble created by Green Lantern (All had spare costumes save Aquaman, who is there naked, except for a pair of black swim trunks; "This was the best I could manage," he shrugs. Hell, it works for Namor!).

The others fill Flash in on what's they have found out so far—namely that the costumes seem to be inhabited by alien minds that want something in the mountain—which saves time, as this is a rather short story. 

To find out what's going on inside the mountain that the aliens may be interested in, Flash plans to vibrate into it, but just before he can do so, the costumes break free of the force bubble, the Flash costume's yellow boots apparently kicking through it at super-speed.

Meanwhile, no sooner does Flash vibrate into the mountain than a mysterious voice, the same one that appears in sketchy blue boxes like the one that said "But first...tell me your story" on the opening splash, greets Flash and starts telling him its story.

This unfolds over eight horizontal panels across two pages, and the voice is apparently that of the mountain itself, speaking in purple, poetic dialogue of its origins in the Pre-Cambrian, and what followed over the millennia, a highlight of which is a strange alien vessel that disgorges even stranger aliens during dinosaur times.

Finally breaking free, Flash relays that the mountain is a sort of giant stone computer storing information that can be released via vibration, and he does so in what reads exactly like the sort of dialogue one could expect from the Morrison of the late-'90s. Morrison had apparently already found a distinct, even signature voice. 

The mystery solved, the team uses their powers to unlock visual memories of the aliens landing all those millions of years ago, the possessed costumes abandoning the fight to silently watch the images of their long-dead people. ("They've come here to pay their respects to their dead," Flash explains). 

As to why the aliens chose to inhabit the Leaguers' costumes, well, Morrison never gets to that. Nor is it explained why the Flash's costume has his super-speed powers.

The team obviously decides to make this mountain their headquarters, though, and the mountain again narrates, this time flashing forward to the League's time there, and noting that now, whenever "some small creature" passes through it, the animal will "unlock the lattice memory" within it, temporarily generating ghosts of the Justice League, the mountain's memories of their time within it replaying themselves.

I can't imagine what readers in 1989 might have thought of the story. Were they happy to see the "real" League again, after years of first the Detroit League and then the JLI? Were they irritated about the retconned version of the League, now absent Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman? Did they think Morrison's story clever and smartly written...or pretentious?

I don't know. I liked it. It essentially reads like a sci-fi ghost story tied to deep Justice League history, one that, as I noted, evokes the Silver Age while being told in a modern, more sophisticated style (itself a very Morrisonian thing). And, again, it's obviously gorgeous looking. 

Somewhat surprisingly, this story doesn't seem to have ever been collected anywhere, which is another good argument for DC to work on some sort of Secret Origins collection. 

*The founding of the JLI iteration of the Justice League the previous year was probably still new enough that there was no real reason to re-present its origins in this title. Notably though, the three issues that followed this issue were devoted to individual heroes from the JLI, three origins per issue. So, Mister Miracle, Green Flame (not yet Fire), Icemaiden (not yet Ice), Captain Atom, Rocket Red, G'Nort, Martian Manhunter, Max Lord and Booster Gold's origins were all told in Secret Origins #33-35, all of which featured connecting covers by pencil artist Jerry Ordway and inker Ty Templeton. As for JLI regulars Blue Beetle and Guy Garnder, their origins had already been told in Secret Origins #2 and #7, respectively.

Isn't this the exact thing people used to argue was necessary in order to save the comics industry...?

I've been blogging about comics here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday for about 20 years now but even before that I used to read about and very occasionally talk about comics online, mostly on the DC Comics message boards and the handful of comics news sites that were around at the time. One thing I used to hear said an awful lot back then was that the one thing that could save the comics industry* would be if publishers could just get their books back in grocery stores and drugstores, where they could be seen and purchased by kids and other new readers, thus growing the market beyond those that already patronize their local comics specialty shops.

Well guess what I saw in the checkout aisle at the grocery store?

Shelved among the latest issues of People and Woman's World and, um, some books of word searches was a magazine simply entitled Justice League, the cover featuring a Jim Lee drawing of the New 52 League (note the presence of Cyborg, and Superman's lack of red briefs) and the words "Four acclaimed comic book stories by all-star writers and artists!"

I was surprised to see it there, although I suppose I shouldn't be. I had previously seen similar magazine format collections of reprints focused on Batman and Superman in the same store, although those were in the magazine section, rather than right here in the checkout aisle, where a kid could presumably spot it and ask his or her parent if they could get it.

This was for a very long time Archie Comics' whole business model, selling digest collections of their comics in grocery store check-out lines and, according to Tim Hanley's book Betty and Veronica, it was a model that helped save the publisher when the comics market was contracting and specialty shops started to replace newsstands and spinner racks as the places that people bought comics. 

Of course, this collection costs $14.99, which seems like a fairly steep price for an impulse buy, although I suppose that's about what magazines tend to cost these days. (There weren't any Archie digests on sale there to compare it to, but according to the publisher's online store, one of their upcoming digests costs $9.99 for about 100 pages). 

Comics readers will likely find that price point pretty high, though, as that's $15 for only 84 pages of comics, all of them reprints. That price is approaching trade paperback level. I mean, Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, the latest trade paperback collection featuring the Justice League, costs $17.99, and that collects six issues, or about 120 pages.  

I did ask my sister if she would buy a $15 magazine for my nephew if he asked for it in the checkout line of the grocery store, and she said she would, as she encourages any kind of reading. Given that this is a survey of just one parent though, I can't be sure how representative she is of the average parent. 

So, what are the four acclaimed stories by all-star writers and artists collected within? A quartet of timeless, evergreen done-in-ones? Ha ha, no don't be silly. Rather, they are the first issues from four different Justice League titles from the last 30 years or so, and I couldn't discern the logic for the order in which they appear; they are neither chronological (that is, oldest to newest) nor reverse chronological (newest to oldest). 

Also, somewhat surprisingly, though the magazine is magazine-sized rather than comic book sized, the comics pages within have been blown-up or reformatted in anyway. They're at comic book page-sized, they just all have wide borders that fill up the rest of the extra space. 

Anyway, here's what $15 will get you at the grocery store...

