The End of JLA Pt. 3: "Elitism"

While it is of course impossible to know for sure what was going on behind the scenes of JLA in 2004,  this 100th issue by Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen, returning to the title after a nine-issue absence, definitely reads as if it was especially created to launch their upcoming Justice League Elite maxi-series, rather than to be their final issue of JLA.

Actually, maybe it's not so impossible, as Kelly himself discussed it in his introduction to the 2005 paperback collection Justice League Elite Vol. 1. He writes that Dan Raspler, who had replaced Mike Carlin as editor for the title, had wanted a story idea for the upcoming JLA #100 (Ah! Is this whole weird period of the title with no regular creative team all Raspler's fault, then...?!), suggesting that by incorporating his team The Elite, he could finally get to do the "dark team" he had been talking about for a while.

The story  that ultimately ran in the oversized, 38-page JLA #100 was entitled "Elitism", and it functions as a perfectly satisfactory JLA story, one in which something big and crazy happens—here, Gaea herself finds humanity wanting and is on the brink of exterminating them—and the League must do something seemingly impossible to save the day—here, rally the entirety of planet Earth to a single cause.

The thing is, for this particular plan to work, our heroes need villains to scapegoat, as humanity just can't be herded that quickly, nor can they be readily convinced to do the right thing simply for the sake of it being the right thing. (If that were the case, I wouldn't be nearly so worried about catastrophic climate change!)

"There's no time for diplomacy here," Batman tells his fellow Leaguers. 

No time for the world to debate and confer and verify our discovery.

People rally in the face of crisis, but it has to be a crisis they understand...

With victims they can relate to.

And so, with the world facing increasingly apocalyptic natural disasters, and with Gaea/Mother Earth herself articulating the problem and how she intends to solve it, using Major Disaster as a mouthpiece, the League comes up with a plan...Well, in actuality, they accede to Sister Superior's plan.

Who is Sister Superior? She's Vera Lynn Black, a powerful cyborg whose mechanical arms can transform into veritable trees of branching weaponry...and she's also the sister of Manchester Black, a character who would have been fairly familiar to Superman readers in the first years of the new century.

Manchester Black was the cynical, cigarette-smoking, Union Jack t-shirt wearing, psychic leader of The Elite, an Authority analogue team that Kelly, Mahnke and Nguyen introduced in 2002's Action Comics #775, the instant-classic "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice and The American Way?"

In that earlier anniversary issue, Kelly used Black and The Elite to articulate the arguments espoused by the then still-popular Authority of writer Warren Ellis and artists Brian Hitch and Paul Neary, regarding pro-active, aggressive, ruthless, efficient and unsentimental superheroics being employed to make the world a better place, whether the world liked it or not. 

Thes nature of such might-makes-right superheroics were, in Kelly's issue, contrasted with the more traditional superheroics as represented by the old-fashioned Superman. 

Naturally enough, Superman won the fight against The Elite in his comic book, and, seemingly, the argument of ideas (In a way, "What's So Funny..." read a bit like Kingdom Come, albeit hyper-condensed into less than 40 pages, and more focused on the Ellis/Mark Millar-style "realistic" superheroes of the time than the grimmer and grittier trends of the '90s). 

Kelly actually addresses this in that JLE trade intro too. He doesn't name any particular writers or titles of course, and said it wasn't meant to be anti-dark comics or anti-"angry, kick-ass heroes.":

As I've said on many occasions, I like dark stories. I prefer dark stories, in fact. What ticks me off is stories that beat down their predecessors under the guise of "post-modern reexamination." A one-sided butt-whupping of comics' good old days, where imagination, pulp, and innocence sold a story. Because, as everyone knows, "In the real world, superheroes would act like this, and you're an idiot for thinking otherwise..."

Crap. Crap. Crap.

Manchester Black went on to become a superman villain of sorts, featured most prominently in the Superman event story "Ending Battle," at the end of which he seemingly died. Kelly said he used Black again solely to kill him off, so no one else would end up using him. 

"He was a one-note villain," Kelly wrote. "Maybe two at best."

Anyway, in "Elitism", Kelly plays with the timeline of recent events, only gradually revealing that despite the conflict between a new, reconstituted Elite lead by Sister Superior and Superman's Justice League, the two teams were actually working together all along, the League helping prop up The Elite as villains that the entire world could rally against and, thus united, could convince Gaea not to destroy the world.

And so after a series of brief portentous scenes—a mysterious appearance by the late Manchester Black, Superman waking from a dream, the Trinity seeing a series of coordinated attacks, Major Disaster being unable to control his emotions—The Elite tear the roof of the Capitol Building, Sister Superior announcing that, because they have done such a shitty job so far, "the governments of the world are hereby disbanded" and that "In twelve hours, you will prepare for new management-- --and hand the keys to the Earth to the people who can do it right."

It's the kind of audacious declaration a supervillain might make, delivered with the sarcasm typical of Ellis or Millar characters...although it's not an argument entirely without merit. 

I mean, if Darkseid or Lex Luthor made it? Sure, but they're bad guys. The Elite aren't villains, but anti-heroes and well, the world is kind of screwed up, isn't it?  Throughout the issue, Vera and others will drop bits of dialogues suggesting the various ways in which it is. Maybe if there was someone powerful enough to take over the world and straighten it all out for the better, that wouldn't be the worst thing ever, would it...?

