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

On Justice League: Their Greatest Triumphs

This bargain-priced 170-page, $9.99 trade paperback seems to have been assembled specifically to give retailers something to point anyone interested in DC's premiere super-team because of next month's movie towards.

As a long-time fan of the Justice League, I was pretty curious about its contents, as "greatest hits" collections are almost never actually that. Given that their limited page-count, they are inevitably limited to single-issue stories, and the editors generally stick to in-continuity, relevant stories rather than looking to something from, say, a comic based on a cartoon or in an alternate universe (So I wouldn't expect anything from Justice League Adventures or Justice League Unlimited, or from Adventures in The DC Universe or the Paul Dini/Alex Ross one-shot JLA: Liberty & Justice).

Of course, the sub-title here doesn't necessarily promise the greatest or best stories, but the greatest "triumphs," whatever exactly that might mean (Given that they are limited to one-issue stories, though, it's not like they can actually include their greatest triumphs, as those generally come at the end of stories of some scope and size. I guess they could use the final issues of story arcs like "Rock of Ages"...?).

These sorts of books also generally reveal more about where the publisher's collective head is regarding a franchise: What they consider the best or most important stories, which iterations of the League are the most important or relevant ones, which characters and creators they find important or relevant to the line at the moment. I knew without even cracking it I was probably going to disagree with many of the inclusions.

Looking solely at the table of contents, there are only three distinct teams or "eras" represented: Grant Morrison's "Big Seven Plus" roster (although nothing actually written by Morrison is included), Brad Meltzer's short-lived, one-arc team and Geoff Johns' post-Flashpoint team. To the extent that any earlier iteration of the team exist, it is only in flashback form in the Meltzer-written issue.

The average age of the stories is nine-years-old, with a Mark Waid, Mark Pajarillo and Walden Wong story from 1999 being the oldest, and a Bryan Hitch, Daniel Henriques and Scott Hanna story from 2016 being the most recent. Geoff Johns scripted three of the seven issues, with the four other writers each getting an issue a piece of the remaining ones. Three of the stories are set before Flashpoint, the other four in the post-Flashpoint DC Universe.

What accounts for the selection? The heavy representation of Johns feels slightly icky given his current prominence in the publisher's leadership--President & Chief Creative Officer--so it feels a little like flattering the boss. On the other hand, from what we know of the upcoming movie, it seems to be somewhat inspired by Johns' first Justice League story (which was also the basis of the direct-to-DVD animated film, Justice League: War), and the film's line-up reflects the post-Flashpoint, Geoff Johns inclusion of Cyborg on the team (aside from a weird, seemingly aborted line-up initiated by James Robinson, Cyborg was never on the team until Johns' relaunch).

It's possible the specific stories are included to offer suggestions of villains in the movie, but that actually seems a little unlikely, as in addition to a Parademon or two, these include The White Martians, The Construct, Ocean Master, a couple of cameos by Crime Syndicate of America and whatever the hell was going on in Bryan Hitch's first "Rebirth" Justice League arc.

Here are the comics included within...

Justice League #1
By Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Scott Williams and Alex Sinclair

This is the 2011 first issue of the previous Justice League series, the official launch of The New 52. Despite having the New 52 version of a Big Seven on the cover--all of whom are appearing in the film, save Green Lantern Hal Jordan--the actual issue just features Batman, Jordan and, on the last page, Superman. A pre-Cyborg Victor Stone makes an appearance (in his origin for the League, Johns tied Cyborg's origin to the invasion of Apokolips and the formation of the team), as does a Parademon or two.

Given the collection's sub-title, it seems like a random choice, with the final issue of the arc seemingly a better one (That at least features the whole roster, as well as Darkseid). Johns and Lee, another DC Comics executive, only collaborated on two story arcs, neither of which is very good, and neither of which was broken into strong individual chapters in such a way that would make the inclusion of any single issue read smoothly all on its own.

So on the one hand, while I totally get why a chapter of this arc is in here--it's Johns and Lee, it's apparently a pretty strong inspiration for the film--it also doesn't make much sense at all to include it here.

If a reader wants to find out what happens next, this story is collected as Justice League Vol. 1: Origin.

JLA #33
By Mark Waid, Mark Pajarillo, Walden Wong and John Kalisz

This one actually kind of baffles me. Waid did have a decently well-written run on JLA, picking up the baton from Grant Morrison at the conclusion of Morrison's World War III arc. Waid's run kicked off with a pretty great, over-sized original graphic novel with Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary (JLA: Heaven's Ladder), and  then ran through issues #43-60 of the ongoing monthly title. Unfortunately, the art was a mess, as he was officially teamed with Hitch, who was unable to ever complete an arc (In that sense, the Waid/Hitch run peaked before it even began, as Heaven's Ladder was the only complete story Hitch managed, start to finish).

Waid was writing JLA stories before his run began though. In addition to scripting the prequel miniseries A Midsummer's Nightmare and then JLA: Year One, he wrote two great, two-issue fill-in arcs during Morrison's run, and returned again for two-issue fill-in stint in 1999, featuring two done-in-one-ish stories that kinda sorta dealt with the "No Man's Land" mega-story in the Batman titles. This was the last Waid-scripted fill-in, and it was penciled by then frequent JLA fill-in artist, Mark Pajarillo.

A follow-up to Morrison's first arc, which had the League re-forming to stave off a White Martian invasion, this issue has Batman assigning then-Leaguers Orion, Big Barda, Steel, Plastic Man and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner to investigate Bruce Wayne (actually a White Martian assuming Wayne's identity), while Superman and Wonder Woman investigate The (or is it "a"...?) Flash, a new version with a new costume who was refusing to reveal his true identity to just about everyone.

This was a fun story in several ways, including Pajarillo's drawings of Orion fighting with the tuxedo he goes undercover in, and one of Plas' skeeviest disguises as an inanimate object, plus an overall weird grouping of heroes interacting in the ways that Morrison's ongoing narrative rarely allowed for. It's still a weird choice for the book, though. Not only do few of these heroes seem to appear in the film, but it ties in to a couple of pretty specific and temporary plot points from other comics.