Justice League Unlimited #1 (2025) by Mark Waid and Dan Mora This seems to be a smart, even obvious choice, as this is the first issue of the current Justice League title, one that's only about a year old at this point (DC has only published one, maybe one and a half collections of it so far, depending on how you want to count Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday).

It introduces various plot elements that won't be resolved for a while (the mysterious villain team Inferno, for example) and it ends on a fairly potent cliffhanger (with point-of-view character Airwave confessing to the readers in a narration box that he's only joined the Justice League in order to kill them all). But, at the same time, the first half or so of the issue pretty thoroughly introduces the premise of this particular Justice League book, that of a massive, army-like super-League consisting of pretty much every superhero in the DC Universe.

The early scenes, in which Airwave arrives on the new team's new satellite Watchtower headquarters, is chock-full of appearances by various heroes, making this story a pretty strong introduction to the breadth of the DC Universe. Skimming through the book again as I pound this post out (I had previously reviewed the first trade paperback collection of the series in this column), I counted over 50 heroes appearing in some fashion, including those you might expect in a modern Justice League comic (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, a The Flash), some less likely candidates (Firestorm, Black Lightning, Star Sapphire, a Kid Flash) and some pretty deep cuts (Tuatara, for example; he doesn't just cameo, but is name-dropped as well, as Red Tornado sends him off on an off-panel mission with a few others). 

The issue, and the next five, are collected in the aforementioned Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, which was then followed by Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday. Other characters and concepts introduced in these 20 pages are followed up on in various spin-offs too, like Challengers of the Unknown, The Question: All Along the Watchtower and Justice League: The Atom Project. The JLU title is still ongoing, and the last issue to ship as of this writing seems to be #16.

I have some concerns about JLU—mainly that the book seems to offer a status quo rather than a story or stories, and, increasingly, that it's meant to serve as a bridge between various big event series like Absolute Power and DC K.O.—but in terms of quality, that first issue was solid. 

There are certainly worse creators a new DC reader could choose to follow after this series than Waid and Mora, too. The former has decades of quality series and miniseries on his resume (including various Justice League-related books), and Mora is one of the best artists drawing super-comics for DC at the moment...or drawing them for anyone else, for that matter. 

Justice League #1 (2011) by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Scott Williams I was a little surprised to see this one in here. Not just because this was the first chapter of The New 52 version of the Justice League's origin and the New 52 continuity has since been rebooted away (Although according to New History of the DC Universe, this story, or at least some version of it, still happened in current continuity, it just would have had to happen fairly differently). No, I was mostly surprised because it's not really much of a Justice League story. Despite the whole team appearing on the cover, the issue itself is basically just a Batman/Green Lantern team-up; the only other Leaguers to appear at all are Superman, who is one panel, and a pre-Cyborg Victor Stone, who is on a couple of pages.

This issue (and the story arc it is a part of) has been collected and recollected several times now, starting with 2012's Justice League Vol. 1: Origin (There have also been deluxe, "Absolute" and "Unwrapped" editions since). This iteration of the title would last 52 issues, with Johns writing the first 50 of them (Lee would draw two arcs, the first one and "The Villain's Journey"). 

As I was a Justice League fan, I wasn't exactly enamored with this story or this run (or the New 52 in general), which jettisoned DC comics history/continuity to offer a new "Ultimate" style reboot. 

Johns' greatest strength as a DC writer was his ability to finesse thorny continuity into things that mostly made sense, solving the storytelling problems that occurred when various writers over the decades took turns on the characters, synthesizing past, sometimes contradictory stories into something that felt natural, even intentional. The New 52 stripped him of that, of course. 

Lee is, obviously, a pretty great artist, and this arc was a decent showcase for him—although the number of splash pages in this first issue is striking and, if you happened to have bought the issue in 2011, annoying—but he's not the best character designer, and the New 52 Justice League notoriously had him redesigning some of the best and most iconic characters in history. I mean, can one really improve on Superman's costume? No, but Lee tried and, well, you can see what that looked like. (Even the costumes he left mostly alone, like Carmine Infantino's Flash costume and Gil Kane's Green Lantern costume, were given more, fussier lines.)

And, again, because The New 52 continuity is now over, I'm not sure there's a whole lot to really recommend this iteration of the Justice League book to new readers. Although if you are a Jim Lee fan, then there are at least two trade collections of him drawing a Justice League you might want to check out.

Justice League #1 (2018) by Scott Snyder, Jim Cheung and Mark Morales The Scott Snyder-written iteration of the Justice League book spun out of his Dark Nights: Metal event series and Justice League: No Justice miniseries, and his line-up seemed to be an in-comics re-creation of the that in the old Justice League cartoon series, with Hawkgirl, Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern John Stewart rejoining after pretty long absences from each. (You'll note Cyborg is on the cover, and, in this issue at least, he is presented as a member of the current team, while John is called in as a secret weapon at one point; Cyborg will pretty immediately leave this "main" league, joining the splinter team in the spin-off Justice League Odyssey, while John will essentially replace him on the team.)

In this issue, the already formed Justice League, headquartered in the Hall of Justice, fight a long-term scheme of Vandal Savage's, the heroes keeping in touch via J'onn's telepathy while they fight against Savage's armies on various mini-missions. Each is assisted by a guest-star or two—Green Arrow, Adam Strange, Plastic Man, Mister Terrific, Swamp Thing, etc.—although these do little more than cameo. While the League staves off that threat, it's actually Lex Luthor and his new (rather small) Legion of Doom that ultimately confront Savage. 

Meanwhile, a mysterious threat from beyond the Source Wall streaks like a comet towards Earth, space-time swirling "like road dust" behind it, while various other cameos look on (The 853rd Century's Justice Legion-A, Kamandi, a Monitor, The Quintessence).

Like the previous issue collected in the magazine, this issue has been collected and re-collected plenty of times; I just re-read it in a library-borrowed electronic copy of Justice League by Scott Snyder Book One The Deluxe Edition. 