Naturally, Superman and the Justice League appear to fight The Elite in Washington D.C. and, despite the League's superior numbers—The Elite are here just Sister Superior, The Hat, Coldcast and a new, second Menagerie—our heroes are defeated, with The Flash and Manitou Raven seemingly killed during the battle (An early tell, of course, that there's more than meets the eye going on).

Standing over the prone and unconscious Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, Vera sneers, "Back to the funny papers, you lot."

"Reality rules," she says. "Dreams are dead." This is a reference to her brother's argument with Superman in Action Comics a few years earlier, in which Manchester Black told Superman that he's "living in a bloody dream world," and Superman made a short, punchy speech about the power of his dream, and how he will never stop fighting to make it a reality.

As becomes increasingly clear throughout the issue, though, the Elite vs. JLA fight was all a ruse, a way to show the world that the League can't save them this time, and that the governments of the world will all need to fight together this time, joining forces to take down The Elite.

This all leads to a scene in which The Elite are teleported to a battlefield, where they are surrounded by a handful of Leaguers...and every single army in the world. 

The Elite loses that fight, of course, but mid-battle Gaea appears, saying, "I have seen enough, my children... And I am sorry that I doubted you." Convinced in humanity's ability to work together, she calls off the natural disasters, and the end of the world. 

It's a very satisfyingly told story, maybe the best of Kelly's JLA comics (it certainly helps that, due to its relative brevity, it can be quite tightly constructed), and one that demonstrates the many virtues of various Justice Leaguers and their ability to successfully work their peculiar beat, the routine saving of the world.

It's also another great showcase for the Mahnke/Nguyen art team, allowing them to draw not only their League, but also revisit the Elite characters, and sell some pretty big moments.

For these first 36 pages, it's a perfectly solid Justice League story, and a nice introduction to a new character in the form of Sister Superior and, perhaps, a new direction for The Elite, as darker heroes who can play villains when necessary, foils or scapegoats for the Justice League, whose goals they ultimately support, even if they have arguments with the specifics of their methods.

But then there's the last two pages. 

In the course of 11 panels, Vera argues with Superman, Batman and Martian Manhunter about the prospect of continuing to work with the League...sort of. 

"There are threats that the JLA could confront using...unconventional means," Vera says, "But shouldn't, because of what you guys represent."

While Batman sees some value in the League being "more...subversive," he says he doesn't know Vera well enough to approve any such operation with her at its head, while Superman is opposed to the whole project.

"It's dangerous and naive," he says. "How long do you think you can wallow in the filth without getting dirty?"

Major Disaster seems swayed ("...have talked about bein' more pro-active--" he says under his breath), as does, somewhat surprisingly, The Flash, the only one on the League who seems to be actively taking Vera's side. 

As Superman dismisses Vera and she walks away, The Flash follows her, saying over his shoulder, "She's earned the right to be heard, Superman...she's earned it."

"That's it then..." Superman says, rather melodramatically. "The end of the JLA as we know it."

And he was sort of right, although that probably had more to do with DC simply not hiring a new, ongoing creative team for the book's last two years, instead having four different writers and and art teams produce four more arcs, two of which seemed to be evergreen fill-ins that could just as easily have been slotted into the upcoming JLA Classified  series ("Pain of the Gods", "Syndicate Rules") and two of which tie-in to crossover events storylines ("Crisis of Consciences", "World Without a Justice League"). 

Meanwhile, Kelly, Mahnke and Nguyen would follow Vera Lynn Black and The Elite, and follow-up on those last two pages of JLA #100, in the 12-part Justice League Elite series. In that series, the JLA's Manitou Raven, Major Disaster and The Flash would join Vera, Coldcast, Menagerie and Green Arrow Oliver Queen and "new" character Kasumi to form a new undercover, black-ops team (The Flash would remain on both The League and The Elite and, in JLA Secret Files & Origins 2004 #1, actually work the same case for both teams simultaneously, which is, of course, only possible for a speedster; interestingly, DC had "The Tenth Circle" pencil artist John Byrne draw the JLA half of that particular story). 

JLE is a pretty great series, and well worth seeking out if you haven't read it already.

"Elitism" was collected in 2005's Justice League Elite Vol. 1 and 2016's JLA Vol. 8.

Next: Chuck Austen and Ron Garney's "Pain of the Gods" from 2004's JLA # 101-106

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

DC's Power Couple vs. The Suicide Squad

Superman/Wonder Woman #18 marked the first issue of series in DC's post-Convergence universe, in which the pair of heroes each have drastically different new directions in their ongoing titles.

In the case of Superman, he was publicly outted as Clark Kent, he got a new haircut, he traded in his old costume for t-shirts so tight they might be body paint (if Paulo Sigueira's cover to the issue is anything to go by) and he was vastly (if ambiguously and mysteriously) depowered.

In the case of Wonder Woman, she got a new outfit.

This first story arc is called "Dark Truth," and it is written by Peter Tomasi and drawn by pencil artist Doug Mahnke and a bunch of inkers (four of 'em in issue #18, but just one in #19). In part one, we find Wonder Woman in Superman's bed, wearing his Superman t-shirt (which fits her like a dress), stroking her sleeping Man of Steel and reminiscing about their relationship thus far.

Awoken at 3 a.m. by a phone call from Lana Lang that gets cut off suddenly, the characters suit up and fly to Smallville to investigate.

The goings-on there are rather strange; not only is Lana Lang and New 52 Steel missing, but someone has somehow stolen The Kent Family home and barn, and seemingly emptied all of the graves in the graveyard.

