The End of JLA Pt. 2: "The Tenth Circle"

Certainly someone at DC Comics in 2004 thought that reteaming writer/artist John Byrne with Chris Claremont was a pretty big deal. 

Both were among the superstars of mainstream superhero comics in the1980s, thanks, in large part, to their popular work at competitor Marvel Comics throughout the decade. 

Claremont had a 17-year stint on Marvel's X-Men characters, spanning 1975 to 1992, during which time he created many of the franchise's characters, popularized others and delivered most of what are now considered the team's classic and most influential stories.

Byrne, meanwhile, had lengthy and well-regarded runs on Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four, The Sensational She-Hulk and X-Men spin-off Alpha Flight. Teamed with Claremont for a time on the X-Men, he drew some of those classic and influential stories, like "The Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past."

Byrne also did plenty of pivotal work by DC, of course, most notably recreating the Superman franchise for the modern, post-Crisis market. He also drew the crossover series Legends, served as writer/artist for a rather lengthy run on Wonder Woman and spent a few years on New Gods/Jack Kirby's Fourth World, as well as drawing and writing another event crossover miniseries, Genesis. He also had some big Elseworlds projects and a pair of inventive DC/Marvel crossovers on his resume.

Claremont's DC output up to that point, meanwhile, wasn't exactly remarkable. He created and wrote the 1995-1998 series Sovreign Seven, penned a 1997 Superman and Wonder Woman Elseworlds miniseries and contributed a 10-page Fire story to an issue of anthology title Showcase '96. Oh, and Claremont also penned a six-issue JLA miniseries in 2003, JLA: Scary Monsters, although I confess that, at this point, all I remember of it are Arthur Adams' covers. 

Still, it's easy to imagine someone at DC thinking Byrne and Claremont reuniting for a Justice League story would be a big deal, and that the creative team, rounded out by inker Jerry Ordway, would be as significant a draw as some of the past big-name creators on the title, like Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Bryan Hitch and Howard Porter. (And hey, maybe it was a draw...for any older readers who remembered the X-Men of the early '80s, anyway. In my late 20s at the time, I had barely read anything from either man, and I had considered their appearance in the pages of JLA at that particular juncture to be a particularly weird move).

Their story was "The Tenth Circle", which ran from JLA #94-99. Byrne and Claremont shared writing credits on the six-part story, while Byrne penciled it and Ordway inked it. 

It wasn't merely a matter of one of the most popular X-Men creative teams reuniting on a Justice League story, though, it was also a sort of stealth pilot for a new Doom Patrol series by Byrne (Although it's admittedly far less stealth at this point, over 20 years later; the final cover from the arc, depicting the JLA and the Doom Patrol together, was the one DC used for its first collection in 2005's JLA Vol. 15) .

Launching a new Doom Patrol out of the pages of JLA probably made some sense at the time too, as DC had in the recent-ish past used the JLA to help launch other super-team books. The 1998 JLA/Titans miniseries lead directly to a new Titans, that same year's miniseries JLA: World Without Grown-Ups immediately preceded the launch of Young Justice and 1999 JLA arc "Crisis Times Five" reunited a new version of the Justice Society, presaging the launch of JSA the month after it concluded (albeit with some significant line-up changes). 

Of course, the difference between all of those launches and this Doom Patrol launch was that Byrne and Claremont were here introducing the Doom Patrol of The Chief Niles Caulder, Robotman Cliff Steele, Negative Man Larry Trainor and Elasti-Girl Rita Farr as if they were brand-new characters being introduced here for the first time.

This, then, was to be a reboot of the then 40-year-old team, one completely unconnected to the sorts of space/time/continuity crises that DC usually organized such reboots around, not unlike the one DC did with Supergirl in the pages of Superman/Batman that year (Unlike Supergirl, though, the Doom Patrol's recent history wasn't anywhere near as weird and convoluted, nor had it drifted so far from their original conception as the post-Crisis Supergirl had; the Doom Patrol's last title was canceled just a year previously).

(And yes, admittedly it is kind of clever to put some of the X-Men's most famous creators on a story featuring the Doom Patrol, who, like Marvel's merry mutants, also debuted in 1963 and featured a wheelchair bound older man leading a team of super-powered outsiders branded as freaks by mainstream society. Interestingly, there's even a panel where Caulder uses what looks like some sort of Cerebro unit.)