If DC wanted to choose a Waid-written issue, JLA #50 might have been a good one, as it was a stock-taking issue that transitioned between the arc that had just ended and the one that was beginning (and featured bearded Aquaman; he is clean shaven and short-haired in all of these issues), and aside from a compelling cliffhanger, it had some pretty classic Justice League-ing.

The best done-in-one, fill-in from during Morrison's run, however, was probably JLA #27, by Mark Millar, Pajarillo and Wong.

Essentially an Atom story, it features classic Justice League villain Amazo and the entire Justice League reserves (i.e. everyone that was a Leaguer and was still alive at the time) showing up before it's all over. It's a very clever story, too, harkening back to classic, Silver Age League comics. It feels weird suggesting anyone read a Millar comic in 2017, but this was back in the days when Millar seemed to really want to be a comic book writer, before he realized he could used comics as a stepping stone to Hollywood films, and started turning his Elseworlds pitches into analogue comics to entice filmmakers into adapting them.

Morrison had a lot of great short stories, but these were generally two issues long, rather than a single issue long. The only done-in-one of his I can think of is JLA #5, which was full of guest-stars and had some good Martian Manhunter moments but, for the most part, was a Superman and Tomorrow Woman story. Unfortuantely, Superman was going through his electric phase at that point, so I wonder if it would just confuse and repel readers of this particular trade collection...?

At any rate, I'd recommend one read the entirety of the Morrison run and, once that's finished, check out the Waid run as well...or, at the very least, Heaven's Ladder.

Justice League of America #1 #0
By Brad Meltzer, Eric Wight, Ed Benes, Alex Sinclair, and a whole bunch of artists

Huh. That's weird. The table of contents refers to this as Justice League of America #1, the first chapter of Brad Meltzer, Ed Benes and company's "The Tornado's Path" story arc, but it's actually JLoA #0. This was the start of prose novelist-turned-terrible-comics writer Brad Meltzer's run on the newly relaunched JLoA in 2006. Following the events of Infinite Crisis, this over-sized issue was mainly a vehicle for an exploration of Justice League history, as revised on the fly by Meltzer, although because it was coming off of a cosmic, continuity rejiggering, this time there was at least an in-universe explanation for the changes (Those in his Identity Crisis, on the other hand, were just mistakes).

Among those changes was to reinstate Wonder Woman as an original member of the Justice League of America--following Crisis On Infinite Earths, Black Canary II was a founding member in Wondy's stead, as Wonder Woman was being introduced into the DCU for the first time in the then-new continuity--and this issue was basically Meltzer having the "Trinity" of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman getting together to discuss who should be on the new Justice League of America line-up, flashing back to various meetings between the three at various points in DC history as it existed at that point and, oddly, a few glimpses into future meetings of the three.

It is mainly noteworthy for all the great artists involved. Ed Benes, who would be Meltzer's main pencil artist for the remainder of the writer's short, 12-issue run, drew many of the modern day scenes, and Eric Wight drew many of the earliest past scenes, with an all-star roster drawing everything in between. Among the artists were those who had worked on previous runs of Justice League comics before, including Kevin Maguire, Dan Jurgens, Howard Porter and George Perez.

In that respect, it is probably a good issue to include in here. If you want to find out what happens following this story, and I wouldn't recommend it, you can check out Justice League of America Vol. 1: The Tornado's Path. In retrospect, the most interesting thing Meltzer brought to the franchise was including new blood in the form of Black Lightning, Hawkgirl and Arsenal-turned-Red Arrow Roy Harper, but the line-up Meltzer spent 12 issues gradually assembling would begin being dismantled almost immediately.

This volume of the League book ultimately lasted five years and 60-issues, and featured work from talented writers like the late, great Dwayne McDuffie and James Robinson, but it was a complete mess, and perhaps the nadir of League history. (Seriously; I'll reread the Detroit Era and Extreme Justice before looking at these comics again.)

Justice League #16
By Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Joe Prado and Rod Reis

This is a particularly perplexing inclusion, as it is the third chapter of the six-part Justice League/Aquaman crossover "Throne of Atlantis," and, as such, doesn't really stand on its own at all. The basic story is that Aquaman's evil brother Orm, AKA "Oceanmaster," is leading the armies of Atlantis against the United States and the Justice League, and Aquaman is caught in the middle. In this particular chapter, he fights Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, while Cyborg is trying to sort everything else out elsewhere.

"Throne" was a pretty decent story, maybe the best of Johns' run, and Reis' pencil art was pretty great, but as just a single chapter, this is kind of a pointless read as anything other than perhaps an enticement to buy the trade it is collected in (Actually, this story appears in two different trades, both of which reprint the entire thing, which I imagine must have been awfully fucking frustrating for anyone following both of the Johns-written series in trade; Justice League Vol. 3: Throne of Atlantis and Aquaman Vol. 3: Throne of Atlantis). It does feature characters that appear in the film, so I guess there is that.

Justice League #29
By Geoff Johns, Doug Mahnke, Keith Champagne, Christian Alamy and Rod Reis

This is the final inclusion from Johns' Justice League, a 2015 issue tie-in to that year's Forever Evil event series, which was also written by Johns. It has a rather striking cover, featuring the Metal Men appearing in the shapes of the Justice Leaguers, but little else to recommend it. It is basically a Cyborg solo story, and sees Vic recruiting Doc Magnus and The Metal Men to help him take on The Grid, the evil version of Cyborg that was colluding with the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3.

If you read this and find yourself dying to know what happens next (and I can't imagine you will), then it is included in context in Justice League Vol. 5: Forever Heroes, and you'll probably also want to check out the poorly-drawn Forever Evil collection.

JLA #107
By Kurt Busiek, Ron Garney, Dan Green and David Baron

So, if you had asked me at the time who should follow Mark Waid on JLA, I would have told you that Kurt Busiek would have been the ideal choice. Instead, DC chose Joe Kelly, a writer who wouldn't have even been on my radar at the time, but who nevertheless turned out a remarkably strong 30-issue run on JLA, which then continued into his Justice League Elite book and then returned for a single issue of JLA before reaching its conclusion. That was probably the last high-quality run on a League book until...well, I don't think anyone's matched it since, actually.