A furious Superman calls out whoever is doing this, and a blast of machine gun fire heralds the appearance of The Suicide Squad, who Mahnke draws over a two-page splash, so I'll only show the right half.

This is the first time I've ever seen The New 52-icide Squad drawn well, before. Deadshot's costume still looks terrible, but it's the least terrible I've ever seen it look, and at least as Mahnke and whichever of the four inkers inked this page draw it,it's clear that it's made out of some sort of red metal.

Superman and Wonder Woman give them dirty looks on the last page–another splash!–and Superman uses the H-word.

The cover of the next issue, the one actually containing the fight, seems to indicate a victory for the Squad, or at least Harley Quinn. Could it really go down that way though? I mean, this particular Squad consists of Harley, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, Black Manta and The (a?) Reverse Flash; a fully-powered Superman should be able to take them all out by clapping his hands or blowing at them. He's not fully-powered, of course, but he is hanging with Wonder Woman. She should be able to level them all in a panel, with only Reverse Flash maybe causing her some trouble.

The fight actually lasts 8-10 pages, although two of those pages are devoted to a two-page splash showing the two opposing sides rushing at one another.

I am immediately unimpressed with supposed master marksman Deadshot, who has three shots of his blocked by Wonder Woman's bracelet, and the ones she doesn't block just bounce harmlessly off of her new shoulder pad (I guess it's a good thing she just started wearing shoulder pads!).

Actually, I'm also unimpressed by Wonder Woman. She only blocked three out of five of the shots fired at her in that panel. That's just 60%. I thought she was supposed to be the best on Paradise Island when it came to bullets and bracelets!

Wonder Woman quickly redeems herself by breaking a tombstone over Deadshot's head (ow!), kicking Reverse Flash in the face (even if he didland a few punches before she did) and then clobbering Reverse Flash with Captain Boomerang, who she is swinging around by his stupid scarf (Who wears a knit cap, scarf and overcoat in Kansas in July, anyway?) and, finally, pulling Harley off of Superman and punching her silly.

While Black Manta and Superman have a test of strength that gets broken up by the former's eyebeams, Deadshot again proves to be bad at shooting targets, while Wonder Woman simultaneously proves to be bad at blocking bullets with her bracelets.

After the Justice League's power couple finishes beating up the Suicide Squad, they talk about getting some information from them. Naturally, Superman decides the best way to do this would be to threaten Black Manta:

Oh, if only they had some kind of, I don't know, magical device like, say, a rope, that they could use to compel someone to give them information that they want.

OH WAIT–

She still has her magic lasso of truth, but she uses it mostly for entangling and strangling people.

But before either of our heroes can remember that Wonder Woman carries a magical polygraph device with her at all times, Deadshot wakes up and starts shooting wildly at them.

He is so bad at shooting:

I mean, he hits Superman a lot, but not, like, in the eye or mouth or forehead, and not in the same place repeatedly, just sort of all over the place. He brags about his "homemade high-velocity armor-piercing shells," but they don't actually seem to do too much damage to Superman, seemingly afflicting him the way a bunch of bees might affect you or I–they hurt him, they stagger him, but they don't grievously wound them, or even tear his shirt.

Wonder Woman than throws Deadshot into a tree, grabs Superman, and files away with him, leaving the Smallville cemetery littered with unconscious super-villains.

I guess Superman is weaker, but still bulletproof...?

Anyway, this is a very well-drawn pair of issues, but I'll be damned if I can make heads-or-tails of what's going on with the Superman franchise at the moment. I wish they would have let "Truth" play out in Superman and Action before we started seeing this new, weakened Superman showing up in Batman/Superman, Martian Manhunter and this title (and maybe some other places I haven't noticed), as it's not really clear what his deal is yet.

Superman gets a lavish gift from his BFF and his GF slaughters their foes in Superman/Wonder Woman #13

Celebrity gossip followers and/or typewriter enthusiasts may have heard TMZ's report earlier this monththat Angelina Jolie put down $11,000 toward a $250,000 purchase of Ernest Hemingway's last typewriter from a typewriter collector. It was meant to be a wedding gift for long-time boyfriend Brad Pitt, but, for some reason, Jolie eventually decided not to buy the machine.

Perhaps she was outbid by someone with even more money than Jolie...?

Well, given the lead time involved with the production of comic books, what a strange synchronicity that just two weeks after TMZ reported on Jolie's pursuit of a Hemingway typewriter for the love of her life, Batman buys Superman one in a comic book published just two weeks later.

So, what does this mean? Does Batman love Superman as much as Jolie love Pitt? Are Batman and Superman married? Is Angelina Jolie the Batman of Earth-Prime? Is Batman the Angelina Jolie of the DC Universe? Is Superman the Bradd Pitt of the DC Universe? So many questions!

This panel occurs in Superman/Wonder Woman #13, the first issue of the series by the new creative team of writer Peter Tomasi, pencil artist Dough Mahnke and inkers Jaime Mendoza (with Don Ho inking two pages; Mahnke's run on Green Lantern was one that required anywhere from two-to-four inkers per issue, for some reason). Of the three Wonder Woman books released this week, it wasn't the best (that would have been Sensation Comics), but it wasn't the worst either (that would have been Wonder Woman).

