A few thoughts on Batman and Owlman, in light of Batman Vol. 2: City of Owls and Forever Evil

In 1964, the Justice League of America creative team of writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky introduced The Crime Syndicate of America, villainous counterparts to the JLA from the parallel earth of Earth-3, where the events of history were reversed in more-or-less random ways (In Earth-3's version of the Revolutionary War, for example, British colonists declared their independence from America, and so on). Therefore rather than having a team of superheroes, like the League's Earth-1 had, Earth-3 had a supervillains, who were a lot like their Justice League counterparts, but not quite (Ultraman instead of Superman, Superwoman instead of Wonder Woman, and so on).

Batman's opposite number was Owlman, who wore a blue and gray costume somewhat similar to Batman's costume, but instead of a cowl he wore what looked like a toupee made out of an owl's head.

In 1999, writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely reintroduced a new version of the "Crime Syndicate of Amerika," this one hailing from a parallel earth within the Anti-Matter Universe in their original graphic novel JLA: Earth-2. The team roster was the same, but the characters were a little more thoughtfully designed, tweaked to more closely parallel their JLA counterparts, and some of them were given fuller back stories.

One of these was, of course, Owlman, who was now revealed to be Thomas Wayne Jr., older brother to Bruce Wayne. On their world, Bruce and his mother Martha Wayne were killed in that alley, while Thomas and his father, Thomas Wayne Sr., the police commissioner, survived. Blaming his father for the death of his mother, Thomas grew up to become the criminal mastermind of Gotham City, Owlman, and went to war with his father.

Morrison, who always showed a zeal for in-story allusions and/or Easter eggs, was in fact referencing an old, Crisis On Infinite Earths-rendered apocryphal story from a 1974 issue of World's Finest by Bob Haney, Dick Dillin and Vince Colletta.

In "Wipe The Blood Off My Name!", Batman pursues "The Boomerang Killer," only to discover it is actually his older brother Thomas Wayne Jr, who was severely and permanently brain-damaged in a childhood car accident, and confined to an asylum (I guess it was a very specific type of brain damage, which causes those who suffer from it to eventually grow up to become killers?). Bruce's parents had every intention of telling him about his criminally insane older brother they put in an asylum when he was old enough to understand, of course, but then there was that whole murder in an alley thing.

Fast forward to 2011, when Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo take over the relaunched Batman. Their first year's worth of stories is dedicated to The Court of Owls, a sort of semi-legendary Illuminati pulling the strings behind everything going on in Gotham City, a secret organization so secret that even Batman didn't know they were real. In addition to naming themselves after owls, wearing ceremonial owl masks and using a lot of owl themes in their decor, they also command a small army of elite, undead assassins in owl costumes that they refer to as "Talons."

At the climax, it is revealed that among their more prominent members is mayoral candidate Lincoln March, who Capullo draws to look a lot like Bruce Wayne. And with good reason!

March claims to be Thomas Wayne Jr., Bruce Wayne's younger brother, who was still in Martha Wayne's womb when she was in a terrible car accident. Born early and severely brain-damaged, he was put in the "Willowood Home For Children" (In Haney's story, Thomas Wayne Jr. was in the "Willowood Asylum;" like Morrison then, Snyder was heavily referencing the now non-canonical early '70s story). Feeling abandoned by his parents and older brother, Wayne/March was raised by the Court of Owls to inherit the Wayne empire. That didn't quite work out, nor did his run for mayor, so he ultimately makes a play to seize control of the Court of Owls, even going so far as to give himself the Court's undead-making super-secret super-serum, the one reserved for the virtually un-killable Talons. Then he puts on a fancy new Talon suit; "Something tough and modern," he says of it, " Something to rival the Batman."

While he never goes by that name, Snyder and Capullo's March/Wayne dons a fancy owl costume and essentially becomes an owl man. (As to whether or not he actually is Thomas Wayne Jr., Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth are certain that he is not, that Bruce's brother actually died from the wounds sustained in that crash, but Bruce says he can't know with 100% certitude until he gets a DNA sample, and March/Wayne disappears during their climactic battle, in the fashion of many supervillains—presumably killed, but with no body discovered).