So there was a lot going on in this particular story, and I don't think it all quite seemed to come together in a way that was particularly satisfying. 

In addition to telling a superhero story big enough to give each member of a sizable Justice League something to do (In addition to the "Big Seven" minus Aquaman, the team in this story also consists of The Atom, Faith and Manitou Raven), the creators also have to introduce the quartet of misfit heroes from the Doom Patrol, and they also set about introducing some new characters who would ultimately join them in the new Doom Patrol title.

The title of the story refers to the name of a group of extra-dimensional vampires, monsters that were banished from this plane of existence by Wonder Woman's mom and the other Amazons centuries ago. They currently have a representative on Earth, a vampire with an extraordinarily bad haircut and the extremely unlikely name of Crucifer. 

He lives in a castle brought over from Europe brick by brick, and commands a small band of loyal vampires, and a group of more loyal still acolytes in cloaks and hoods; these latter he is able to subjugate via mind-control, which seems to be most effective when he bites someone...but doesn't turn them all the way into vampires.

After a few chance encounters with Crucifer and his followers, the League realizes that there is a rash of child kidnappings across the county, the victims all seeming to possess the metagene and relatively minor super-powers (if this were the Marvel universe, we could call such people "mutants"), and so the heroes begin to investigate. 

Also investigating are a mysterious group based in an old Spanish fortress in the Florida Keys, a group we will gradually learn are meant to be a new, rebooted version of the original Doom Patrol (They all get something of a makeover, the most dramatic being Trainor; rather than the traditional bandages wrapping his face up like that of a mummy, he here has what looks like some kind of leather fetish mask on, and when he releases "The Negative Man," rather than the familiar streaking silhouette with an electric yellow aura, the powerful energy form now appears as a black flying skeleton in a bluish aura).

A great deal of attention is paid to a couple of kids working for Crucifer, a girl named Nudge who possesses some form of low-level mind-control and has a close relationship with a four-armed gorilla named Grunt (which is, later in the story, referred to by Caulder as a "mega-primate"), and Vortex, a boy with the power to emit some kind of powerful energy blast from his mouth, powerful enough to break through one of Green Lantern's constructs and knock him on his ass.

Meanwhile, Manitou Raven, who we see at the opening of the story, his magical telling stones and a swarm of bats presaging some upcoming disaster, has gone missing. When The Atom searches the stones for clues to his whereabouts, he ends up shrinking down to investigate them in person and then falling through some sort of dimensional portal and into a bizarre, alien microscopic world, the inhabitants of which regard visitors from our world as a god. The Atom will spend most of the arc there, and how that connects to the rest of the story isn't even suggested until the very end, making his part of the adventure feel oddly grafted-on.

Frustrating the League's efforts is the fact that, after Nudge brings a mind-controlled Superman back to the castle, Crucifer bites him on the neck, and the vampire is thus able to mentally dominate the Man of Steel (This is in rather sharp contrast with 2002's Superman #180 by Jeph Loeb and Ian Churchill, where in Dracula tries to bite Superman's neck and recoils as he burns; Superman being a "living solar battery" meaning that his blood was suffused with "the power of daylight"). 

Under Crucifer's command, Superman acts as something of a double agent, at one point kidnapping Faith (who will spend most of the arc kidnapped actually, tied to a chair in Crucifer's castle) and fighting Wonder Woman a couple of times. Crucifer even seems to kill Wonder Woman at one point, impaling her on a sword, but, thanks to the Amazons' purple ray, she gets better.

It will prove no surprise that the League eventually wins the day, our heroes storming the still-forming Doom Patrol's HQ and then teaming up with them to take on Crucifer's forces, dispatching the dumb-looking but seemingly unkillable vampire in a neat way, a sort of superhero comics twist on an element from folklore, wherein other immortals achieve their invulnerable status by hiding their hearts outside of their bodies. 

I thought Byrne and Claremont did a decent job with all of the Justice League characters, at least the ones they spent the most time juggling, and while we don't get nearly as much of the Doom Patrol, they mostly all felt like themselves (Caulder seemed a little cooler and, well, douchier than his Silver Age self, but then, he had been trending that way since Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, hadn't he?).