I'm a big fan of Mahnke's work, which I've enjoyed off and on since his Major Bummer comic in the late '90s; today he's one of the better DC Comics artists working on their regular DCU titles on a regular basis. He's an interesting, maybe even ideal, choice for this particular title, having had plenty of experience drawing the pair during a long if under-appreciated (and ultimately troubled) run on JLA, and in later DC Universe titles like bits of Final Crisis, Green Lantern and Justice League of America.

I also enjoy the work of Tomasi more often than not; when his comics are bad, they tend to be really bad, but to still have a strong, baseline structure to them, and to work as plots and scripts, no matter how off the characterizations might seem, or how pointless or distasteful those stories can be. I think he writes far more good stories than bad ones though, and while I'm pretty far behind in his Batman and Robin series at this point (I read it in trade), it's easily the second best Batman book; given the fact that the New 52 line consists of something like 31 Batman comics, hat's a pretty good showing (Um, I may be exaggerating slightly on that bit; someone check my math, huh?).

This particular comic falls pretty squarely into the mediocre category, I'm afraid. But hell, that's still better than bad! (And it's a great improvement over the original Superman/Wonder Woman team, which featured not-very-good-at-all art by Tony Daniel and a crack squad of fill-in artists (I reviewed the Superman/Wonder Woman Vol. 1 collection here, if you're interested).

Let's start with the cover, which reveals at a glance that the comic is already better than the David Finch-drawn Wonder Woman. The cover is still a fairly generic "posed" shot that could likely adorn any issue of a comic featuring both Wonder Woman and Superman, the closest thing we get to a storytelling element being that big red skull behind them, but, well, the skull is a pretty generic symbol of the ever-present threat of death in our heroes' dangerous lives.

Unlike Finch, Mahnke goes with a very big, very strong, very powerful version of Wonder Woman. She stands straight and tall, with immaculate, confident posture and a toned, athletic build. She's unfortunately wearing her dumb, over-accessorized black, red, white and silver New 52 costume (A choker, a garter and an armlet are a little much, and I think three "WW" symbols is overkill), but I don't suppose there's much that can be done about that without editorial approval. She's also carrying a sword and a spear*, two deadly, stabby weapons that should seem super-superfluous to someone with super strength and the ability to make a fist (The similarly powered Superman, hovering just behind her, isn't carrying a blade or packing heat, you'll notice).

Do look at Wonder Woman's expression, in addition to her poster, on this cover versus on Wonder Woman's cover. She's confident, relaxed, maybe eve a little bored.

(One complaint about the Mahnke-drawn, Tomeu MOrey-colored cover? I wish there were deeper, darker blacks; part of Superman's face is in shadow, but it's a brownish-red shadow. It gives the image a sketch-like quality, but I always prefer more stark imagery, myself).

The story within begins with a flashback to the day Superman and Wonder Woman first met—the day chronicled in the first story arc of Justice League by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee; you know, the battle against the Parademons in which the Justice League united to casually murder enemies by the dozens.

The very first page is a splash page, in which Wonder Woman and Superman are swarmed by Parademons. "BACK TO HADES!" Wonder Woman screams, while slitting one's throat, bisecting another's head and chopping another's arm off at the elbow all with one might swing.

I know we've talked about the Justice Leaguers' surprising willingness to slaughter their foes in that Justice League arc repeatedly, and the two explanations generally offered was that killing Parademons doesn't count because they are aliens and/or not human (weak, especially considering they're being fought off by alien Superman and galactic policeman on an almost all-alien beat Green Lantern) or that the Parademons are made up of some sort of Deathlok-esque combination of robot parts and dead bodies, meaning that they're not really alive.

That's pretty weak too, considering that it's no-prize thinking (there's nothing in the comic, or in this revisiting of that comic, to indicate that)...not to mention the fact that what the actual comic book does reveal is that The Parademons weren't killing anyone, they were trying to capture people alive (the League was therefore responding to non-lethal attacks with lethal force) and that they are all former victims who were being turned into Parademons against their will. Rather than seeking a way to save them, Wonder Woman was just straight up chopping them to pieces (while the other Leaguers, including Superman and Aquaman, were killing them left and right in the page of Justice League).

The following four pages continue the flashback to the battle, in which Wonder Woman continues dismembering**, beheading and stabbing Parademons to death.

In this issue, we don't see Superman actually killing anyone, and he and Wonder Woman actually argue tactics, with Superman asking him to help here build a buffer of rubble to keep the invaders from getting at the humans, while she prefers to kill them, getting in a nice Amazon burn at one point.

"Who did you train under?" Wonder Woman asks while Superman sets a boulder atop a Parademon and she withdraws the sword she shoved to into one's chest all the way to the hilt.

"My father," Superman responds.

Ha ha, your dead father was a shitty fighter, Superman! (Note the background in this panel; it's easy to miss, what with Wonder Woman punching a foe's head and shattering it like an egg, but the various reactions of the three people between Wonder Woman and the Parademon are pretty fun; Mahnke provides plenty to look at in these panels.)

The pair did not get a long at all, seems to be the point, and then we flash forward to "Today," where they most certainly do.

Wonder Woman is wearing a hideous dress and impatiently awaiting Superman to finish writing on his gift from secret husband Batman so they can go on a date. For reasons unclear to me, Superman is wearing his Superman costume (I thought it was some sort of nantochech thingee that appeared and disappeared as needed now?) with a red shirt over it.

In a neat reversal of her earlier burn on Superman's dead father, Wonder Woman admires the way he uses super-speed and club soda to get a stain out of his shirt, and Superman says, "Credit my mother."