Then, in 2013, writer Geoff Johns re-introduced the new, New 52 version of The Crime Syndicate, who are once again from Earth-3, a parallel world where many aspects of the DC Universe is "reversed," including the fact that the heroes are villains and the villains are heroes. This Syndicate also has an Owlman, and as Johns reveals in issues of his Justice League of America, the new Owlman of Earth-3 is still Thomas Wayne Jr., now once again Bruce Wayne's older brother.

In Johns' origin story, the two Wayne children—Thomas and Bruce—conspired to kill their own parents, and, on the night when they were shot to death in the alley, Bruce had last-minute, second thoughts, so Thomas Jr., conspiring with Alfred Pennyworth, kills his mother, father and little brother. He then grows up to be Owlman.

So this is strange.

On the "real" Earth of the DC Universe, which I'll call Earth-New 52, there is a heroic Bruce Wayne defending Gotham City as the superhero Batman, and a villainous "Owlman" who is—or at least claims to be and presents a pretty good case for being—Thomas Wayne Jr.

And on Earth-3, the reversed world where good is evil and evil is good, Bruce Wayne was good (well, he was a spoiled brat who considered killing his parents, but he wasn't as evil as his brother), and a villanous Owlman who is really Thomas Wayne Jr.

In that respect, at least, the worlds aren't opposite at all. Thomas Wayne Jr./Owlman is a bad guy on both worlds, just as Bruce Wayne/Batman is a good guy (or at least not a bad guy) on both worlds.

"The Wednesday Phenomenon"

As obsessive-compulsives who actually read every word of my blog (just me, I think) no doubt remember, last month I finally got around to reading John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies, inspired in large part by the interesting cover on the copy of the book a library I visited happened to have on its shelves.

Since then, I’ve been on a casual but continuous quest to read as much about the 1966-1967 sightings of the creature popularly called Mothman as I possibly can in an effort to a) find more and more different artistic interpretations of the creature popularly called Mothman and b) figure out just what the hell Keel’s theory regarding the monster, the flying saucers, the men in black and the various strange experiences he chronicled in Mothman Prophecies was actually all is, as the book read like an investigation without a conclusion to me (As I mentioned in that original post, Keel hinted that he had some sort of understanding of it all in Prophecies, but never really shared it in the book).

I’m still tracking down various Keel-written works, but the other day I checked out High Strangeness: UFOs From 1960 through 1979 (The UFO Encyclopedia Volume 3) by Jerome Clark (Omnigraphics Inc.; 1996) because it had a healthy-sized entry on “Mothman and Other Winged Entities” (although it had no drawings save a version of the expected one).

Keel came up quite a bit, not only in the Mothman entry, but throughout the book, and Clark’s summary of Keel’s thinking—and reflections of the latter’s place in ufology in general—were pretty interesting to me. Additionally Clark summarizes Keel’s theories of UFOS and related phenomena pretty clearly, particularly in an entry entitled “Paranormal and Occult Theories About UFOS”.

(The connection to comics is coming up; be patient…or quit reading this post I guess…have you checked Blog@Newsarama yet today?)

Keel believed in a “superspectrum” which was essentially a higher plane of reality, and the beings native to it were “ultraterrestials” who, Clark writes, “cynically manipulate the human race and individual human beings.” They can make humans see whatever they want, and thus toy with humanity.

Writes Clark:

In Keel’s revisionist history ultraterretirals “posing as gods and superkings” once ruled the earth, but when democracy became a force in human affairs, these “gods” and their descendants (royal families whose ancestors had mated with ultraterrestrials in human guise) lost their power and authority. Ever since then the ultraterrestials have waged war on Homo sapiens. They have generated religions, cults and secret societies, intervened in the lives of historical figures (Thomas Jefferson and Malcolm X among others) at crucial moments, and otherwise directed human life to serve their ends. God himself is an ultraterrestrial dwelling in the superspectrum.

I don’t even know how to wrap my head around such a view of the universe, especially since it seems like the only evidence for such a view one could provide would be experiential and not concrete, making a view that can easily be stated and, perhaps by some, believed, but not really argued for.