Byrne had drawn most of these characters before—and, in the cases of Superman and Wonder Woman, he had drawn them a lot—although I still thought it fun to see what, say, his turn-of-the-century Batman, or Atom, or John Stewart might look like. 

And, after reading the arc to completion, I even kind of developed a love/hate feeling toward Crucifer, who is in many ways your stereotypical old horror movie vampire, but so much so (and with such a ridiculous hairstyle), that he comes around to almost being kind of...neat?

The story ends with a great two-panel sequence, wherein Batman makes a deadpan joke and turns away, and we get a silent panel showing the League's shocked reaction, the Dark Knight betraying just the slightest hint of a smile. That was pretty great.

As the last issue is winding down, Faith assures Nudge how well she fought against Crucifer and says, "I'd like to help teach you," while Vortex expresses and interest in joining Nudge and Grunt with the Doom Patrol.

"I'm intrigued by all three of you," Caulder says, adding, "Faith, as well...if you're interested!" 

They all join the departing Farr, Trainor and Steele on a teleportation platform, Robotman telling the League, "You guys ever need backup, we're there! Just call on the-- --DOOM PATROL!"

It's kind of curious that Faith leaves with Doom Patrol, as she was created by Joe Kelly specifically for his JLA run, and while she lasted some 30 issues or so in the title, she was never too terribly distinct a character, neither in her ambiguous powers, nor her personality, nor her history. 

I really can't imagine what Byrne might have saw in her, aside from the fact that with Kelley's run on JLA ending and Kelly not using her on the upcoming Justice League Elite, she was available, and perhaps Byrne wanted to use her as a sort of bridge character to the Doom Patrol...? (At any rate, she would only appear twice more time in the pages of JLA; she's among the Leaguers in Kelly, Doug Mahnke and company's JLA #100, wherein Kelly has her say in an aside, "Think stickin' with the Doom Patrol for now is best..." and later, during Kurt Busiek and Ron Garney's "Syndicate Rules" arc, she's among the heroes recruited to help the League deal with twin threats from the anti-matter universe.)

She actually didn't stay with Byrne's Doom Patrol much longer, though, leaving the book and the team with issue #5. 

As for Byrne's Doom Patrol, which he wrote and penciled while Doug Hazelwood inked the majority of the series, it only lasted 18 issues, the final one shipping in January of 2006. All in all, then, it didn't even last as long as the 22 issues of the 2001-2003 John Arcudi/Tan Eng Huat series hat it followed (and, of course, rebooted), and only about as half as long as Sovereign Seven. 

If you missed it the first time around and are curious about it after reading this post, "The Tenth Circle" was collected multiple times, including in the aforementioned JLA Vol. 15 from 2005, 2016's JLA Vol. 8 and 2020's Doom Patrol by John Byrne: The Complete Series. While the Doom Patrol business now sticks out oddly, the rest of the book is fairly evergreen, and fans of Byrne's art especially should find plenty to enjoy in it.

Next: Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen's "Elitism" from 2004's JLA #100.

Review: DC Primal Age

Walmart is no longer the only big box retail giant with exclusive DC Comics; Target gets its own 100-Page Giant in the form of DC Primal Age, a $9.99 one-shot featuring all-new material from a surprising line-up of comics talent, ranging from Marv Wolfman, Louise Simonson and Jerry Ordway to Scott Koblish, Phil Winslade and Brent Anderson.

The comic is based on Funko's DC Primal Age toy line. The line appears to be one big, elaborate Masters of the Universe homage, with DC Comics characters applied to the original MOTU template, from the proportions of the figures to the beast mounts to the Castle Grayskull-like Batcave playset. For the purposes of the comic then, the idea seems to be an Elseworlds Justice League story in a sword-and-sorcery setting (A cover blurb reads "DC's Heroes As You've Never Seen Them Before!", but 1996's League of Justice and 2001's JLA: Riddle of The Beast both did something similar).

For increased veracity, I suppose the ideal format for a DC Primal Age comic book story would be character-specific 15-page mini-comics packed with the toys, but instead DC seems to have gone with an extra-length comic book of their usual dimensions.