For whatever reason, DC de-emphasized the importance of JLA around 2004, perhaps because they were focused on Identity Crisis and the ramp-up to Infinite Crisis. The result was about two years in which the book became an anthology series, with different arcs by different creators, few of which had anything to do with one another, let alone with the DC Universe at large: Denny O'Neil and Tan Eng Huat did a forgettable two-parter; John Byrne, Chris Claremont and Jerry Ordway did a barely readable seven-part storyline that included a soft reboot of the Doom Patrol; Chuck Austen and Ron Garney did a series of solo stories which kind of defeated the purpose of the book (all of these character already had at least one solo book at the time, after all, with the exception of Martian Manhunter) and then there was "Syndicate Rules," of which this is the first chapter.

If anyone was still paying attention to JLA, they would have been rewarded with this eight-part story written by Busiek (finally!) and penciled by Garney, featuring a rematch with the Crime Syndicate, the first since Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely reintroduced them in their original graphic novel JLA: Earth-2. Entitled "Maintenance Day," it featured what was left of the Big Seven version of the League, which now included Green Lantern Jon Stewart in for Kyle Rayner and The Atom apparently out of his self-enforced semi-retirement.

While the storyline would eventually grow pretty epic in scope, this first issue is kind of a low-key start, a day-in-the-life type of story in which the impatient Flash Wally West and Martian Manhunter perform a series of tasks needed to keep the Justice League's lunar Watchtower in working order. This includes a conflict with The Construct.

It was a strong enough story arc that it became all the more depressing that the JLA/Avengers writer never had a proper run on JLA, but he would kinda sorta get his chance a few years later with the weekly Trinity series. To read all of "Syndicate Rules," you can try to track down the out-of-print JLA: Syndicate Rules trade or JLA Vol. 9, which includes it along with Geoff Johns and Allen Heinberg's Identity Crisis tie-in, "Crisis of Conscience."

Justice League: Rebirth #1
By Bryan Hitch, Daniel Henriques, Scott Hanna and Alex Sinclair

No, I don't know why these books aren't presented in anything approaching chronological order, but instead keep jumping back and forth.

After his poor showing as the pencil artist during Mark Waid's run on JLA, and a rather poor showing as a writer/artist on his own book entitled Justice League of America (which he hadn't yet finished when this series launched), Bryan Hitch got another crack at the League with the relaunched, "Rebirth" version of the title. The line-up was essentially the same as it was when Johns and Lee relaunched the rebooted League in 2011, only instead of one Green Lantern in Hal Jordan, they now had two Green Lanterns in new, Johns-created characters Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz. Oh, and instead of New 52 Superman, they now had pre-Flashpoint, post-Convergence Superman. What his deal was would eventually all get ironed out in the Superman books, but, at this point, much of the character's interactions with his teammates were colored in distrust, as they didn't know who exactly he was or understand what the fuck was going on with Superman continuity (Join the club, Justice League!).

As with all of Hitch's League writing to date, I read this--three times now!--and couldn't really tell you what happened in it, or why. It's all apocalyptic, wide-screen, disaster picture stuff, but it is also strangely boring, lifeless and unsubstantial. If you read the chapter and find yourself intrigued, however, you can see how it all plays out in the pages of Justice League Vol. 1: The Extinction Machines.

Wait, that worked?

But Wonder Woman didn't even say "Clear!" first! Wonder Woman defibrillates Superman's heart with one of Zeus' thunderbolts in JLA #9 by Bryan Hitch and Daniel Henriques. He survives...but only to die for real in Superman #52, which came out...in May, three months prior to when this scene was published.

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week six

Justice League: Rebirth #1 by Bryan Hitch, Daniel Henriques, Scott Hanna and Alex Sinclair

Artist-turned-writer/artist Bryan Hitch has been struggling* with the Justice League B-title, the oft-delayed Justice League of America**, for a year now, but apparently DC either liked what he was doing and what he had planned for the future, or they had no one else of equal or greater fame ready or able to inherit their flagship title after Geoff Johns' departure, so Hitch got the gig.

Here he is both writing and penciling–with Daniel Henriques and Scott Hanna inking–but when Justice League #1 ships in a few weeks, Hitch will just be writing.

As far as the writing goes, this is a very good, if somewhat generic, introduction to the current version of the Justice League, who's serving on it and what they're powers are. If you're looking for original ideas or incisive (or even mildly clever) characterization, you won't find it here, but then, the mandate of these Rebirth one-shots seem to be to offer a sort of pre-series example more than actual stories. Think of the specials as auditions by the books to you, the reader.

Set sometime after all of the individual characters' Rebirth specials (save for Cyborg's, which won't be along for a while yet), when they've all got their new costumes as status quos, it opens with a titanic, scary, Lovecraftian bug monster crawling through a city spitting out little tentacle bug things that hug people's faces and take over their minds in a somewhat Starro-like fashion (which is perhaps why Hitch mentions Starro among the threats the Justice League has faced and overcome, along with Darkseid and Rao, the latter from his own, and still not complete, first arc of JLoA).

The League of Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman confront the creature, which is called "a Reaper" and is big enough to be seen from space; it's design is probably the most interesting aspect of the issue. There's no mention of Captain Marvel Shazam or Lex Luthor (the latter of whom has declared himself the new Superman in the last issue of the last volume of Justice League, and is currently starring in Action Comics). They are eventually joined by Green Lanterns Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz and Superman.

Perhaps highlighting the wonkiness of DC's "Rebirth" Superman, much of this issue's focus is on this new Superman, and whether he should join the Justice League. If you've been following DC Comics the last few months, or even just reading all my blog posts, then you know that The New 52 Superman, the "real" post-Flashpoint Superman, has died, and the other Superman, the pre-Flashpoint one aged by six or seven years, has been living in hiding in this universe with his wife Lois Lane and son Jonathan, and has just recently decided to take up the mantle of the dead Superman. Got all that? It sure makes any and all interactions between Superman and any other character outside of Lois and Jonathan annoying!

While the League contends with the Reaper, Old Man Clark and Lois "White" discuss whether or not he should join the League in their kitchen, and, as you can tell from the cover, he eventually decides to suit up, fly off and save the day (Another flashback shows the Leaguers discussing what they should do about Superman II, and Batman decides they should offer him membership in order to keep him close).

The story has a kind of weird double-ending, in which the League poses and declares themselves/are declared Earth's champions and defenders twice, first organically within the story, and then in a last page splash.