That's cute.

...

Wait, did Superman match his shirt to her dress? Where are they flying off to, prom...?

There's a cute scene about Superman giving up every taxi that stops for them in Manhattan in a freak rain storm, when an earthquake KKRRRRUMMBBBBBles, and they realize something supervaillainy's going on.

"Date night over," Wondy declares.

The cause of the problems are a pair of familiar supervillains, each outfitted with jet boots, and working for a mysterious employer. These are Major Disaster, who Mahnke drew exenstively during his JLA run (at the time, the villain was inspired by Superman to reform and start using his powers for good, even becoming a member of the Justice League for a while until the League's story just sort of petered off as Infinite Crisis and its accompanying continuity punches and soft reboots temporarily abolished the League, and its recent history was forgotten by the next semi-permanent-ish writer, Brad Meltzer).

The pair of villains put up a hell of a fight before suddenly cutting and running, at which point they're intercepted by a new character with the terrible costume and more terrible still name of Wonderstar.

This action scene, like the one at the beginning, is pretty wonderfully illustrated. Mahnke's great at figure work, action and expression and, in great contrast to the Daniel (and others) run earlier in the title's short history, there are pages packed with enough panels that the fight seems like a real super-powered fight, rather than a handful of poses. That is, the villains and heroes each get to use their powers in a couple of different ways to attack and counter one another. It's not exactly an action masterpiece or anything, but it is action, and that's actually something compared to so many of the fights these two usually engage in.

I'm not sure this issue was engaging enough to encourage me to read the next one, or to add the book to my pull-list, but it seems to be an improvement over the previous issues of the series I've read, and it's head and shoulders above the new Wonder Woman run.

If you only read one Wonder Woman comic, you're still better off sticking with Sensation, but if you read two, or want to read one set within current New 52 continuity, than this is your best choice at the moment.


*Double phallic symbols!

**I've been reading a lot of Star Wars comics lately; it would be interesting to see whether those feature more arms being chopped off than DC Comics' superhero line of comics. There are a lot of arms being chopped off in Star Wars comics, but for some reason it never seems as jarring as it does in a DC comic. Maybe it's because it's usually bloodless, with the lightsabers cauterizing the wounds, making them bloodless, or maybe it's because I've grown up thinking that sometimes a Sith Lord or Jedi Knight has to chop someone's appendage off and/or kill the hell out of them, whereas seeing Superman and Wonder Woman kill enemies still seems a newer, more novel phenomenon.

The Week In Geoff Johns Comics, Part One: Justice League #31

Geoff Johns doesn't seem to be doing quite as much writing as he used to be doing, but he's still got two books on his schedule, Justice League and a high-profile run on Superman, which starts this week and will likely be one of the more talked-about and watched books to ship this week (in large part because of its pencil artist, John Romita Jr, breaking away from a literal lifetime of drawing for Marvel in order to tackle some DC superheroes, which I have to imagine a guy who draws superheroes for a living would want to have the opportunity to do at some point in his career).

Both of these books shipped this week, so let's take a look at how the comics Geoff Johns is writing at the moment turned out.

Ivan Reis drew this image.

Justice League #31, drawn by pencil artist Doug Mahnke and inked by Keith Champagne "with" Christian Alamy, is a 22-page, $3.99 book. The average DC comic, at least a few months ago, was 20-pages for $2.99. Do you know what the means? The last two pages of this comic book must cost fifty-cents a piece. So I hope you really enjoy the debut of the all-new, New 52 Doom Patrol in a classic Geoff Johnsian climactic splash page (Retroactive spoiler alert!), because it was pretty expensive compared to each of those first 20 pages.

This issue follows up on he few post-Forever Evil plot points introduced in the previous issue of this series: 1) Power Ring's power ring, which fled from his body after Sinestro buzz-sawed his arm off and then incinerated the Earth-3 version of Hal Jordan, has approached an Earth-1 lady named Jessica Cruz and offered itself to her ring finger, and 2) Lex Luthor wants to join the Justice League since him and his villain bros saved the world from the Crime Syndicate and, since the Justice League is all no way dude, he goes to Bruce Wayne's house to tell him he knows he's totally Batman.

Now, despite everything else that might have happened in Forever Evil, up to and including the introduction of The New 52 Anti-Monitor, the biggest Oh no they di'nt! moment came quite early on, when The Syndicate captured Nightwing and then unmasked him and told everyone everywhere on Earth that he was really Dick Grayson (not just people who happened to be watching TV; literally everyone, as they hacked every electronic device with a sound and/or speaker in order to broadcast this information).

What was shocking about this is that Dick Grayson is either the adopted son or the ward (not sure which, in the current continuity) of Gotham City billionaire philanthropist celebrity Bruce Wayne, a man who had previously given a news conference to announce that he was Batman's financier (which is still in continuity, according to "Death of the Family" in Batman and Batman Eternal, so don't give me that!).

So, with Grayson outted as a Gotham City vigilante and long-time Batman associate, it shouldn't take too much thinking to develop a theory that Bruce Wayne, who disappeared for years only to return to Gotham City about the same time The Batman first appeared, is probably Batman. Maybe not enough evidence to hold up in a court of law, as it would likely be mostly circumstantial, but, if nothing else, everyone with a pulse in the DC Universe should strongly suspect that Batman is secretly Bruce Wayne under his cape and cowl.