The bulk of the special consists of a 32-page story written by Wolfman and drawn by Scott Koblish, with Tony Avina coloring the art. In it, a mysterious hooded figure is stealing glowing orbs of mystical power, and Batman--wielding a logo-shaped bat-tle axe and riding upon a horse-sized Ace the Bathound, seeks to stop her. This thief turns out to be Wonder Woman, and she is trying to steal the orbs before The Joker, who here looks like a chalk-white He-Man figure with a Joker head atop its shoulders and "HAHAHAHA" scrawled across this chest*, can use then as part of his nefarious plans. Joker wants to use the maguffins as part of he and King Shark's plan to sink Themyscira below the sea and rule the world and suchlike.

Together, Wonder Woman and Batman visit Aquaman in Atlantis, and then travel to Themyscira, where allies Superman, The Flash and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan flavor) meet them. There's a big battle between good and evil, during which The Scarecrow uses his powers to turn some of the Leaguers evil for a bit, but ultimately the good guys win, Themyscira isn't sunk and there's talk of formalizing this alliance of heroes into some sort of Justice League, although the suspicious Batman doesn't quite trust Superman, because he is an alien.

Koblish

On a mechanical level, Wolfman's story works just fine, but there's not much in the way of style or flair to the writing. Indeed, it's strange how little the story has to do with the unique--or at least, unusual--setting of the so-called "Primal Age." The characters' dialogue all sounds just as it would were this story set in our modern, mundane, magic-less world and, indeed, it wouldn't be difficult to rewrite the story to set it in a version of the regular DCU; it would mostly be a matter of having Koblish draw Batman on a motorcycle instead of a giant dog, for example, or calling "Apollo's Solar Orbs" something like "Solar Super-Batteries" instead.

It's frankly quite disappointing, as there is obviously a lot of potential to do something fun, funny or at least just different and interesting with these characters in a Robert E. Howard by way of He-Man setting, but Wolfman doesn't seem to take the opportunity. I suppose, given the nature of the project, it's quite possible that doing anything beyond providing a script that gets all of the characters in it at some point just wasn't in his remit, however.

That leaves a lot up to Koblish, though, as a bland, unimaginative super-comic script means it's all on the artist to make the story worthwhile. Koblish too is hamstrung, though, as the designs for all of the characters were established by the toys themselves before the comic was being drawn, so unless he was involved in the design process for the action figures as well, Koblish doesn't really get to go crazy with the "Justice League, but as barbarians" aesthetic.

As for those designs, there's not a lot to them either. The characters all basically resemble their "normal" selves, which I suppose is something of a must since they need to recognizable as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and so on, and so the alterations are relatively minor. You can see stitching in some of the costumes, so they look as if they were made long before the invention of spandex. Everyone's got harnesses, arm-bands, furry underpants (in primary colors) and fur-trimmed boots. Superman has a spiked metal ball over his hand like Machiste from Warlord**, for some reason. That's...really about it. Because most of the book takes place in either Atlantis or Themyscira, settings that are always more-or-less depicted as islands of sword-and-sorcery oases within the modern DC Universe, they don't even really need to be reimagined.

Taken altogether, the main story is thus pretty dull and disappointing, and did little to grab my interest or fire my imagination. Granted, I am likely aged far beyond the target/Target audience, but, on the other hand, I've been reading/re-reading the original He-Man mini-comics as I gradually work my way through Dark Horse's 2015 He-Man and The Masters of The Universe Mini-Comic Collection***, and many of those still have pleasures to offer me.

It is fortunate then that this book contains an additional 68 pages. These are five shorter stories--about ten pages apiece, with title pages pushing the book up to meet the "100-Page Comic Giant!" size boasted on the cover--by different creative teams, each focusing on a particular character within the DC Primal Age--and these are all actually pretty engaging, each offering at least something for a reader to grab on to.

These five shorts were all strong enough that, in retrospect, I wish the entire book was an anthology, and rather than a full-length Wolfman/Koblish story, the book opened with a short comics prologue or framing sequence that made room for more shorts featuring different characters and different art styles by different creators (As a Scarecrow fan, for example, I would have liked to spend ten-pages with that character, rather than the handful of panels he gets in the opening story).

Ordway

Jerry Ordway both writes and draws the first of these short stories, "Born On A Monday," and you can probably guess which villain appears in it. Ordway's art, here colored by Wendy Broome, is as highly detailed as ever before--perhaps even more so--and is an immediate and dramatic departure from Koblish's art in the previous pages.