I was struck—repeatedly, actually—while reading about Keel in this book at how similar he sometimes sounded to Grant Morrison. Not just in the language choices and naming conventions ("Ultraterrestrials from the superspectrum posing as gods and superkings" sure sounds like a snatch of Morrison super-comics dialogue), but also in his idea of higher-dimensional beings influencing us here in the third-embedded-in-a-fourth (Think "Crisis Times Five," or All-Star Superman or Final Crisis or that interview where Morrison claimed to interact with fifth-dimensional beings) and his belief that he could actually control aspects of reality through his own writing (Keel has at least one anecdote in which he could conjure particular types of UFO events simply by making shit up and talking about it, whereas in Invisibles-era interviews Morrison talked about his ability to conjure up real people by creating them first as characters in his work).

Also of note to comics fans is the way Keel’s intellectual predecessor (to use Clark’s term) talked about the superspectrum’s ultraterrestrials, and the way they traveled to our reality. N. Meade Layne had a similar understanding of a higher plane of reality with its own entities, although he called that higher reality “the etheric world” and the entities there “etherians.”

Check out this summary by Clark:

The etheric world coexists with and interpenetrates ours. Like our world, it has stars, planets, and other familiar features which are the etheric analogues of ours. Its inhabitants are human and highly advanced. The etherians, who have our best interests at heart, must lower their “vibrational” rate considerable in order to enter our realm.

Readers of DC comics will note that such terminology echoes the way DC’s multiverse cosmology. The various DC Earths (Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-S, and so forth) all existed in the same place in space, but vibrated at different frequencies, creating parallel earths—to travel between those earths, The Flash characters would vibrate at different frequencies.
(Above: A one-panel explanation of DC's multiple earths, from 1977's Justice League of America #147 by Paul Levitz, martin Pasko, Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin)

Layne didn’t crib this theory from old Gardner Fox JLA/JSA stories, of course. Clark says Layne identified flying saucers as “ether ships” from the etheric realm back in 1947. The “Flash of Two Worlds” story that introduced DC’s dominant use of parallel Earths was published in a 1961 comic book edited by Julius Schwartz and written by Gardner Fox.

Schwartz was extremely active in 20th century literary science fiction circles, publishing one of the first sci-fi fanzines and serving as a literary agent to influential sci-fi writers. Fox was a prolific science-fiction prose writer as well as a prolific comics writer. Certainly ufology would have been something both would have heard quite a bit about over the years.

Hey, you know the difference between professional writing and stuff I write on my blog? In a case of the former, I’d start out any piece with a lede or introduction of some kind. In the case of the latter, I might ramble on at random for 1,000 words before getting to the point, which is referred to in the title of this post.

So, the reason I started typing all this—

John Keel wrote about a trend he referred to as “The Wednesday Phenomenon.” After analyzing close-encounter reports from 1966-68, Keel determined that the “greatest umber of sightings are reported on Wednesday, and then they slowly taper off through the rest of the week.”

In Mothman Prophecies, Keel wrote:

I had collected some seven hundred UFO reports from 1966 and discovered that the greatest number of sightings, 20 percent, took place on Wednesdays.

…

No one except the U.S. Air Force had attempted even a superficial statistical analysis of UFO sightings before, so my findings were greeted with howls of derision by the scientists who posed as experts on the phenomenon. Then Dr. David Saunders of Colorado University fed several thousand sightings into a computer and found the Wednesday phenomenon remained stable. That day produced the largest number of sightings, well beyond the laws of chance and averages.

According to Clark, Keel also noted in UFOS: Operation Trojan Horse that “psychic and occult events seem to follow the same cycles as the UFO phenomenon.”

Is there anything to that? Clark’s High Strangeness entry on the subject notes that when two other researchers attempted to test the Wednesday phenomenon, they came to different conclusions, and an Allen Hendry noted such studies would be meaningless due to the difficulty of screening out bogus reports from misidentifications.

But Keel himself seemed satisfied with his conclusion that, for whatever reasons, Wednesday is the day when people are most likely to encounter UFOs.

It is also the day on which new comic books go on sale each week.

COINCIDENCE?

I don’t know.


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

Whatever Mothman really was—giant owl, CIA-controlled animatronic puppet, UFO pilot, ultraterrestrial from the superspectrum—its appearance and behavior puts him in the well within the category of "monster."