Artistically, Hitch is a good "get" for a Justice League book, just as he was last year and in 2000, but in both cases he proved unable to meet a monthly deadline. That's why he will only be writing the upcoming Justice League, which makes his presence as pencil artist here maybe unfortunate. He does a fine job on most of the book, and it gives the one-shot an aura of special-ness, but if the idea was to get readers excited for the ongoing book that launches in two weeks, perhaps having artist Tony S. Daniel (ugh) draw it would have been best.

I'll certainly give the first issue a try, but based on what I know so far–decent but not extraordinary writer, artist I'm not fond of, the always bumpy and getting bumpier DC continuity–I'm not too terribly excited about the book personally. But given the popularity of Daniel, it's not hard to imagine Justice League remaining one of DC's more popular titles, even if it doesn't end up moving as many copies each month as it did when Johns was at the helm.



*And by "struggling" I mean DC has only published eight issues of the monthly book since its debut in June of last year...and one of those issues was an unannounced fill-in issue by an entirely different creative team starring Martian Manhunter, who had and has nothing to dow with this iteration of the team.

**So DC's brand-management might be a little shaky with the League these days. Since 2011, they've published books called Justice League, Justice League Dark, Justice League International, Justice League of America, Justice League 3000/Justice League 3001 another volume of a re-launched Justice League of America and are now relaunching Justice League. I like to think I follow this stuff kind of closely, but I honestly thought the name of the Hitch-written and drawn book was JLA, as that's what the logo features so prominently.

But when I was unable to find it on comics.org I realized that it was actually Justice League of America, a name the New 52 Justice League never actually used, but the ARGUS-sanctioned rival team did.


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Okay not to go all Frederic Wertham or anything, but maybe not the best arrangement of Wonder Woman's fist, her sword and Superman on Joe Madureira's variant cover for this issue...

Review: Age of Ultron

I think it's fairly safe to say that when Avengers 2: Age of Ultron is finally released in theaters, its plot won't at all resemble the crossover event storyline it's taken its sub-title from. Age of Ultron, the 10-issue 2013 miniseries, is, after all, about Wolverine going back in time in an attempt to prevent a horrible, robot-ruled future where most of his friends have been killed. Which was, of course, the same basic plot as this summer's X-Men: Days of Future Past movie.

The comic book series was written by Brian Michael Bendis, a very able, very experienced crafstman who has been writing these stories pretty much continuously for years now, and has thus had plenty of opportunities to find out what works and what doesn't. Like most of Bendis' big superhero epics, this one is really rather good, right up until the point where it stops being any good at all. What's different about this one, however, is how long it manages to be any good at all—it's remains rather strong right up until its final chapter, at which point the likely mandated events that elevate it from basically a big Avengers story into one that will change the Marvel Universe forever—which included introducing a one-time Spawn supporting character for no reason evident in the book itself—occur, and the book devolves into an only tenuously related resolution and a series of teases for other, smaller events (so unrelated to what's come before they need special Marvel "AR" applications to explain them to the possibly confused).

From the outside looking in, this seems to be Bendis' long-in-the-works conclusion to his tenure at the head writer of Marvel's ever-expanding Avengers line (and transition to a similar role with the X-Men line), banged and hammered into a line-wide crossover/event somewhere rather close to the finish line.

The collection begins before Age of Ultron #1, in Avengers #12.1, which is included here, and rightly so. It may not have been branded as part of the series proper, but it's fairly important, even integral. So much so that when Age reaches its climax, large portions of #10 are recycled pages from Avengers #12.1, albeit with a few additional dialogue bubbles super-imposed upon them.

Like the first half of Age, that issue is drawn by Bryan Hitch, in his usual "widescreen" art format, here with his borderless panels atop white pages, like some of Chris Bachalo's recent X-Men art. He'll prove an excellent match for the story and for Bendis, as the former involves several scenes of epic destruction and plenty of rubble, a specialty of Hitch's, and the latter's penchant for scenes of long, drawn-out conversations surely benefits from someone of Hitch's skill at drawing realistic and detailed human faces (although there are relatively few such scenes here; Bendis doesn't write all that Bendis-y this time around).

In the Avengers issue, Spider-Woman Jessica Drew, Agent of SWORD goes investigating a strange energy source and then goes missing, and so SWORD Director Abigail Brand convenes a meeting with the various Avengers squads of that moment in time: adjectiveless, New and Secret (SWORD, of course, is the SHIELD-like organization dealing with extraterrestrial threats).

A search and rescue team including Avengers from each of the major Avengers titles is assembled, and they go to find Spider-Woman, currently in the clutches of The Intelligencia, a villain team made up of various super-geniuses. The energy source was a "Spaceknight" that fell to Eath, but when the Avengers attack to kick the poor mad scientists' asses, the metallic hulk activates itself and reveals itself as Ultron, having stowed away on the space-artifact to get back to Earth after being...away, probably being the menace in a miniseries written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, if I had to guess.

"I am unprepared for this battle," Ultron says. "You will wait." Then he blows up, knocking everyone down and disappearing. Iron Man completely loses his shit. Despite having fought Ultron many, many (many, many, many) times before, he's scared that this time fighting Ultron means the end of the world.

"I've seen the future..." Stark says, perhaps referring to the solicitations for Age of Ultron, perhaps to having seen early drafts of Bendis' script. "This is going to happen and there's nothing we can do to stop it."

And what do you know, Tony Stark was right! From there we journey to "Today," and two, two-page spreads of establishing shots of a meticulously devastated New York City, the "camera" slowly zooming in from shot to shot (Another reason Hitch is so well-suited for Bendis...? Bendis often seems like he'd rather be writing for Hollywood, and is settling for Marvel Comics). We see a pretty elaborate infiltration action scene, in which Hawkeye murders a whole bunch of the apparently now-endangered humans, in order to rescue a captured, drugged, tortured and interrogated Spider-Man from The Owl and Hammerhead, who were planning on trading him with Ultron, who apparently lives in the big city floating over what used to be New York City. Hawkeye returns Spidey to the few surviving heroes left in NYC.