Snyder's run, which featured a few fill-in issues from writer James Tynion IV and art from a whole bunch of different artists, lasted about 39 issues. The title continued for another 36 issues though, with writers Robert Venditti, Simon Spurrier, Jeff Loveness, Joshua Williamson, Brian Michael Bendis and the team of Andy Lanning and Ron Marz all following Snyder, some of them writing enough issues to constitute a "run", others only writing a story arc. The title was then cancelled with issue #75, as part of the lead-up to Williamsons Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

I read all of the Snyder issues (and the rest of the title more sporadically), so I guess it was good enough that I never dropped it. It was well-written, and the art was never terrible (although it would have been nice if Snyder had a true, regular, consistent partner on his run). What is both noteworthy—and really weird—about Snyder's run is that it is essentially just one big, long story arc, about the Justice League fighting the Legion of Doom (Luthor, Grodd, Sinestro, Black Manta and Cheetah...The Joker, who is in this first issue, would leave almost immediately) over fundamental forces of the universe, and the direction that the universe was to take...towards justice, or towards doom. 

Snyder also introduced some cosmic beings that played into his own messing around with the nature of DC continuity and the multiverse.

It had its moments (most of them revolving around Starro and Jarro), but, seen from the remove of years, it now seems a lot like an ongoing series devoted to marking time, acting as a bridge between Snyder's Dark Nights: Metal and his Dark Nights: Death Metal. Because of that, I can't really remember the specifics of any single issue or arc within the overall narrative, nor have I ever been tempted to revisit it. 

JLA #1 (1997) By Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell The final issue collected in here is the first of the Morrison/Porter/Dell JLA, which took the then novel (if obvious) approach of re-teaming the Justice League's founders (with the legacy versions of The Flash and Green Lantern taking the places of their then-dead predecessors). It was the first time that some version of these seven heroes had starred in a Justice League title together since the early 1980s, and thus seemed pretty fresh, new and exciting then.

I do wonder how readers seeing this comic for the very first time might react to certain aspects of it. Would they know who this Kyle Rayner character was? Would they wonder at all about Aquaman's design, with the gladiator armor and harpoon hand? Or why Superman has a mullet? Or perhaps why Martian Manhunter seems so nude?

The issue opens with a UFO landing on the White House lawn. Out of it steps a golden, caped man named Protex and his superhero team The Hyperclan, who say have come to save the world and deal with all of its problems...even if they do so in a much harsher way than any Justice League ever has (At one point, they execute supervillains tied to posts with their eyebeams; Porter draws one of them to resemble Marvel's Wolverine). They are met by Superman, and he and various other heroes aren't so sure about the Hyperclan's methods or promises of quick fixes to long-term problems.

At one point, mysterious assailants assault the then-Justice League America's satellite base, knocking it out of the sky, and forcing Leaguers Metamorpho, Ice Maiden, Obsidian and Nuklon to a desperate gamble to save their own lives (Metamorpho, who transforms himself into an escape capsule, dies in the process, or at least seems to die in the process; his funeral is then held in JLA #5 but, like all superheroes, and like Morrison hints during the funeral, he will eventually get better).

In this first issue, all of the incoming Leaguers appear, except Aquaman, who will be reluctantly drafted into the brewing fight against the Hyperclan in JLA #2. Superman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman (who was leading the previous League, the team who flee the satellite, in Justice League America, the title that JLA would replace) get the most panel time, while Martian Manhunter and Batman get the least, the latter showing up in the last five panels, and uttering "HH!" for the first time.

(I love how Potrter poses Batman there, melodramatically stalking around, gesturing like a vampire; this is pretty consistent with how then Batman artist Kelley Jones was drawing him.)

Frankly, I could talk about this title, and this particular story arc, for thousands of words, but that's probably enough for this post. 

This issue, and this arc, has also been collected and recollected over and over. If you've never read it and would like to, basically just look for any book with "JLA", "Grant Morrison" and a "1" on the cover. 

Morrison's run would last through issue #41, with maybe a half-dozen fill-in issues, and include JLA/WildC.A.T.s (did I spell that right?), original graphic novel JLA: Earth-2 and event series DC One Million.  Porter and Dell drew most of it, with fill-in artists needed here and there to meet deadlines (These include Oscar Jimenez on #8 and #9, Mark Pajarillo here and there and, surprisingly, the likes of Greg Land and Gary Frank, among a few others). 

Morrison was followed by Mark Waid and Joe Kelly on JLA, which would ultimately run 125 issues, and, after Kelly's run, the book became an anthology series with rotating creative teams until it was finally canceled in 2006 as part of the events of Infinite Crisis. 

I am likely prejudiced and influenced by nostalgia to some degree, as this was my first introduction to the Justice League, but Morrison and company's JLA was (and is) one of my favorite comic book runs ever; revisiting it now and then, I still think it holds up as one of the best superhero comics ever.

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Previous to the comics portion of this magazine, there's a two-page introduction by a Jim McLaughlin, under the headline "Top Heroes. Top Talent." It's maybe 500-800 words, tops, and seems to do a decent enough job of offering a sort of elevator pitch to the Justice League concept and then introducing the writers, pencil artists and concepts for each of the issues included. The thesis seems to be that the idea of the Justice League was to unite the best DC characters into one book, which naturally produced the best comics by the best creators.

It's a decent piece given its brevity and I wouldn't argue with its main points, publisher boosterism aside, although I will nitpick it (I also would have attached the names Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky when mentioning 1960's Brave and the Bold #28). I mean, you know how wordy I am; I would struggle mightily to produce a piece that hit all these points in so few words.

The parts I found most interesting, maybe even revealing, were the ways in which McLaughlin described the writers and pencillers.

Mark Waid isn't just "one of comics' most acclaimed and award-winning scribes," but he is also "the scholar, the teacher." And Dan Mora? Well, he's "a 30-something hotshot who burst out of Costa Rica to become one of comics' most dazzling talents almost overnight." (Overnight, I guess, if you don't count his pre-DC work for the likes of Boom, although you should count it; it's also great!).