Why then it was presented as a surprise in Forever Evil #7 and the previous issue of Justice League that Luthor knows that Bruce Wayne is really Batman, I can't even imagine.

Let's dispose of the Power Ring business first. "Jessica Cruz of Earth" is in her home, which she hasn't left in four years. Like most paranoid shut-ins who haven't left their houses in four years, Jessica has the fit, firm, slim, sexy body of your average Hollywood actress or professional model, he heair looks great, and she's even wearing make-up and nail polish.

The ring knows everything about her, and proves it by expositing at her in Lantern-like dialogue bubbles (which are in the shape of the GL symbol, although slightly bent-up and twisted, not the shape of the four-leaf clover symbol of Power Ring. Julia shoots the talking, glowing ring with a shotgun, but to no avail. It slips onto her finger, giving her maybe the worst costume you could imagine.

Go ahead, close your eyes and try to imagine the worst Power Ring costume you can.

Okay, ready?

Now open them.

Did it look as bad as this? Liar.

The League has been tracking Power Ring's power ring, and, when Superman calls to check in with Batman, he tells him "there's just been a detonation of emerald energy" outside of Portland. That's a perfect example of what I love about Johns; he had Superman say "emerald energy" instead of "green energy." That's awesome and dumb at the same time (particularly so given the New 52 DCU's feint toward "realism," as seen in the costumes Superman and Wonder Woman are wearing during the scene where Superman says "emerald energy").

The ring, which repeatedly refers to Jessica as "my puppet" is apparently burning down her apartment building, and summoning scary, demonic-looking energy constructs that are eating emergency responders. And that's where the Doom Patrol comes in:

It looks like the original line-up of the Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani-created super-team: Elasti-Girl (or -Woman), Robotman (in a too-big jacket and a pair of pants), Negative Man (in a dumb jacket likely meant to recall the Grant Morrison-written version of the characters from...400 years ago), Doctor Niles Caulder (wearing an all-black action suit and totally walking) and Element Woman, last seen on the Justice League roster, although she went missing during Forever Evil.

I'm pretty sure this is Geoff Johns' second Doom Patrol, following one that appeared in this Teen Titans run (all of these guys, plus Beast Boy, Bumblebee and Herald-with-a-new-codename Vox).

But back to Bruce Wayne and Lex Luthor.

Wayne has invited Luthor into the room where he keeps his secret entrance to the Batcave in order to convince him that he's not Batman. Bruce sips on a steaming mug of what must be either coffee or hot cocoa (I can't imagine Alfred serving tea out of a coffee mug instead of a tea cup), while Luthor sips an amber-ish liquid from a tumbler with a few ice cubes.

For about three pages, Luthor essentially keeps telling Wayne not to insult his intelligence by denying his Batman (without brining up the very compelling evidence), and Bruce is all like, "Stop playing," until he finally gets up to leave, saying "As much as I'd like to stay here, drink bourbon and take credit for Gotham's Dark Knight, I have tickets to the opera." (So that's bourbon they're drinking? I guess Lex's cup looks right; I wonder why Bruce drinks his steaming hot out of a mug?)

(An aside: Do you know exactly when Lex realized Batman was probably Bruce Wayne? It was in the headquarters of the Crime Syndicate, after Lex had stopped Dick Grayson's heart, diffused the bomb wired into it, and then re-started his heart, saving his life, and he saw how genuinely concerned for Dick Batman was. By the way, did you know that means that Lex Luthor and Catwoman, who were in the room at the same time as Batman when this all happened, know that Dick isn't dead, and yet, according to the last issue of Nightwing, Batman is keeping that secret from Alfred and, apparently, the rest of the Bat-family. He doesn't trust his closest allies and confidants with the fact that Dick is still alive, but Luthor, Catwoman, supervillain Owlman and sundry Justice Leaguers all know that he is. That's kind of weird, isn't it?)

So anyway, Luthor pulls a gun on Bruce Wayne, saying he plans to prove he's Batman, and noting that he felt a slight draft in the room, and smelled stale air. Then Alfred puts a gun to Lex's head. But Lex, using his cat-like reflexes, grabs Alfred's wrist, and pushes the gun away from his temple.

And then, to protect his secret identity as Batman, Bruce Wayne leaps off of a chair and hits Luthor in the sternum with a flying roundhouse kick.

Bruce Wayne, carefully concealing his secret identity.

Luthor fires a round of his "exploding ammunition" at the clock, blowing it up and revealing a stairway. "I'm guessing that doesn't lead to the wine cellar," he says.

"Once Nightwing's identity of Richard Grayson was exposed by the Crime Syndicate, I simply followed the long and murky trail," Lex tells Bruce. "Long murky trail" is a kind of odd way to put the, let's see, one point of separation between Nightwing/Grayson and Bruce Wayne. It is six times more difficult to link Kevin Bacon to any other actor in Hollywood than it is to link Dick Grayson to Batman.

Lex tells Bruce he has no intention of blackmailing him, he only wants to join the Justice League so he can help them prepare for the coming threat that so frightened the Crime Syndicate (i.e. The Anti-Monitor, although Luthor and Batman aren't privy to that, since they didn't read the last page of Forever Evil like we did).

Batman responds by telling Luthor the story of the fable of the scorpion and the frog, but his version includes a violent bat that swoops in to destroy the scorpion before it can sting the frog. Oh Bruce, you add bats to everything!