(If you're counting, these are Tony Stark, Luke Cage, cute haircut She-Hulk, Emma Frost, cooler-costume-than-usual Wolverine, Captain America, Storm, Sue Storm, Monica Rambeau, Daisy, Quicksilver and...I think that's it. There are other characters who appear in the background of the first three issues, like Beast and Iron Fist, but they are never mentioned and don't reappear, so they are either art mistakes—at one point, Hitch draws Ben Grimm lying on a cot, while dialogue later refers to him as being dead, meaning that was an art mistake or the heroes were just storing his corpse in their sleeping quarters—or they get killed off-panel between scenes).

A handful of heroes survive in other cities. Moon Knight and badly-scarred Black Widow are in San Francisco, and they've tumbled upon Nick Fury's secret plan to save the world if this exact thing happens (It turns out to be a dumb plan that doesn't work). Taskmaster, The Red Hulk and The Black Panther are in Chicago—I know, where else would one expect to find an African king?

After Cage and She-Hulk do some suicide reconnaissance to figure out why exactly Ultron seems to be trading favors to humans (like not killing them) for superheroes, and where Ultron really is (the future).  Ultron is apparently invading the present from the future using the top half of The Vision and a bunch of super-duper-powerful Ultron drones, one of which is strong enough to do this to a Hulk—

Is that even possible? I didn't think that was possible.

The three factions of heroes eventually arrive in The Savage Land, where Nick Fury's waiting, with a cache of super-weapons and his dumb-ass plan. He wants to use Dr. Doom's time machine to travel into "the future," where Ultron waits, and then destroy the evil artificial intelligence. With guns.

You can probably think of a better way in which to use a time machine in order to stop a robot invasion from the future that also used time travel. Maybe, for example, traveling back to the point where Ultron arrived in the present in the first chapter of this story, or the flashback in which Ultron apparently infiltrated The Vision. Or hey, did you guys see Days of Future Past...? They could travel back in time to warn themselves about this going down before it goes down, so they'll be ready to stop it, just like Kitty and Bishop did to save their team over and over.

Anyway, Wolverine's got a big, dumb idea too, but not quite as dumb as Fury's: Go back in time and kill Hank Pym, the man (and Avenger) who created Ultron in the first place, before he can create Ultron.

Removing a founding Avenger, the creator of Ultron (who created The Vision, who pro-created with Scarlet Witch, which lead quite directly into House of M) would obviously have pretty huge implications for the timestream (none of which Bendis visits at all methodically, instead going with "everything is just bad and different"). It still makes slightly more sense than Fury's plan.

This is the end of the first five-issue "act;" that is, the part that Hitch is/was available to draw on the necessary schedule. From their, the art style shifts rather drastically, with the second "act" art split between two different artists, Brandon Peterson handling the scenes set in the present and future, pencil artist Carlos Pacheco and inker Roger Bonet handling the scenes set in the past. Peterson does a passable Hitch imitation, and while Pacheco's art looks nothing like either of theirs, it doesn't really need to: It's cleaner, smoother and less fussy, the better to distinguish itself from the dark, gritty present of Marvel comics. It's too bad Hitch couldn't have stuck around a little longer, as there's actually relatively little present/future left in the story, with the bulk of it happening in the past.

To spoil things, Fury's team does indeed land in "the future," and are then immediately slaughtered by Ultron, whose army of killer drone-bots are obviously much more advanced by that point.

In the past, Wolverine arrives on the exact day Pym is about to have the great idea to build Ultron, but there's a stowaway, Invisible Woman Sue Storm. These two are, obviously, a unique, even inspired pairing, and to see two such vastly different characters whose paths almost never cross in the crowded Marvel Universe is one of the pleasures of the series. She tries to talk Wolverine out of it, Wolvie tries to talk her into it, with the end result being she lets Wolverine kill Pym, and they return to the "present," only to find a much different but equally terrible future (For one thing, Cyclops is calling himself Cable and is on The Defenders!). There, NYC is again obliterated, only this time by Doombots with rams' horns, controlled by Morgan Le Faye.

So Wolverine goes back in time again to stop himself from killing Pym, eventually coming up with a decent solution to stopping Ultron's invasion of the present that doesn't alter the timestream in any way.

Except for the fact that Wolverine went back in time one time too many.

In the tenth issue, drawn by the previously mentioned artists (well the Hitch and Paul Neary sections are repeats) as well as Alex Maleev, Butch Guice, David Marquez, Joe Quesada and others, the awkward grafting of implications occurs.

The only issue in this book that I read the serially-published, comic book-comic of was Age of Ultron #1, which Marvel actually charged $3.99 for but also provided over 30 pages of content in, while (most of ) the rest of the series was at their regular $3.99/20-22-page price point. If I had purchased #10, I think I would have been fairly furious to find that eight of its 34 pages are simply reprints of that Avengers issue drawn by Hitch and Neary (I wonder if they got paid for that art again?). The gag is, of course, that through time travel, that scene happens "again," with a slight change: Pym sends a message to Tony Stark instructing him how to shut down Ultron before Ultron escapes to initiate his "Age," so we get eight pages of Avengers #12.1 all over again, only on a handful of those pages there are little electronic dialogue bubbles from Pym telling Stark to load a program.

He does, and the day is saved...or is it?

Smart guys Stark, Pym and The Beast are looking at troubling "readings," and they've come to the conclusion that they've "broken" time.

"We've altered the space-time coninuum before," Beast argues. "Time travel has been part of our--"

"But this-- This may have been on time too many," Pym cuts him off.

So, what does broken time mean? Well, there were hints earlier in the story that there are other worlds or dimensions (which isn't exactly a revelation, as trans-dimensional travel has also been a part of all their day-to-day lives), and the book is then dedicated to a series of teasers. Some of these are very, very brief, as in single-image cameos that hint at future storylines involving time-travel (Kang and The Apocalypse Twins, the Indestructible Hulk's time travel, Spider-Man 2099, the original teenage X-Men), but there are a trio of other, slightly longer sequences: The "616" Galactus arriving in the Ultimate Universe (which I believe lead to an Ultimate Universe crossover story called Cataclysm), Hank Pym having an idea involving artificial intelligence (no idea; did this maybe tease the already-canceled Avengers A.I. series, which wasn't very good?) and Neil Gaiman's Angela character appearing in a Marvel Comic for no discernable reason (I guess we'll have to see future issues of Guardians of the Galaxy for that explanation).