Upon relaunching the League for the New 52, Geoff Johns was "writer and executive producer of DC's The Flash TV show and Wonder Woman movies", rather than one of super-comics' most popular writers, who then had a decade of experience writing most of DC's biggest heroes, teams and events, and had even managed to make books starring less-than topline characters like Hal Jordan and the Justice Society into hits. (As for the New 52, that was "a groundbreaking slate" of comics "that grabbed both critical acclaim and massive sales success." Sales? Sure. Acclaim? Eh...the fan press sure like Scott Snyder's Batman, but I'm having trouble thinking of many—or any—critical darlings among that mess. Refresh my memory, if you do.)

Scott Snyder's run on Batman was also "groundbreaking", according to McLaughlin, and Jim Cheung is an excellent draftsman. Together, their book—which Cheung didn't last all that long on, intentionally built a lineup to "echo" that of "the smash-hit Justice League animated series."

And finally, we get to Grant Morrison, "a madman-with-a-plan writer who cut his teeth on DC Imprints books." (McLaughlin also refers to Morrison as "he" here, rather than Morrison's preferred pronoun "they", which I can definitely relate to, as EDILW readers have repeatedly had to call me out for doing so here and on Bluesky; still, it's probably embarrassing to do so in print, rather than online, where it's so easily fixed).

I found the "DC Imprints" phrase...weird. Yes, Morrison wrote some Vertigo books (And why not just say "Vertigo" instead of "DC Imprints", with a capital "I" in "Imprints"?). These included Sebastian O, The Mystery Play, Kill Your Boyfriend and Flex Mentallo. But before that, Morrison had written Animal Man and Doom Patrol (Morrison's runs on each title concluding before these books were absorbed into the new Vertigo imprint in 1993, although certainly Morrison's work helped establish the Vertigo aesthetic). And, of course, there was Morrison's earlier Batman work, the original graphic novel Arkham Asylum and the Legends of the Dark Knight arc "Gothic" (the latter of which was collected into a trade paperback, back when such collections were relatively rare). That's just the DC stuff, though; prior to that Morrison "cut his teeth" (or "their teeth") on comics in the UK, of course.

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Anyway, it's nice to see that DC Comics' Justice League comic is finally taking its place in the grocery store checkout aisle, alongside such other important pieces of American pop culture, like, let's see here...

...ground beef, Sydney Sweeney's breasts and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's "epic" romance, I guess. 

*And by "comics industry", I think they just meant "the direct market" or "DC and Marvel as publishers that release series as floppies once a month".

No one ever told me that Grant Morrison wrote Spawn.

It wasn't until I was writing about the first two Batman/Spawn crossovers (here and here) for the blog that I discovered Grant Morrison had written a Spawn arc in 1993 and 1994. I was looking at what was going on in the title around the time of the crossovers, and was quite surprised to see Morrison's name in the credits, as the writer has long since become one of my favorite super-comics writers (Thanks mostly to his JLA run that started a few years later, at which point I started actively hunting down their past work while looking forward to their new work.)

I had, at that point, dropped Spawn and, after returning for the guest-writer stunt run of issues #8-11, I stopped paying attention to the series altogether. I suppose if I did know that Morrison was going to take over the book for three issues back then, it wouldn't have really moved me to spend any of the little money I had to spend on comics back then on the arc. 

At that point, I only knew Morrison as a pretty great Batman writer with a pair of graphic novels to his name, Arkham Asylum and Batman: Gothic being the only work of theirs that I had read at that point (I think; I wouldn't read his Animal Man or Doom Patrol until much later). His presence wouldn't have excited me like having the writers of Watchmen, Sandman, Cerebus and The Dark Knight Returns guest-write an issue. 

Curious if I could find the Morrison-written issues now, 31 years later, I was pleasantly surprised to find my library system had something called Spawn Compendium 1, a 1000+-page doorstop published in 2021 that collected the first 50 issues of the series (Which, in addition to an arc by Morrison, also included a second issue guest-written by Alan Moore, 1995's #37...which I also intend to write about in the near future. Sorry readers with no interest in Spawn!*).

(Oh, and if you're wondering, I did briefly consider reading and maybe reviewing my way through the whole compendium, but a flip-through convinced me I wouldn't enjoy doing so at this point. While Todd McFarlane's art has some virtues I can still appreciate, I don't really enjoy it that much, and I find many of his designs off-putting. I'm also not a fan of the coloring or the lettering, which feel very '90s to me in a bad way. Still, I think this is a pretty nice package for anyone interested in the early years of the character and comic, and I appreciated the opportunity to re-read the Dave Sim-written issue without messing with my longboxes, for example, or finding the Morrison issues and later Moore issue. If I have any complaint about the collection, it's that it doesn't reproduce the covers between issues, making navigating it a little hard and, besides, some of those covers are really great...although this one remains my favorite.)

So anyway, Grant Morrison wrote three issues of Spawn in the early '90s! How did the visionary superhero comic book writer handle one of the dark characters most emblematic of the decade? Let's find out, shall we?

Morrison wrote issues #16-18, collaborating not with McFarlane, but with pencil artist Greg Capullo, who was here making his debut on the character, inked by Dan Panosian, Art Thibert and Mark Pennington. McFarlane, who I imagine was busy drawing Spawn/Batman #1, didn't even contribute covers; those are by Capullo too. 

The story arc revolves around two different militaries' interest in Spawn. The first is the U.S. military, which Spawn apparently worked for in some capacity back when he was still Al Simmons, and was still alive (In the handful of Spawn comics I've read, Spawn/Simmons is, kinda like the '90s Wolverine, dealing with a fractured memory, so that his own history with black ops government work is mysterious even to him). 

The second is the army of Heaven, represented by warrior angels, which seems to have been a concept introduced by (now rightly canceled) guest-writer Neil Gaiman in his Spawn #9, which introduced the mostly naked angelic character Angela, over whom he and McFarlane would go on to argue about in court for years (But let's not get into that here).

The former is interested in part due to Simmons' work for them, and in part because they want to weaponize Hell, which they have learned is composed of a substance called "psychoplasm", which can be shaped by the human mind, usually to respond to its worst fears. The latter in interested as part of the eternal war between Heaven and Hell, and Spawn is a kinda sorta warrior for Hell ("Spawn" is, of course, short for "Hellspawn"); that's where he gets his magical super-powers, after all.