There are two other scenes between these major threads. In one, Captain Cold visits Lexcorp HQ for a physical, as he is apparently going to join the Justice League with Luthor, as the covers of the past two issues—and a splash page in #30—make clear. That's three pages.

In the other, new recruit Captain Marvel Shazam, brought on by Luthor in the previous issue, complains about how boring monitor duty is to Cyborg. Cy suggests Shazam try using his magic to help them track the power ring, and Shazam says he doesn't know how his magical powers work, but that he would be happy to try. So he puts on his stupid hood, his right eye shoots lightning, and he intones, "Uh, powers of Shazam...show me what I want for the League. ALA-KA-ZAMM!"

And in a blast of mystical lighting, a ping pong table appears, which is "funny" because he just said on the previous page that the League's new satellite HQ could use a ping pong table.

I admit I haven't yet read Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's introduction of the new Captain Marvel character to the New 52-iverse yet—it ran serialized in back-ups in Justice League, and was recently-ish released in a trade collection—so I actually have little to no idea what his powers are or how they work, but I just sort of assumed he would still have the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury, but I guess he also has the ability to summon ping pong tables as well (Maybe one of those A's in "Shazam!" now stands for Amazon.com, and he has the ability to order anything he so desires?).

DC's May 2014 in dismemberments

Dystopian Future Captain Cold (drawn by Ethan Van Sciver) and Dystopian Future Batman (Jesus Merino and Dan Green), The New 52: Futures End FCBD Special Edition #0, May 3rd

Hawkman (Mike McKone), Justice League United #1, May 14th

Power Ring (Doug Mahnke and Scott Hanna), Justice League #30, May 21st

A polar bear (Dan Jurgens and Mark Irwin), The New 52: Futures End #3, May 21st

Frankenstein (Aaron Lopresti and Art Thibert), The New 52: Futures End #4, May 28th

Swamp Thing (Paul Pelletier and Sean Parsons), Aquaman #31, May 28th

Review: Emperor Joker

If you're reading this collection of the millennial Superman line story arc of the same name, which comprised two issues of each of the then extant four Superman books, plus an over-sized one-shot, then you already know the basic premise, as the title Emperor Joker and the crown and ermine wearing Bat-villain is right there on the cover.

The story would have been a bit more mysterious as it originally played out, however, as the first four issues merely presented the reader with a world gone mad. A semi-amnesiac Superman, now wearing a black costume and some serious five o'clock shadow, escapes from Arkham Asylum every night, using his scaled-back powers to try to figure out what's gone wrong with the world around him. And every night the leader of the JLA, Bizarro #1—a pure, undiluted, unapologetic version of the Silver Age Bizarro—fights and re-captures Superman, bringing him back to Arkham.

In this world, there's no Lex Luthor, but a bald, Lois Lane is Metropolis' maniacal, super-villain industrialist. Jimmy Olsen is Bizarro #1's pal and sidekick, Gravedigger Lad, enthusiastically tending The Graveyard of Solitude. Supergirl is a nun in a convent that worships Alfred E. Neuman, Superboy flips burgers at a fast food restaurant run by The Guardian and Steel is an asylum for scientists.

The JLA's lunar watchtower is where Bizarro meets with a group of "heroes" who look and sound more like villains—Bounty, Ignition, Scorch, Poisonous Ivy, Skizm and, um, Gorgeous Gilly—while the old Justice League are criminals appearing in strange, cartoonish forms (Martian Manhunter is more like the Martian from the Looney Tunes cartoons, for example).

The Justice League, by either Duncan Rouleau or Carlo Barberi; I'm leaning toward Rouleau.

No one's heard of a Batman, but every night the blood-curdling screams of someone dying horribly can be heard, and Mr. Mxyzptlk is somehow mixed-up in all of it, although he's not responsible.

The only real clue as to what the hell was going on for the four-issue prologue were the covers, which featured various members of the Superman family and various villains of the story arc in a playing card design, echoing that of the cover of the collection.

That and, of course, the fact that Superman finds himself incarcerated in Arkham, I suppose.

What the hell is going on is this: Mr Mxyzptlk had the bright idea to recruit The Joker to help him mess with Superman, intending only to grant him a tiny fraction of his Fifth Dimensional magic powers, but accidentally giving him all but a tiny fraction, so that The Joker was able to reshape the entire universe as he saw fit, with only a few tiny flaws in his now omnipotent mastery of the universe (Like the fact that Mxyzptlk is still around to offer exposition, that Superman has an indomitable will and the ability to inspire those around him and that The Joker just can't bring himself to do away with Batman, choosing instead to have him horribly killed every night...and then resurrected to wash, rinse and repeat).

I returned to the storyline just recently, inspired to revisit some previous Joker vs. The DC Universe storylines by my reading of the recent The Joker: The Death of The Family collection. It holds up pretty well, but, like all such story arcs involving so many of the always-moving pieces of a Big Two superhero universe, it's very much a product of its time, reflective of rather particular versions of the many characters (versions that have gone through a good half-dozen changes in the 13 years since it was originally published serially) and of the particular talents and publishing strategy of the DC Comics of the time.

Ed McGuinness, a quintessential Superman artist, able to rather seamlessly fuse modern, stylistic sensibilities with the stripped-down, simple designs of the Superman characters, and a real master at drawing big, beefy looking characters that nevertheless seem to bounce, float and fly weightlessly, draws the opening chapter and a later 22-page chunk of the story, as well as providing five of the nine  covers.