Most of the negative issues with the series—aside from its implosion of an epilogue, so hastily and lazily thrown together they didn't even bother to use completely new art for all of it, of course— are fairly minor, somewhere between nitpick and That's not the creative choice I would have made there.

Ultron is strangely absent from his own epic storyline, one in which he has conquered the Marvel Universe. Throughout, he appears as no more present or compelling then, say, the Sentinels in any X-Men comic or the Terminator robots. Aside from a one-panel glimpse in flashback, and a splash page in the Avengers issue, he's just reflections of himself from the off-page future,  generic foot-soldiers that look like himself. We don't understand his motivations any better than what Tony Stark says in an offhanded manner—he hates humanity—and Bendis seems to assume a great deal of familiarity with the character. That, or "robot that hates humanity" is all the characterization he thinks we need.

And even if it is, it would have been nice to get some of the mechanics of the story: How Ultron invaded the present from the future, how he maintained a backwards link through the timestream with Vision, how and where he got all those spaceships and floating cities and drone versions of himself and so on.

One of the mysteries of the first act was why Ultron was bothering to run a protection racket with some human villains, allowing The Owl and others to live in exchange for superhuman payment. Stark guesses that it had something to do with Ultron trying to imitate human feelings and emotions but, um, I didn't quite catch how that worked or works in the context of the story. Was Vision attempting to save them? Did Ultron use them as raw material? What?

Also, it seems strange that Pym didn't play a bigger role. Until the very end of the book, he is simply seen in flashback, but as Ultron's creator and the guy whose life and death the book's moral dilemma hinges on, it seems like he should have been a presence. Presumably he was quickly killed at the outset of Ultron's attack. It might have been something worth noting; also, it seems like he's the only Avenger not at the meeting in #12.1 that kicks the whole thing off.

(I realize it's quite possible that some of this business will be explained in a tie-in to the series, and I see there's an entire additional collection of all the ancillary material, entitled Age of Ultron Companion; that's all well and good, but I can't judge a book based on what might appear in another book. A work should be complete unto itself.)

As for the nit-pickery, I'm well and truly lost as to how time-travel works in the Marvel Universe, as I thought for a long time there were rules about it; that is, that time couldn't ever really be altered, attempts to do so only created alternate timelines where the changes happened, but the "real" or original timeline didn't change at all. Am I remembering that correctly? Did I dream it?

The idea that the time is actually "broken" by all of this abuse is fairly interesting, but I don't really understand what it means, as time travel has been more-or-less constant in every corner of the Marvel Universe since this saw print—Bendis' own X-books, for example, saw not only the original X-Men travel forward from the past, but multiple visitations from multiple contingents of X-Men in the future (This feels like one of those instances of Joe Quesada's attempts to put genies back in bottles, like reducing the number of mutants or breaking up Spider-Man and Mary Jane; to take a problem that isn't really a problem, fix it clumsily, and then everyone either just writes around the solution to keep telling the stories they wanted to tell in the first place, and maybe its even reversed at some point anyway). The idea of holes into other dimensions opening is also interesting, but, again, I don't really see what it's changed (the last few volumes of Uncany X-Force I read involved them visiting other, alternate dimensions, and the Ultimate and Marvel Universes have crossed over repeatedly before, directly and indirectly).

Finally, I was pretty amused by a sequence in Age of Ultron #4, in which Black Widow shows Moon Knight a copy of Fury's plan to save the world in case of an Ultron invasion from the future (which, remember, is to time-travel into the future to attack Ultron):

There's a pretty clever issue of Secret Avengers written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Bendis' frequent co-creator Alex Maleev (#20 in...one of the many volumes of Secret Avengers. It's in the Ellis trade) devoted entirely to Black Widow saving the day via repeated time-travel. Of course, that was a secret, so maybe she's just keeping it secret from Moon Knight.

Finally finally, Hitch's Beast reminds me of Stinkor.

That is all.

There is an appalling lack of pictures of Aquaman and Plastic Man on the Internet.

Oh there are plenty of pictures of Aquaman on the Internet, and there are plenty of pictures of Plastic Man on the Internet, but there don't seem to be any pictures of both Aquaman and Plastic Man, with no one else in the picture.

At least, not that I could find from an unbelievably long time spent Googling for images of the two of them to use to illustrate last night's post.

The pair were both members of the Justice League from 1997's "Rock of Ages" storyline in JLA through about 2001's crossover event story Our Worlds At War, and I know they shared at least a couple of scenes during that time.

They coincidentally met one another in Mark Waid's first fill-in issue, and they were both attacked at the United Nations by Talia al Ghul's forces in the beginning of Waid's "Tower of Babel" story arc. Oh, and if I'm remembering 2001's JLA Versus Predator correctly, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Plastic Man fought some super-powered Predators in Venice in a scene.

I was planning on scanning one of those Howard Porter-illustrated scenes from JLA, but when I started searching through my longboxes, I discovered the one with the JLA comics must be buried at the very bottom of my back-issue midden, and thus not worth the hours of digging to pull it out just to scan.

So then I turned to Google Image, and blew wayyyyyyy too long searching (it wasn't a complete waste of time; I was watching an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 I'd never seen while doing so).

The only JLA comic I have that wasn't buried at the bottom of my back-issue midden was the over-sized 2000 one-shot, Waid and Bryan Hitch's JLA: Heaven's Ladder (it's too big to fit in a longbox). I scanned through that looking to see if Plas and Aquaman shared a panel, but came up empty (They shared a few, but usually Wonder Woman or Flash was between them).

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Anyway, it reminded me how much I liked Bryan Hitch's Plas. Hitch obviously has a very realistic style, and his lack of speed proved to make him a terrible, terrible artist for an on-schedule monthly comic, but the original graphic novel Heaven's Ladder was a great showcase for him.

All of his characters looked realistic in the way all of Hitch's characters do, but his Plas had exaggeratedly large ears and hands, and was super-skinny. These small variations from regular human anatomy really popped out in a world drawn by Hitch.

(It also reminded me how disappointed I was when Waid shrunk Morrison's League as he inherited it down to just eight members, the Big Seven plus Plas. It was a fine line-up, but his Heaven's Ladder had those eight plus Steel and Atom Ray Palmer as well, which is an even better line-up. If I'm remembering correctly, Waid wasn't sure which of the character's actually survived Morrison's "World War III" arc when he started writing his run, and thought Steel and Zauriel, for example, were going to die. I wonder if Steel had stayed on for Waid's run to, if he would have thus stayed around for Joe Kelly's, and maybe still be on the League today...)