The first issue opens with a seven-page sequence in which a pair of soldiers are sent into a place called "Simmonsville". "Private joke," explains Jason Wynn to army officer Major Vale, who he is sort of explaining/selling the place to, in a series of narration boxes that run over the action.

That action? The soldiers enter a creepily empty small town, when out of the ground rise a pair of demons, giant, bent creatures with big bug eyes, cartoonishly wide mouths with long, lower jaws and tongues, thin arms and claw-tipped fingers. Capullo draws them as clear members of the same species as McFarlane's Violator, the first denizen of Hell introduced into the series. 

These are revealed on a two-page splash that requires one to turn the book sideways to see properly.

As Wynn explains, Simmmonsville is apparently composed of the psychoplasm Wynn was given after contacting some entities from Hell, and it is built of memories of places Simmons had lived in before. The two demons proceed to gorily kill the soldiers, one of them dragging the last surviving soldier into a nearby house, slamming the front door behind him, and then we see a fountain of blood shoot out of the chimney. 

"Cut to New York City", a narration box says, and there we see Spawn crouching on a gargoyle which is too weird looking to imagine even on a Gotham City building, as he gathers his voluminous cape dramatically behind him and rain falls. 

The narration box says that "he broods," while other narration boxes stylized so as to suggest they are Spawn's thoughts speak of various questions about his life and death, like who killed him, how it is that he has a body now and who it is that's buried in Al Simmons' grave.

He is interrupted from his brooding by a pair of young men who have cornered a homeless man in an alley. One holds a can of gasoline, the other a lighter, and the latter tells the homeless man, "We're just a couple of concerned citizens tryin' to do something about the homeless problem...We call it the 'Burn a Bum' scheme."

And yes, this is the exact same situation that Frank Miller had Spawn intervene in during Spawn/Batman #1, which would see publication a few months after this. Apparently bad guys attempting to set homeless people on fire was a regular problem Spawn had to address (Here he does so by breaking one guy's hand and sending the other one flying with an uppercut).

Meanwhile, in a mysterious skyscraper in Manhattan, two women in business suits who are apparently angels from Heaven discuss "the Earthbound Hellspawn who defeated Angela recently", and their new orders, received over the phone, "to create our own solider to destroy the creature."

These characters are, by the way, named Gabrielle and Michaela, names that are only mildly more creative for angels-posing-as-women than that of "Angela." (The former appeared in the Gaiman/McFarlane issue, #9, by the way; Angela checks in with her at her office before she begins her hunt for Spawn.)

How does Heaven go about making a soldier? Here they have a satellite, which they have apparently taken control of by possessing the astronauts stationed there (Their bald heads are split open at the top, a starburst of energy pouring out of them and forming a sort of halo, and their eyes similarly emanate light). These now speak in a special stylized font and dialogue balloons, of which there are so many in this book. 

They proceed to abduct Wynn—who has just finished a Kingpin-like workout, fighting a couple of ninjas he hired to train with—a terrifying-looking event that finds him being beamed up through the ceiling, his body seemingly liquefying in the process.

In one splash panel, he is transformed into a "soldier of light," "the elemental fire of Heaven" now burning inside him. As Capullo draws Wynn in this panel, he looks like a typical, Superman-like caped strongman character, albeit with a longer cape, and all golden yellow. In fact, he looks rather exactly like the version of the original Superman that emerges from the sun in the 853rd Century near the end of the Morrison-written DC One Million, minus the chest symbol and spit curl.

That design only lasts for that one panel though, as he gets a hilariously dumb redesign and a new name on the very next page:

Yes, he is now "ANTI-SPAWN!" and he has a goofy costume covered with crosses and spikes and honestly looks something like what have been an early sketch of McFarlane's on his way to coming up with the final Spawn design. 

You can't tell from this particular image, a result of Capullo having the character in a crouched pose, as if ducking under the huge dialogue bubble naming him, but he's wearing a belt buckle that features the Spawn emoji symbol, the one that appeared on the cover of Spawn/Batman alongside the bat-symbol, only with a red strike-through circle around it, like the Ghostbusters symbol...but for Spawn. ("Anti-Spawn" is a cooler name than "Spawnbuster" and feels more appropriately superhero melodramatic. Creating an extremely obvious evil opposite of Spawn also seems both very classic superhero comics and very Morrison-esque.)

This new character doesn't make the cover of the next issue though; that's reserved for a pretty generic Spawn-posing-in-a-sewer cover (Did Spawn readers ever have trouble telling if they've read a particular issue or not, based solely on the covers? I don't know that this was necessarily the start of that trend, but the covers I've been looking at sure seem to be rather early ones where the comic book just features a character posing, rather than any information particular to that issue. I know we've gotten tons of such potrait/post covers in the 21st century, particularly from Marvel, but I feel like it was maybe still an outlier in 1994...?)

This issue opens with the Spawn mythology's devil, "The Malbolgia" (which is how its spelled in issue #17; the next issue box at the end of #16 had promised "Malebolgia", with an "e"; I think the spelling with the "e" is the more standard one). He looks a little like a heavy metal kid's version of the devil, somewhat like the other demons, but with a big pair of horns and a mane of long, stringy, gray hair. 

Interestingly, Morrison's script doesn't call him the or a devil, but "the bad god," which is an interesting way to describe a/the devil, and calls to mind dualistic religious beliefs of earlier in the last millennium (Because the lettering in that narration box is all caps, there's no way to tell if Morrison meant to refer to him as "the bad god" with a lower-case "g", or "the bad God" with an upper-case "g", a rather significant difference, really). 

This bad god, however you spell his name, taunts Spawn for a few pages, having found the title character in a graveyard, where he just dug up his own grave and is shocked to find a skeleton in a suit within it, which he somehow recognizes as his own body, causing some existential confusion. He plucks Spawn up in a giant yellow clawed fist and then deposits him in Simmonsville, "a doorway into my realm, a gate that stands open onto Hell."

Then the angels on the satellite shoot a comet down to Simmonsville, and there, standing in a cloud of foot-obscuring smoke, crackling with energy, is Anti-Spawn, now standing at his full height and giving us a good look at his belt...and his weirdly-muscled thighs, which seem to include muscle groups previously unknown on Earth (Although this is an Image comic circa the mid-nineties, I guess, and those comics were full of such weird muscles). 