It opens with Wonder Woman atop a horse, charging to rescue a young boy from a mountain lion. Wonder Woman looks like "herself," with a slimmer build and more natural-looking hair than in Koblish's take, and given that her current costume is just ancient armor, the costume she wears here looks not unlike what she could be wearing in the DCU comics. It's different, of course, with golden rather than silver bracelets, a nose guard built into her tiara, and something rather weird going on with her boobs, which seem to be separated by a chest plate with special holes cut out for them, but there's not much about it that says "barbarian" rather than just "alternate Wonder Woman costume."

After she saves the child from the cat, she tries to take him home, and he leads her to a swamp full of orphaned children, each of whom has a crutch or rag over their eyes to denote some physical imperfection. Wonder Woman is then attacked by Solomon Grundy, dressed in a ripped-up black robe and sandals rather than his usual ripped-up black suit and boots, but as they fight Wondy learns that Grundy has adopted the children, each of whom was tossed into this swamp by the rich assholes at the nearby castle, so she goes off to have words with them.

Again, this is a story that doesn't necessarily need to be told in this setting, and would work just as well in the regular DCU setting, but if there's not much to the story, Ordway nevertheless tells it masterfully, and his art here is just as good--if not better--than I've ever seen it.

Winslade

The next story, "Ice & Fire," carries the highly-detailed, high fantasy aesthetic of Ordway's story forward, thanks to some quite gorgeous artwork by Phil Winslade (colored by Carrie Strachan). This script is written by Louise Simonson, and it stars Mr. Freeze, who does not appear in the lead story. Here Freeze is a blue-skinned mage with magical ice powers. Engaged to a woman named Nora who felt faint in the heat of his desolate, desert kingdom, he built a magnificent ice palace for her, but he became overwhelmed by his powers and, touching her, froze her solid, and now strives to find a way to free her from the curse.

That tragic story is told in flashback, while the majority of the action involves a really rather cool-looking fire-breathing dragon attacking Freeze's palace. He arms himself with a helmet, gauntlets and a sword of ice and does battle with it, ultimately freezing it solid. On the last page, King Shark approaches to recruit him, and Winslade's King Shark is as cool as his Freeze or Dragon; rather than the silly, Street Sharks-style version on Jon Bogdanove's cover, Winslade's King Shark is tall and thin and dark, looking more like an eel in shape than a shark, and bearing black pin-point eyes and an upside down smile full of triangle teeth.

Anderson

Simonson scripts the next short too, "Darkest Knight," a Primal Age Batman origin story drawn by Brent Anderson and colored by Broome. Batman is an ordinary man in a blue fur cape fighting crime with sword and shield when, one night, he saves a mage named Lucius Fox from a pack of demons conjured by a generic evil wizard. Fox uses his own magical abilities to heal a wound Batman sustained in the battle, and then follows him back home to the Batcave playset.

This Batman's origin is told in a few lines of conversation--Prince Bruce's parents were killed by a wizard, and he was tossed into a deep dark, crevasse filled with bats. There he adopted his new identity and set up his base, intent on fighting the mages who "run roughshod over the non-magical folk." Fox helps him by giving him a crime-detecting crystal ball, a new and stronger costume and then transforming his throwing daggers into Batarangs.

Derenick

Ordway scripts the next story, but doesn't draw it. Instead, two-thirds of it are drawn pencil artist Chuck Patton and inker Karl Kesel, while Tom Derenick handles three pages (Kelly Fitzpatrick colors the whole shebang). It's called "The Joker's Wild"--there's not a title among these stories that hasn't been used at least 300 times before--and it naturally stars The Joker. He rides atop a giant purple lizard, who looks at bit like a sharp-toothed dewback from Star Wars, and he and his hyena horde--a small army of men dressed in hyena skins--are pillaging a town, searching for a vague treasure that I think is meant to be one of the Apollo orbs from the opening story.

There's a neat bit about a peasant boy who shows kindness to the giant lizard--feeding it a pumpkin and beer--and The Joker deciding to spare the boy. The act of seeming mercy isn't actually mercy, but a sort of reward for making his lizard monster funny, which was an interesting bit of character work in an otherwise generic-ish story.