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Since the the Internet seems to be suffering from a dearth of pictures featuring just 1990s Aquaman and Plastic Man without any other superheroes getting in the way, I naturally followed up my hours of fruitless Google Image-ing and Heaven's Ladder poring over by drawing Plas and bearded, harpoon-handed Aquaman over and over.

Content!

Review: Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom

The second half of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s short run on Fantastic Four is collected in Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom, and it ends quite a bit more strongly than it began.

Ironically, the last few issues were ones in which the presence of Millar and Hitch were increasingly diluted, as Joe Ahearne scripted the last two issues from Millar’s plot and Hitch worked with additional pencilers Neil Edwards and Stuart Immonen on those issues (Throughout the eight issues collected in this volume, seven different artists assisted Hitch on inks, although the artwork remained surprisingly consistent looking until Hitch had to be helped with pencils too).

I think this fact is more of an interesting coincidence than any sort of indictment against the two guys with their names above the logo on the cover. While they may not have done as much during the finale as they did during the build-up, it’s very much still their story, and the fairly satisfying conclusion is clearly one that Millar had envisioned and been working toward, before either getting too busy or moving on to devote his full attention to more successful and lucrative endeavors.

The volume title takes its name from the climactic story arc, which is teased and foreshadowed throughout the entire volume, with little in the way of a meaningful break (The family’s trip to spend the holidays in Scotland and the children’s encounter with a Lovecraftian monster god—which Hitch does a great job of designing—being about it).

So who is this Master of Doom? Well it’s, um, Doctor Doom’s former master, the so-called original supervillain under which Marvel Comics’ greatest bad guy apparently apprenticed under for a while. He looks a bit like a naked Judge death in a veil, and he’s accompanied by a new apprentice, and the pair of them are traveling through alternate realities, killing Marvel Universes and Fantastic Fours on their way to check up on how Doom is doing in his dimension against his Fantastic Four.

I can imagine this development may have proved galling to long-time Marvel fans, as the idea that Doctor Doom—who is really pretty much a perfect supervillain—needs his origin retconned can’t have been a popular one, but in trade form one doesn’t have months between issues to think about whether or not that’s a dumb idea and, if so, how dumb an idea it actually is.

Millar does a fair job of presenting the Master as a terrible, apocalyptic threat, using many of the hyperbolic tricks Grant Morrison employed during his JLA run, and while Hitch’s designs for the new villains are pretty uninspired, he does occasionally land a great, menacing image, like the pair riding black vapor trails through a shining New York afternoon.

So the villains are built up as the ultimate of ultimate villains, they dispatch everyone, even Doctor Doom, and then it’s up to the FF to save the day against these impossible odds. They eventually see the way to do it, but to do so they’ll have to do something awfully unheroic—kill an innocent person—and, faced with two bad choices, Reed Richards must find the impossible third way (You know what else is ironic? That this story is plotted by Mark Millar, who wrote Civil War, in which Reed Richards constantly chose the lesser of two evils instead of either bothering to find the impossible third way).

It all comes down to our FF and a few allies trying to hold off armies of infinite, alternate universe versions of themselves while also dealing with a guy who seems like the biggest Big Bad they’ve ever battled.

It’s an exciting, imaginative story, and one that ends much more optimistically and, well, heroically than almost anything I’ve read from Millar since he was writing DC’s superheroes.

That’s followed by the resolution of the Ben Grimm/Some Random School Teacher Lady sub-plot, which is remarkably effective and even a little touching.

I’m still not convinced Hitch is the very best artist for The Fantastic Four (which, of course, does make him an interesting choice), but his art seems to flow better with Millar’s scripting through most of this volume (perhaps because he was slowing down, and didn’t have the time to over-reference and over-render everything to the extent he did earlier in the 16-issue run?).

He seems to have gotten a really good handle on The Thing by the time he leaves the book, giving the big brick gorilla expressive, soulful eyes, but for everything he does right, he does something as wrong as Doctor Doom’s nose—no longer the little bolted on triangle of Kirby’s design, but a big, honking metal bird-beak. I can’t look at Hitch’s Doom without giggling a little; it’s just too realistic, to the point of complete silliness.

It’s a little difficult for me to judge how clever the ending of the Master of Doom story arc was, given that the reveal of his identity seemingly invoked an old, obscure FF story I’d never read or even heard of (I assume; otherwise Millar just assigned him a back story that sounds like an old, obscure FF story I’d never read or even heard of and…well, that might be kind of cool, actually). At any rate, much of what seemed wrong about the presentation of the villains is made to feel right by the end (well, it felt right to me anyway).

I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that this volume was so good it redeemed the first volume (and, obviously, it didn’t suddenly turn the book into the sales juggernaut Marvel was probably expecting a Millar/Hitch book to be…and the major development regarding Doom seems to have so far been pretty much ignored in the Dark Reign business I’ve read, despite Doom playing a prominent role). But even still, it ended well, so that I left the Millar/Hitch FF run with much warmer feelings toward it then I had at the beginning, and that’s certainly something.


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OH, YEAH: I forgot to mention that there’s a point in the Master of Doom story where the big bad guy and a guy with similar powers think really hard at one another and bend reality and fill up a splash page with Marvel characters and alternate reality Marvel characters, which results in this:
Was there an issue of What If…? entitled What If Captain America was a Tyrannosaurus Rex for Some Reason…?

And, if not, why not?

Review: Fantastic Four: World's Greatest

It was a somewhat fortuitous coincidence that the same week I sat down to read some of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s short run on Fantastic Four was the one during which some clever soul decided to start the Twitter account Not_Mark_Millar so as to parody the way Millar talks about himself in public (“If Kick-Ass does not out-gross Avatar I will eat my shirt and you can punch me in the throat when you see me at conventions” for example, or “Had tea with the Queen today. Said she like my books and will knight me sometime this year,” and like that.)

Millar is a talented writer who has had some honest-to-God great ideas before, and there’s no denying he’s one of the more popular/successful writers of his generation, but his public persona can be a bit, well…insufferable, and his boasts not always grounded in reality.