He points at Spawn and calls him out, like a professional wrestler filming a promo: "HELLSPAWN! I've come for you!"

He proceeds to shoot a beam from his fist at Spawn, hurling him through a stained-glass window, visible in a nicely-drawn background that seems unusually detailed for Capullo here, given how often the panels don't feature any backgrounds at all.

Spawn then teleports to the Bowery in New York, but Anti-Spawn follows and the fight continues. And keeps continuing into the next and final issue. 

Anti-Spawn is about to finish off Spawn, using the glowing energy blade that has sprouted from his right hand, when he's surprised by a "WHAAANG", the sound of one of the local homeless guys that Spawn hangs out with striking the back of his spiked helmet with a pipe.

The mob of assembled men wielding two-by-fours and broken bottles (one of whom looks uncannily like Harvey Pekar), tell the villain that "This is our turf and we stick together" and "You got a beef with Spawn you got a beef with all of us."

Before Anti-Spawn can make good on his promise to tear them all apart, Spawn recovers and the fight continues, Spawn ultimate destroying his new foe with a series of dumber and dumber one-liners.

"Welcome to the real world, bastard!" Spawn says, blasting his foe on either side of his head at point-blank range with green energy from his hands. Okay, that sounds fine, I guess. But he keeps going.

"Have a nice day," Spawn says, putting his fist through Anti-Spawn's head with a "TSCHH!"

And then, as Anti-Spawn screams in pain, molten light bubbling and leaking from his head wounds, gurling "I'll kill you...", Spawn responds by blasting him with green energy through the torso, and the line, "Tell me about it."

Man, shut up, Spawn. 

In the aftermath, Spawn meets a character who refers back to the events of Gaiman's issue, he then travels to Simmonsville to tear it all down by shooting it with a really big gun like the sort Cable and Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee's Image characters used to tote around and then shooting Major Vale through the eye with a pistol, as Vale seems to have had something to do with Simmons' murder (The gun in Spawn's hands seems to change type and size panel to panel in this weirdly-drawn sequence). 

And then Spawn uses his magic powers to preserve one positive memory out of those that Simmonsville was built from, and decides to store it "somewhere safe," secretly, magically giving it to his ex-wife Wanda, briefly seen in a tiny nightgown staring out her bedroom window at the rain.

She can't see him, but Spawn is lurking outside, perched in the leaf-less branches of a dead tree. 

"The window goes dark," Spawn's melodramatic narration says, and it gets even more melodramatic over the course of the arc's last two panels: 

The world goes dark.

But that's okay. I'm used to it. 

DARKNESS IS MY HOME NOW.

That last line appears over another splash page, which Capullo drew sideways, so one needs to turn the book again to see right-side up; it pictures a mask-less Spawn, the lower half of his face in darkness save for his green, almond-shaped eyes and gritted white teeth, as he seemingly leaps toward the reader, a bolt of lightning in the black sky behind him.

It's completely ridiculous, but also reads as completely sincere; over-the-top, but in a way that is appropriate for the character, the milieu and the series...or at least as I understand them from the dozen or so issues I've read. 

It's obviously not the best Morrison super-comic I've read (although it was interesting to see Morrison's depiction of angels as super-aliens here, a few years before he would introduce the angel Zauriel in a JLA arc that would prove to be one of my favorite superhero comics stories ever), but it may be the best Spawn comic I've ever read, up there with Alan Moore's Spawn #8 (which doesn't actually feature the Spawn character) and Miller's Spawn/Batman (although much of the fun of that story was the degree to which Miller made fun of Spawn and, of course, Batman). 

Though the art leaves something to be desired in several patches—the Capullo of the mid-nineties is obviously not the Capullo we've seen drawing Batman over the course of the last 15 years or so—it honors McFarlane's visual imagination and the characters and world McFarlane had been building over the previous few years. One imagines that Spawn readers of those early years wanted the art to look as much like McFarlane's as possible. 

All in all, if you're a Grant Morrison fan, I think it's well worth tracking down. 

*So I recently noticed a drastic drop in my per-post readership a few weeks ago. This is right around the time I attached new URL everydayislikewednesday.com to the blog, which had been everydayislikewednesday.blogspot.com for the last 19 years. That's also when I wrote the first Spawn-related post. Did I screw something up by messing with the address? Or does my regular readership just have no interest in Spawn at all? I guess we'll see...!

The End of JLA

In 1997, it seemed like a pretty radical premise for a Justice League comic book, despite how obvious it was: What if the Justice League line-up consisted of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman and Martian Manhunter? 

That was, of course, the original line-up when the team debuted in 1960, the team consisting of all of the DC Comics characters with their own features at the time (give or take Green Arrow, who would join shortly thereafter). And, with lots of additions and only occasional subtractions, that was the core of the Justice League for almost 25 years. 

But by 1997, it had been a long time since all of those characters, which included the most popular as well as the most iconic of the publisher's heroes, were on the League together. The so-called "Satellite Era" came to a close in 1984, at which point the Justice League reformed into what would become known as "the Detroit League", veterans Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Elongated Man and Zatanna teaming with new heroes Gypsy, Vibe, Vixen and Steel.

That era then gave way to what we now think of as the "JLI Era," beginning with Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire's 1987 Justice League #1. The Giffen/DeMatteis run would include several different teams and several different books, lasting some five years, after which DC would continue publishing multiple Justice League books, and their creators would mostly stick to the pool of characters that Giffen/DeMatteis used, with a few additions. 

While Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash and various Green Lanterns would sometimes join Justice League mainstay Martian Manhunter as members of these various teams, they never all served together, instead usually anchoring a line-up of lesser known characters. 

So by the time Grant Morrison must have been pitching the book that became JLA, it had been some 13 years or so since the team even resembled its original all-star line-up, an eternity in comics (which at least used to be geared toward young readers, where the turnover could sometimes be a matter of years, although this was obviously changing by the 1980s, as adult readers gradually began to become the norm, and little kids the exception).