As this was a story that ran "triangle"-style through the Superman books and in a special, there are an awful lot of artists involved, with Mike Miller, Kano and Doug Mahnke handling the bulk of the non-McGuinness pencils, and Duncan Rouleau, Todd Nauck, Carlo Barberi and Scott McDaniel pitching in as well. It's a wide variety of artists, but it's not too hard to see them all bunched rather close together on the spectrum of cartoony, manga-influenced superhero art, with Mahnke's more realistic style being the greatest outlier—although it's worth remembers that Mahnke is a pretty consumate drawer of superhero comedy, as he's demonstrated in the short-lived Major Bummer and that Hitman/Lobo one-shot, and he acquits himself nicely here.

The writers involved were those of teh Superman line at the time: Jeph Loeb, Joe Kelly, J.M. DeMatteis and Mark Schultz.  The style of the scripting, not unlike the style of the art, shifts widely from chapter to chapter, but this being the "graphic novel" about a madman given the power to warp any and every aspect of reality to suit his whim, that's hardly the drawback it would have been in other works.

This Joker, like that in Last Laugh (and unlike the one in Death of The Family), is presented as a dark cartoon character, always making jokes and, indeed, here making the world one full of his jokes, and the sense of humor on display tends to feel pretty flat and forced, seeing that it is forced, the various writers all trying to write funny. Or, more specifically, Joker funny. As far as humor goes, it seems to work best where Bizarro is concerned, as the opposite talk with ever-shifting rules is such a perfect comic book gag, akin to the backwards spells of Zatanna or, more appropriate here, Mxyzptlk's return trip spell.

Ed McGuinness, obviously.

Mahnke's artwork brings much of the humor that is here to the fore too, whether it's really going to town filling in backgrounds with his idea of "crazy" imagery (which is a lot more twisted under his more realistic style than in that of the others)...

...or the manical expression on Bizarro's face...

or the wide-eyed surprise on that of our hero...

As a superhero story, I suspect this might have rather sharply divided readers at the time, as it so prominently includes two aspects of the Superman mythos that some readers seem to be somewhat embarrassed by—Mxy and Bizarro—and, hell, even some DC creators seem embarrassed by them. Note chief creative officer Geoff Johns' repeated attempts to present us with a scary version of the backwards-Superman, like the monster threatening a school bus full of children in the opening arc of  his short Action Comics run, or the brutal killer version that beat The Human Bomb to death with his bare hands in Infinite Crisis #1, or the Frankenstein-like, New 52 version currently receiving an origin in the pages of Forever Evil (On the other hand, Johns did do a pretty fun story with Eric Powell in "Escape From Bizarro World," in which he presented the more traditional version of the character).

As for me, those are my two favorite Superman adversaries.

The day is eventually, ultimately saved, in a scene that would be echoed in Paul Cornell's Action Comics story arc "The Black Ring" a decade or so later, with Superman facing a Joker with the god-like powers to do almost anything, and the hero managing to exploit that single weakness, allowing the villain to defeat himself (In "Black Ring," of course, it was an omnipotent Luthor who was facing Superman at the story's climax, rather than the omnipotent Joker).

What's impressive about it is the way the writers start with Superman and then draw a circular, spinning, curlycue-ing line out from that point, until their story isn't just one of Superman fighting a Batman villain, but a story that involves all of Metropolis, all of the world, all of the DC Universe (By story's end, "The Quintessence," Darkseid and The Spectre are also involved, in addition to all of the heroes and villains and supporting characters already mentioned. Oh, and there are even some cameos like those in the panel below).

See Pandora? Swamp Thing was part of  the DC Universe as late as 2000.

While the New 52 ultimately wiped this and these versions of all the characters out of continuity, the story was also noteworthy for a time in presenting the origin of the post-Crisis Bizarro that lasted the longest and most resembled the pre-Crisis Bizarro (prior to this, the in-continuity Bizarros were merely short-lived, failed cloning experiments conducted by Luthor) and for adding a few new minor characters to the DCU, in Ignition (who would play a role in a future Superman storyline) and Scorch (who would be involved in both future Superman stories and a significant portion of Joe Kelly's JLA run, when she dates Martian Manhunter, helps him overcome his aversion to flame, and accidentally unleashes Fernus).

It was at least well-liked enough to generate this trade collection, and to have inspired an episode of The Batman: The Brave and The Bold, in which The Joker gets 5D imp Bat-Mite's powers and uses them to kill Batman over and over, albeit it in more cartoon friendly ways. That is, nothing as grisly as the scene in this story in which Batman is eaten alive by vultures, tastefully shown just off-panel. It's actually kind of strange to see the restraint in scenes like this...

Kano

...given all the gore of the DCU of just a few years later.

There's even a scene where Jimmy Olsen apparently kills "Krypto" (Superman in the form of an ordinary dog that looks like Krypto) with a shovel, that not only happened off-panel (we don't see the shovel strike the dog, just the sound of the shovel hitting the ground), but then it's edited in a way that doesn't really make any sense, as if DC were trying to soften the act of killing a dog with a shovel.

I actually can't really make out what happened:

The falling fire hydrant seems to imply The Joker smooshed Superman-as-Krypto with his magic powers, but the dialogue refers only to Jimmy killing Superman-as-Krypto.

But back to the book at hand: Not bad, and a great example of Superman as the center of the DC Universe, in addition to being its greatest hero.