Perhaps because of that, I find mental images of Mothman behaving in ways more mundane than monstrous sort of hilarious.

The only previous example I had encountered was the one suggested by a line in Keith Phipps' A.V. Club review of the 2002 Mothman Prophecies movie. Summarizing the plot, Phipps wrote, "After making a widower of [Richard] Gere in the film's opening sequence by flying at his car, the Mothman later retreats to more subtle tactics, like prank phone calls."

Reading the book after reading that review, I'd occasionally imagine Mothman as the culprit behind all of the strange stuff Keel described, like making all those weird phone calls, opening Keel's mail, dressing up as men in black, creating UFO hoaxes, etc. I especially like the image of Mothman making prank phone calls though, since he isn't generally reported to have a mouth. Or ears. Or head.

Clark's High Strangeness has a non-Keel account of some Mothman behavior which puts him in another bizarre light.

He reports that in 1976 members of the Ohio UFO Investigators League reinterviewed some Mothman witnesses and came up with some fresh details. They found that Linda Scarberry, one of the original witnesses, had seen Mothman hundreds of times and that, for a period of a few years, Mothman followed them everywhere.

Clark quotes Brent Raynes' 1976 article "West Virginia Revisited" from Ohio Sky Watcher, quoting Scarberry:

We rented an apartment down on 13th Street, and the bedroom window was right off the roof. It was sitting on the roof one night, looking in the window, and by then I was so used to seeing it I just pulled the blinds and went on. I felt kind of sorry for it [because] it gives you the feeling like itw as sitting there wishing i could come in and get warm because it was cold out that night.

A sad, lonely puppy dog version of Mothman that is so ubiquitous that it has become something akin to weird, slightly disturbing furniture in one's life is pretty compelling. (At least read about third- or fourth-hand almost 35 years later, as opposed to being the one seeing a sad, lonely puppy dog version of Mothman following you around and looking in your window all the time).

Way too many words about JLA: The Greatest Stories Ever Told

I was originally planning on reviewing JLA: The Greatest Stories Ever Told and Shazam!: The Greatest Stories Ever Told together, perhaps in the “Delayed Reaction” format I often use when writing about books that have been out for a while that I’m getting around to a little late. But when I started writing about the JLA one, and considering why the stories that were chose were chosen, it became evident that almost all of them were there to represent particular eras of the team, and I soon found myself getting sidetracked, and, well, this grew in the writing.

So, if you’ve got the patience, this is going to be one hella long post, I’m afraid.

As with all of DC’s Greatest Stories Ever Told collections, this is really more of a Greatest Short Stories From a Variety of Different Times and Creators That Don’t Belong in Any Other Trades Really So We Put ‘Em In Here collection. None of these are among the greatest JLA stories ever told, but they are, for the most part, pretty decent, and are all good examples of the contributions of particular creators.

It’s really more of a sample platter of Justice League history. If you like the Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky story, you’ll want to read Showcase Presents: Justice League of America Vol 1. If you like the Giffen/DeMatteis story, they have a JLI trade (or two) out (or coming out). Like the JLA stories? Every issue of that run is in trade. Like the Satellite Era stories? Well, tough; none of ‘em are in trade yet.

The book begins with a two-page origin of the League by Gerry Conway, George Perez and Brett Breeding, a story which is kind of like a condensed version of the Mark Waid/Barry Kitson JLA: Year One story, only with Wonder Woman standing in for Black Canary, who was standing in for Wonder Woman. That’s followed by a pretty thorough four page overview of Justice League publishing history by Mike Tiefenbacher, and then it’s on to seven stories spanning 40 years of publishing history, and a nice set of contributors’ bios at the end, which should be helpful to any new readers wanting to see what else this Grant Morrison character has written, for example.

Here’s what DC decided to include, and way too many words about each story…



“The Super-Exiles of Earth” (Justice League of America #19)

This 1963 Gardner Fox/Mike Sekowsky story is typical of Fox’s run, in that it is simultaneously stupid and brilliant at the same time, depending on what angle you regard it from. Recurring villain Dr. Destiny, whose powers are ever-changing and vague—but always derived from dreams and reality shaping—has caused the Leaguers to dream of themselves, and then bring their dream versions of themselves to life.