Some of the characters might now look quite different than in the old Super Friends or Super Powers cartoons (like the long-haired, hook-handed Aquaman) and some of them had different secret identities behind their masks (The Flash was by then Wally West, of course, and Kyle Rayner had just become the new Green Lantern a few years previously), but, when Morison's JLA launched, the line-up was once again made up of DC's biggest characters, all of whom anchored their own books at that point, save for Martian Manhunter (although, thanks in large part to the popularity of JLA, he would get his first ongoing series in 1998).

Morrison was paired with pencil artist Howard Porter, who had previously drawn most of DC's characters in 1995's Underworld Unleashed, and whose style was timely without necessarily given to the excesses one might associate with the most popular superhero comics artists of the 1990s. 

It worked. Morrison swiftly transitioned from the Justice League as it stood before theey took over to their new conception, within the first issues. Morrison's new villains knocked the previous team's satellite out of the sky and forced them to make an impossible escape, which seemingly killed off Metamorpho (temporarily, of course, as Morrison would acknowledge during the character's funeral scene in an upcoming issue). Superman and the other characters quickly assembled to save the world from these villains...and then they decided to keep saving the world together.

I assume sales data was available at the time, but I didn't pay attention to it back then. I was just 20, a college student who hoped to one day write comics and hadn't yet considered writing about them instead (aside from the many, now embarrassing letters I used to send into the letter columns of the DC comics I read at the time, of course). 

The sales must have been quite healthy, though, based on how much JLA product DC would publish. There were, of course, the sorts of associated titles most popular DC Comics got at the time, annuals, Secret Files & Origins specials, 80-Page Giants and even a "gallery," a collection of pin-ups. 

But there were also a bunch of JLA-branded one-shot specials and mini-series, a pair of spin-off maxi-series (JLA: Year One and Justice League Elite) and a few original graphic novels (JLA: Earth 2, JLA: Heaven's Ladder, JLA: A League of One). 

The team also engaged in a fair amout of inter-company crossovers, seemingly commensurate with those of Superman and Batman: JLA/WildCATS, JLA Versus Predator, JLA/Witchblade, JLA/Cyberforce and, of course, the big one, JLA/Avengers. 

Members of the team got their own books, not only the aforementioned Martian Manhunter series, but original character Zauriel starred in a three-issue miniseries, and Plastic Man got a special and an 80-Page Giant before eventually earning his own ongoing series, his first since the 1970s. A new, android version of Hourman, introduced in the pages of Morrison's JLA, also got his own ongoing series. 

And eventually, DC added a second JLA monthly, a Legends of the Dark Knight-style anthology series featuring different creative teams on each arc, JLA: Classified. 

Not all of these comics were, good, of course, and while I'd like nothing more than to go through them all and give you my opinions on them sometime, my point here is just that there was a lot of JLA comics for a few years there, apparently reflecting the popularity of Morrison's "Big Seven" plus other heroes approach to the team.

I certainly loved it. 

Morrison was quite adept at coming up with challenges big enough to threaten such a big, powerful and experienced team, mixing old foes from their then nearly 40-year history with new and original villains. The writer's characterization could be limited to sketching out the relationships between the characters, but then, they all had their own books (or in Superman and Batman's case, whole lines of books) to explore their psychology and personal lives, and, as ever, he left a lot of the story implied and off the page, so that readers could fill-in any blanks with their own imaginations.

Morrison's run managed the neat trick of Silver Age-esque conflicts—lots of big, crazy ideas—filtered into the more realistic (or, this being super-comics, "realistic") aesthetic of comics at the turn of the century, constantly escalating threats (and, remember, the very first story involved saving the world), all while managing to be about something. 

Morrison's run, all with artists Porter and Dell and the occasional fill-in artist, lasted through 2000's #41, with eight fill-in issues from other writers (five penned by Mark Waid, a sixth by Waid and Devin Grayson, one by up-and-comer Mark Millar and another by J.M. DeMatteis).

Morrison was followed by Waid, who, in addition to his fill-ins on the title, had also written a sort of prequel miniseries, JLA: Midsummer's Nightmare, and the maxi-series JLA: Year One. After his first story arc, pencilled by Porter, Waid was technically paired with artist Brian Hitch, although outside of their over-sized graphic novel Heaven's Ladder, Hitch was never able to complete a single story arc, needing assists from fill-in artists to keep the book on schedule. 

Waid reduced Morrison's League, the ranks of which had swelled to a dozen heroes, to just eight, the founding seven plus Plastic Man. If I recall interviews from the time correctly, this was because Waid wasn't entirely sure which characters would survive Morrison's final arc, "World War III."

His run on the series, which began with 2000's #43 and concluded with 2002's #60 (and had only a single fill-in, a Joker: Last Laugh tie-in by writers Chuck Dixon and Scott Beatty), was more tightly focused on the characters on characterization, particularly the relationships between the characters, with one throughline being the team's decision to finally reveal their secret identities to one another in order to instill a greater degree of trust. Perhaps surprisingly, given Waid's apparent affection for DC Comics past, his run featured as many new threats (the Queen of Fables, the Cathexis and Id) as older ones (Ra's al Ghul, The White Martians).

Waid was then followed by writer Joe Kelly, coming off work on the Superman franchise, who was paired with pencil artist Doug Mahnke. Kelly's (consecutive) run ran from 2002's JLA #61 to 2004's #90 (with only a single fill-in, a Rick Veitch-written one in JLA #77). Kelly's run started with the Big Seven plus Plastic Man team, minus Aquaman, who had been temporarily killed off in the 2001 Superman event "Our Worlds At War". 

During the "Obsidian Age" arc, in which the team goes back in time, a substitute League is created, featuring Nightwing, Green Arrow Oliver Queen, Jason Blood, Hawkgirl, The Atom, Firestorm, Major Disaster and new, original character Faith and, in the wake of the story, the team would reconfigure a bit, having J'onn J'onnz, Plastic Man and the resurrected Aquaman all take leaves of absence, adding some of those characters from the substitute League plus the ancient shaman Manitou Raven to the line-up, and, finally, substituting Green Lantern John Stewart for Kyle Rayner (At the time, this last change seemed to have been made mainly to make the team resemble that of the cartoon Justice League series, although it did finally add a person of color back to the team line-up; it had been all white people since Steel disappeared somewhere between the Morrison and Waid runs.) 