Pollard and Marzan Jr

The final story is "Not A Bird," and its written by Wolfman, drawn by Keith Pollard and Jose Marzan Jr and colored by Strachan. This too is one more story that is your average DC superhero story--Superman appears to go rogue and start committing evil acts, a suspicious Batman fights him, but it turns out that Superman was innocent and it was Bizarro who was doing all the bad stuff--made medieval. At least in this particular case Wolfman puts some extra effort into finding pre-industrial age analogues to elements of their stories, so that Superman hails from Metropolis Shire and Batman from Gotham Village, for example, or that Batman is summoned by a signal fire shining through a bat-shaped hole in a tent, or that the authorities try to fight the rogue Superman with kryptonite-tipped arrows.

Pollard and Marzan's art is pretty incredible, and filled with images of dynamic human figures in action, with most of the images of the super-people drawn to resemble the "real" Superman and Batman, only with a touch or two of the Primal Age designs to remind a reader this isn't supposed to be set in the 20th or 21st century, despite how far Pollard has strayed from the toy designs.

And then, presented almost at random, is the best page of the book, a pin-up of the Ace-mounted Batman charging The Joker and his lizard monster, by Michael Wm. Kaluta:

I certainly wouldn't mind reading 100 pages that looked like that.

The strengths of the back half of the book makes up for the weakness of the front half, but I'm not entirely convinced the whole package is really worth $10. Regardless, I won't be at all surprised if we get more DC Primal Age specials in the future, as Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Scarecrow and King Shark don't really get much of a spotlight compared to the other heroes, and, obviously, there are so many more characters that can be Primal Aged. This issue's cover, for example, features Luthor and Krypto, neither of whom appear within the book.

If more comics do appear, I hope that DC will continue to assign the stories to artists of this caliber, and that the writers lean harder into the setting.



*Unfortunately, he never says "Just call me Ha-Man" at any point in the story.


**I was actually thinking about Warlord a lot while reading this comic, for the rather obvious reasons.


***The new-ish Netflix series She-Ra and The Princesses of Power re-ignited my interest in the goings on of Eternia and Etheria, and after watching that I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the source material which is, obviously, quite different. That show, by the way, is really great.

That one time Roy Thomas almost inserted FDR/Churchill slash into All-Star Squadron

In 1982's All-Star Squadron #10, writer Roy Thomas and artists Adrian Gonzales and Jerry Ordway have President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt and All-Stars The Atom and Liberty Belle about to pay a surprise visit to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who is staying at the White House while the two Allied leaders hammer out their plans.

"It's, er, still awfully early, Mr. President," The Atom asks, "Are you sure the Prime Minister will even be awake yet?"

Judging by the direction of the dialogue balloon's tail, it's Liberty Belle who answers, singing Churchill's praises, saying he "has a constitution as hardy as the one we wrote in 1787."

Roosevelt notice that Churchill's door is ajar, and they enter. They don't see Churchill though, and Roosevelt says, "Wait! Isn't that running bathwater I hear?"

Then, in the next panel, Churchill enters his room, naked save for a cigar , a towel and a complete lack of embarrassment:

He fixes the president with a puckish smile...

...and continues (in dialogue balloons too close to the spine to be clearly scanned): "The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States! Now, what is on your mind, Mr. President?"

Nothing to conceal! Not even his own naked body! Yes, Mr. Roosevelt, what is on your mind*, now that you are confronted by your naked ally and his suggestive comments?

Jeez, talk about a "Special Relationship"...!



*The United Nations. The pair had been trying to think of a better name for their anti-Axis coaltion than "allies" or "The Associated Powers," and, after a sudden inspiration, FDR wanted to suggest "The United Nations" to Churchill.

Pre-New 52 review: Justice Society of America: Monument Point

This trade paperback collects the final five issues of the relatively short-lived Justice Society of America monthly, which relaunched as such in 2007, replacing the canceled JSA (which lasted 87 issues, from 1999 to 2006).

It was a Geoff Johns/Alex Ross joint, but once they left the book, it rather rapidly fell apart. Perhaps because DC was spreading the franchise too thin, splitting the cast between two JSA books, JSoA and JSA All-Stars, when the JSA aren’t really an X-Men or Avengers-like franchise. Perhaps it was because Johns and Ross are more popular than the JSA. Perhaps it was because once Ross and Jerry Ordway left, the book lacked a consistent, strong, appealing visual identity. Or perhaps because by that point, it was, like most of the DC’s line, dead in the water, a lame duck book awaiting cancellation and relaunch as part of the “New 52” initiative.