His FF run was a particularly interesting entry on his bibliography, because it came after he had really made his name as a super-successful, blockbuster writer (as much as any superhero comic book writer can be considered a super-successful, blockbuster writer at this point in time), with The Ultimates and Civil War already under his belt, and yet it didn’t really sell any better than Fantastic Four under the previous creative team of Dwayne McDuffie and Paul Pelletier.

There are a couple of factors to consider before going with the most obvious reading of that fact—i.e. that the Millar/Hitch team lost most of the market heat they possessed during their delay-plagued Ultimates runs. First, McDuffie and Pelletier may have benefited from a post-Civil War bump, as their run was branded with an “Initiative” logo. Second, their run featured an all-new, all-different team roster, with Storm and the Black Panther filling-in for Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman, which perhaps gave it a bit of novelty that the Millar/Hitch run lacked. And, finally, Millar’s run was almost completely divorced from the day-to-day goings on of the Marvel Universe, with only the occasional mention of “registration” or superhero fighting acknowledging the events of the past few years. During Secret Invasion, for example, Millar and Hitch kept right on doing what they were doing, and a separate Fantastic Four miniseries was launched to detail what the team was doing during the big Skrull invasion.

Or maybe it really was as simple as fans not being all that excited about following another Millar/Hitch (supposedly) monthly comic. I know that’s the reason I didn’t even attempt to read this run as it was released in single issues, and am just not getting to it via a trade paperback collection of the first eight issues, one of the few books in the tiny graphic novel section of a new library I just visited.

I suppose there’s still one more possibility—readers and retailers tried out the first few issues of the run and decided they didn’t like it. After all, while it’s hardly incompetent comics-making or anything, this creative team makes for very poor heirs to the Kirby/Lee one, being particularly aesthetically ill-suited to the characters and concepts, and neither Millar nor Hitch do their best work here.

Millar does a good job of balancing the cast, assigning a plotline to each of the four: Reed Richards’ college friend/almost-but-never-quite lover comes back into his life, Sue is trying start up an all-female charity super-team, Ben has a new girlfriend, Johnny begins dating a super-villainess on the down low.

Each of these play through each of the issues, occasionally inter-tangling, but generally advancing bit-by-bit as perfectly adequate, soap opera-style plotting—it’s what you’d expect from FF or Spider-Man comics.

Millar also tries to play with big, crazy cosmic ideas, but cosmic has never been his strong suit. There’s a cabal of rich and powerful people building a new earth to escape when this one invariably collapses (And they actually all it “Nu-Earth,” completely unironically; the prefix “Nu- is one I recall being assigned to things that sucked as far back as 1996 or so, as in “Nu-metal” and so on), and an invasion of the present by the people of the future, pissed off about how we’re screwing them over all the time.

Those are some pretty neat ideas, although it’s unfortunate that Millar doesn’t do a whole lot with them.

The storyline which introduces the first concept quickly devolves into a pretty generic fight comic story, in which an unbeatable robot foe inspired by Robocop 2 is demonstrated as being unbeatable by beating up the whole Marvel Universe (Sentry/God included, although how the damn thing is so powerful is never explained, and the super-awesome robot versus the Marvel Universe combat all happens between panels), and it is then beat by Reed Richards, who then gets to wear the championship belt of the Marvel Universe, I guess.

The storyline dealing with the second sidesteps a lot of the ethical questions and, again, the science (or fake super-science; same thing, really) to deal instead with a team of Marvels from a possible future, so we get yet another alternate Hulk and Wolverine to spend time with.

Hitch is still Hitch, for better or worse. There’s no denying the man can draw, and his success and popularity are well earned, but that realistic style is less than ideal for a books whose cast includes a stretchy guy, a guy on fire and a guy who looks like a gorilla made out of bricks (in the same way that the FF looked pretty goofy in the live-action film—Jack Kirby characters shouldn’t look much more realistic than Kirby could draw ‘em, you know?).

Given how long Hitch and Millar have worked together now, it’s also surprising how often his images don’t quite work with Millar’s scripting of certain panels. The amount of detail Hitch puts in many of his facial expressions manages to freeze the characters during a particular reaction or a particular syllable of dialogue, but the panels will sometimes have several sentences or paragraphs of dialogue in them. In other words, the words are moving much faster than the pictures; it’s kind of like how Marvel comics used to have Captain America frozen in mid-leap, throwing his shield, while rattling off 150 words before falling back to the floor, only long after everyone knows better. (Hitch has a weird habit of drawing some of his female characters making weird faces with their tongues too, which makes these panels especially awkward; there are at least two occasions where characters speak a few sentences of dialogue with their tongues between their teeth).

It reminded me, rather unfortunately, of Millar’s Ultimate Fantastic Four run with Greg Land, who also freezes time awkwardly and with no regard for the scripting of the panel. Hitch’s art is, obviously, a lot less off-putting than Land’s, which often looks like air-brushed fumetti and features perhaps the worst character “acting” in modern comic books, but the pair share at least a few tendencies when it comes to synching up with Millars’ scripts.

And like Ultimate Fantastic Four, its greatest deficiency is it’s lack of fun and wonder. It’s fairly solidly plotted and drawn, it’s remarkably devoid of some of Millar’s more annoying writing tics, but I read the whole book cover to cover without chuckling once, feeling a tickle in my mind warning me that someone was at least attempting to blow my mind, “hearing” Ben Grimm’s voice or encountering the suggestion of a great idea left unexplored for now, something for other writers and artists to exploit and perhaps run into the ground later.

Those are the things that made Fantastic Four live up to the “World’s Greatest Comics Magazine!” tagline, and remain the criteria by which Fantastic Four reads like Fantastic Four to me. McDuffie and Pelletier didn’t quite get there either, of course, but they got a hell of a lot closer than Millar and Hitch did, and perhaps that’s the reason the all-superstar creative team didn’t move the sales needle much more than the talented-but-underappreciated one.

But that’s just my opinion. Let’s see what Not_Mark_Millar had to say about Mark Millar’s FF…

My Fantastic Four work with @THEHITCHFACTORY is the highest selling, and if you pardon a bit of self-promotion, the best since Lee and Kirby

Hmm. That’s actually more modest than I would have expected...