The Big Seven that launched the team was now the Big Five, then, but the book was still oriented around DC's more powerful and popular characters. 

In addition to adding new characters to the mix, Kelly managed to continue the book's focus on world-ending threats like Morrison and Waid, but seemed to focus on the characters and their relationships even more than Waid had, like giving Plastic Man a son (a move I detested at the time, as it presented one of my favorite characters as a deadbeat dad, although Plastic Man does eventually decide to dedicate himself to his son during Kelly's run), having J'onn try to overcome his weakness to fire and start a relationship with new-ish Superman villain Scorch and teasing a romantic relationship between Batman and Wonder Woman that they ultimately decide not to pursue (thanks to time spent in a Martian device that shows them possible futures). 

Though Kelly's last consecutive issue was #90, he didn't exactly leave the title then. After nine issues of  what seemed like fill-ins (a three-issue arc written by Denny O'Neil, a six-part arc written by John Byrne and Chris Claremont), he returned for his final issue, #100...which lead directly to the spin-off series Justice League Elite, which featured Leaguers The Flash, Major Disaster, Manitou Raven and a returning Green Arrow joining a new version of The Elite, an Authority-analogue team that Kelly had written in his well-liked "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way?" story in 2001's Action Comics #775 (This new JLE would again feature art by Kelly's JLA teammate Doug Mahnke).

JLA would continue publishing for another 25 issues but coupled with the nine issues of fill-ins by O'Neil and Byrne and Claremont, it was an extremely weird title, having become an anthology series in the mode of Legends of the Dark Knight...or JLA: Classified or JSA: Classified, both of which launched in 2005.

After some seven years and 90 issues of fairly tight issue-to-issue and run-to-run continuity, it was a strange, even perplexing swerve, and while the quality of these arcs varied greatly, they all seemed disconnected from one another, and, in some cases, from the goings-on of the DC Universe at that time in general. 

I would love to know what was going on behind the scenes. Some of these stories may have been specifically commissioned for the title—the Byrne/Claremont pairing, for example, was likely seen as a big deal by someone at DC, and maybe the equivalent of a Grant Morrison or Mark Waid among readers of a certain age (and fans of a certain book from a certain other publisher many years previous)—while some of them seemed like they might have been inventory stories, or proposed miniseries or one-shots that were instead folded into the main title. 

There's little to distinguish, say, the Chuck Austen/Ron Garney "Pain of the Gods" or Kurt Busiek/Garney "Syndicate Rules" from the pages of JLA from, say, the Gail Simone/Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez "The Hypothetical Woman" or the Dan Slott/Dan Jurgens "The Fourth Parallel" from JLA: Classified. 

After a handful of arcs that felt unmoored, JLA finally returned to DCU continuity, its final arcs being tie-ins to other goings on. Geoff Johns and Allan Heinberg wrote the five-part story arc "Crisis of Conscience," in which the modern League contends with the actions of the "Satellite Era" team (some 25 years earlier, our time) that were revealed in Brian Meltzer's ridiculous Identity Crisis miniseries. Dealing with the morality of magically (and/or psychically) altering people's brains to change behavior or keep secrets, it featured various old Leaguers and some of the modern JLA, at least those that the writers thought were around at the time (Firestorm died during Identity Crisis, and The Atom dramatically shrunk himself out of view; one could imagine that maybe Major Disaster and Manitou Dawn decided to stick with some off-page version of The Elite; and Plastic Man...? Well, they seem to have just forgotten about him entirely).

The book ended with Martian Manhunter and John Stewart as the only heroes left on the League...and then the Watchtower being destroyed and J'onn seemingly killed in a cliffhanger ending. (When it was picked up on in the pages of event series Infinite Crisis, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman gathered to bicker in the ruins of the Watchtower; it would ultimately be revealed that it was Superboy-Prime that had destroyed the base.)

And the final arc, "World Without a Justice League", was a six-issue arc written by Bob Harras, following Green Arrow Oliver Queen as he and a few allies (Manitou Dawn, Aquaman) travel the DC Universe, meet various characters and deal with aspects of the Infinite Crisis plot, while engaging classic Justice League villain The Key.

And that was that, the end of the series.

And the end of the team...at last until 2006, when Brad Meltzer and company would launch Justice League of America, a troubled title with an incredible amount of creative team turnover that nevertheless manage to stick around for 60 issues, when it was cancelled along with the rest of the DC line to make room for The New 52. 

I've been thinking a lot about the weird final few years of JLA lately, having fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to answer what I assumed was a simple question recently—When, exactly, was Plastic Man on the Justice League. 

While I had read the Morrison, Waid and Kelly issues of JLA (and many of their tie-ins) over and over again in the course of the last few decades (especially the Morrison ones), I had only read issues #91-120 the once...if that (I bailed on the Byrne/Claremont arc after an issue or two; having not read Marvel comics in the 1980s, their names weren't much of a draw to me personally, and I didn't care for their Justice League vs. vampires story that served as a stealth launch of a new soft-rebooted Doom Patrol). 

So I thought I might revisit these comics and, of course, write about them here. I wanted to do so in order to maybe more fairly evaluate them, now that I am so far removed from my initial disappointment in their lack of connectivity to the title that they were appearing in, and I'm curious to see how they might hold up some 20-ish years later (If I remember them correctly, some seemed designed to be more-or-less evergreen, while "Crisis of Conscience" and "World Without a Justice League" were obviously closely tied to the events of other old comic books, and thus might not make much sense if encountered for the first time in 2025).

That, then, is going to be the next series on EDILW, seven posts that each examine one of the stories published in JLA after #90, the last consecutive issue of Kelly's run.  I plan to post one each Monday, with posts on other comics on Thursdays, in the hopes that none of you get too sick of me talking about 20-year-old JLA comics.

Next: Denny O'Neil and Tan Eng Huat's "Extinction", from the pages of 2004's JLA #91-93