At any rate, these five issues are complete fucking mess; confused, inchoate and unpleasant to spend any sustained amount of time around. It’s kind of a shame; I feel bad for writer Marc Guggenheim, who must have inherited something of a mess, and clearly had a unique direction he wanted to go in...and never got the chance to go in (Several sub-plots are simply abandoned in the last issue, when he clearly had to wrap up his run, and all of post-COIE continuity, and a character rather randomly killed off, because, who cares, DC Comics was, at that point, over anyway).

And there are some talented folks involved. Darwyn Cooke delivers a few fine covers, covers which add to the visual cacophony, given how they look nothing at all like any of the art around them.

George Perez and Jerry Ordway provide some fine art, but it clashes horribly with the style of Tom Derenick, who draws a big chunk of the comics in this trade.

And while I generally liked Derenick’s pencils in the past, his art is downright repulsive here; seemingly inked and colored via airbrush. I found it pretty nauseauting, and for the life of me I can’t imagine why series editor Joey Cavalieri thought it would work on different chapters of a story that Ordway was drawing the rest of…unless he too succumbed to the “Aw, fuck it” attitude that clearly infected everyone working for or with the publisher as the “New 52” appeared on the horizon.

(Above: Derenick and Ordway draw JSA members)

I missed the first two-thirds or so of Guggenheim’s run, so I was a little lost at the beginning of things, trying to make sense of the fairly changed status quo.

The cast is still pretty large, and includes Kingdom Come import Lightning, whip-wielding Mr. America, the Kate Spencer version of Manhunter, Bule Devil (?) and completely new-to-me characters The Red Beetle (a woman wearing a red version of Blue Beetle II’s costume); buxom, white-clad healer Ri and Darknight, who looks like Batman without little bat-ears on his cowl.

They’re now based in a fictional city of Monument Point, where The Flash Jay Garrick is the mayor (and usually wearing a suit and tie with a lightning bolt pin on his lapel, without which he would be completely unrecognizable, because hair color and costumes are all any artists do to distinguish super-characters from one another).

And Green Lantern Alan Scott is now wearing a fairly crazy new get-up, which makes him actually resemble a big green lantern.

It took me a bit, but I think I actually kind of love it now.

The book’s fiftieth issue was an oversized anniversary celebration type of issue, divided into different “episodes” for some reason (that seem extra out of place in a trade collection like this, as one of the chapters is further divided into sub-chapters, while the others aren’t), each by a different artist.

The opening one is by Perez, and is a nice distillation of the post-Crisis conception of the Justice Society as the first generation of superheroes, the ones who ultimately inspired the “real” heroes of the DC Universe, the Silver-to-Bronze Age versions of Superman, Batman and their various Justice League peers.

It’s only ten pages long, but it feels longer with Perez’s panel-packed pages, and opens with bits of Superman, Batman and The Flash Barry Allen’s origins, and how they looked to various Society members for an understanding of what a superhero is, exactly, and more and more legacy heroes are introduced throughout the course of the super-short story, from a few pages of a young Hal Jordan fretting over becoming a member of the GLC until he joins Alan Scott on an adventures, to Aquaman climbing out of the ocean for the first time, to a panel of Ronnie Raymond and Courtney Whitmore.

I can see why the existence of a World War II era generation of superheroes preexisting in a fictional world before Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman could be perceived as problematic by some of the higher-ups at DC—it does seem somewhat artificial to give primacy to the also-rans; if Superman is the first superhero in the real world, why can’t he also be the first superhero in the DC Universe?—but it’s impossible to have the Big Three and the more “iconic” (i.e. the ones from Superfriends) versions of Flash and Green Lantern be eternally young and modern and pre-date their Golden Age counterparts without doing something as silly as having multiple versions of the characters on multiple Earths.

But if the choice is between Superman coming along a generation or two after Green Lantern Alan Scott and Starman or being a 90-year-old himself or banishing a bunch of the DCU’s best characters to a sub-universe, I think the pre-“New 52” way of having generations of superheroes works best. It gives the fictional DCU a longer, deeper, more detailed and exciting fictional history to go along with its fictional locales, and it allows for more characters for writers and artists to play with.

With the “New 52,” the decision seems to have been to wipe out all of the legacy characters (except the Robins, for some reason) and the existence of pretty much any character that might have existed prior to 2007 (Exceptions are seemingly limited to Etrigan The Demon and whoever’s in Demon Knights, and Jonah Hex and a few of the cowboy heroes). The result is DC lost not only a lot of history, but a lot of characters, with most of the JSA ones being recreated as “Ultimate” versions of themselves in an alternate universe (In this book alone, it looks like we’ve lost Cyclone, Courtney “Stargirl” Whitmore, Mr. Terrific II, Dr. Mid-Nite III, Jade, Obsidian, Silver Scarab, Red Beetle, Ri, Darknight, Lightning, Mr. America, Jesse Quick, Manhunter, Atomsmasher, Judomaster II and Citizen Steel. That’s an awful lot of characters, and while many of the original JSA members will likely be recreated in Earth 2—your Spectres and Wildcats and Dr. Fates so on—that seems like an awful lot of characters to lose just so Superman can claim “First!” on the cape and tights look in your fictional universe. I find that aspect of the "New 52" reboot pretty perplexing, as DC and Marvel seem to be transitioning into an IP farm business model, so de-creating a bunch of IPs seems...like something the publisher would seek to avoid, rather than leap into).

(Jeez, where was I…? Oh!)

“Episode 2” of issue #50 is drawn by by Freddie Williams II and follows time-traveling villain Per Degaton as he encounters a bigger, badder future version of himself, who repeatedly re-absorbs him from various points in his past adventures, allowing us to see brief appearances by Infnity Inc, the original version of The Crime Syndicate, the villains PD teamed up with in the early bits of All-Star Squadron and so on. That’s followed by a segment drawn by Howard Chaykin, recounting the time the House Un-American Activities Commission called the JSA in during the 1950s to bust their chops, and pretty much force them into early retirement. And for the fourth and final “episode,” Derenick and his new style arrive to bring us up to speed on the new, weird status quo of the JSoA.

The remainder of the book is devoted to the story arc “The Secret History of Monument Point,” in which Mayor Garrick learns there is a big, weird door deep beneath the city, which leads to a big, weird ancient city, which the Society and the Challengers of the Unknown team up to explore, and accidentally unleash a Kirby-esque giant monster god that seems a little too close to Gog, the Kirby-esque giant monster god that Johns and Ross and company pitted the team against in the opening arc of this volume of the title.

Meanwhile, some other villain has made Mr. Terrific dumb, a plotline Mr. T spends a significant amount of time dealing with, until it is simply resolved off-panel in the last issue, because the book was apparently canceled a lot faster than Guggenheim expected (Also going nowhere is a potential romantic arc between Dr. Fate and Lightning, which came on the heels of his rescuing of her from a weird Dr. Fate dimension in the 50th issue).

Derenick draws the first half of “Secret History,” while Jerry Ordway draws the second. Their styles couldn’t be less compatible; I vastly preferred Ordways', which was cleaner, crisper, flatter and more “comic book-y,” and thus vastly more appropriate for the old school heroes of the JSA (Even the newer characters like Stargirl and Terrific have some fairly old-school looking costumes compared to, say, anything Jim Lee has ever designed).

The monster god guy is ultimately only defeated when one of the Society’s most powerful members (Spoiler! It’s Alan!) sacrafices his life to destroy it. That would probably have been a big, dramatic deal…if DC didn’t reboot their universe the following month. Looking at the characters who are in attendance at Alan’s funeral, it appears that Terrific is the only one that still exists at all in the DC Universe—although Jay Garrick and the late Alan Scott have been recreated in a parallel universe within the New 52-iverse’s multiverse.

As for what became of these particular creators, Perez was heavily involved in the New 52, although not used very well—he wrote and provided lay-outs for the rebooted Superman, which didn’t work out so well, and he inked a few issues of the rebooted Green Arrow. He’s now drawing parts of World’s Finest.

Guggenheim and Derenick both seem to be MIA. And Ordway was responsible for helping Dan DiDio introduce a new version of the Challengers of the Unknown in the pages of the new DC Universe Presents title.

Hey Kids! Comics!

(From DC's Green Lantern #49, written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Jerry Ordway)