This created a League of “super-super heroes” who are “naturally” wicked, since Destiny is himself wicked. The wicked Dream League defeat the true League, since they are those heroes but slightly better, and then go about robbing banks. The real Justice League members are brought before a judge for the crimes, but settle on exile, since no prison can hold them.

Presiding over the case is future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:


Ultimately, the League decides to return to earth but, so as not to break their promise to Scalia, they do so in their secret identities. At this point, the Leaguers didn’t know one another’s secret IDs, so this is a pretty big moment. It’s revealed in a wonderful two-panel sequence:

Good thing their spaceship had a hallway with eight rooms in it!

The secret identities fight the dream League, but are again outmatched, ultimately only triumphing when The Atom shrinks to microscopic size in order “to enter our dream selves’ brains undetected and unfelt—and perform delicate ‘operations’!”

So, essentially he lobotomizes them all, to the point they can’t control their bodies, and Superman heroically suggests the rest of them then “finish off” the feeble-minded versions of themselves.

This issue is pretty representative of the breathless, dream-like storytelling Fox engaged in, and the casual savagery of superheroics. Even in this era where “crime” consisted solely of bank robberies, and rape and murder weren’t on anyone’s minds, you still have the heroes triumphing through stealth lobotomy.

Rereading the from today’s perspective, what stands out most to me is that Fox’s hyperbolic storytelling was more or less standard for the era, but in today’s super-comics scene, it seems extraordinarily weird. People always talk about how insane Grant Morrison’s stories are—not just his Justice League stories, but all his superhero stories—and yet Morrison’s really just writing like a Fox in a post-Dark Knight/Watchmen/Maus world. In tone, pace, scope and scale, this reads just like a Morrison story, albeit one with much more narration and explanatory dialogue.

The other striking thing about this story is the way in which Fox undoes whatever changed in his story. Story-to-story continuity existed at that point—Dr. Destiny is in jail, right where the League sent him in a previous adventure—but changes came pretty slow back then. Here, the League out themselves to each other, but the last two panels have Superman explaining his going to fetch some Amnesium from his fortress to erase that info from all of their minds.

I’m not positive why this particular story was chosen over all the other Fox/Sekowsky ones; if I had to guess, I would guess that this issue was chosen in large part because featured the whole League (the Big Seven, plus Green Arrow and the Atom).

It sure gives Sekowsky a lot to draw. In addition to the full line-up—two full line-ups actually—he gets to draw two sets of the heroes in their secret identities, including some great panels of the evil secret identities (I particularly like evil Bruce Wayne in his ascot), and some cool shit like a cutaway of the crust of the earth after the bad League imprisons the good League under it, and a small army of Aquaman’s octopus friends carrying “art treasures” over their heads.
(Can you spot the billionaire in the above panel?)

I can’t think of an instance of DC later re-doing this story, or following up on it, but the scenes of the Silver Age League looting and robbing reminded me of Ty Templeton’s cover for Silver Age: Justice League of America #1, and during Mark Waid’s too-brief run on JLA, he wrote a four-part story in which the Justice Leaguers’ secret identities had to defeat self-dreamed versions of themselves.




“Snapper Carr—Super Traitor!” (Justice League of America #77)

The next story in the collection is from a 1969 issue, scripted by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Dick Dillin and Joe Giella.

Tonally, the book (like a lot of DC’s superhero comics) is now in that gawky, awkward phase, where they were becoming less full-on zany, and more imitative of Marvel’s superheroes-as-soap-operas-for-teenage-boys approach. The sensibilities were thus growing a lot more modern, but often these books seem more grating than Fox’s, if only because their more literary aspirations and their relative weaknesses give them an aura of pretentiousness (I don’t mean that in a bad way, necessarily; O’Neil’s pretentiousness at the time give his work here and elsewhere—particularly on the classic Green Lantern run—a particular, peculiar charm).

The story involves Snapper Carr, the only teenager who looks older and squarer than Jimmy Olsen, getting hassled for hanging out with those “freaks” like Superman and Wonder Woman. If it seems insane that the Justice League could be vilified as if they were the X-Men in the Marvel Universe, well, I thought so too—you can’t get any more establishment and mainstream than the JLA, even though they let Green Arrow stick around after he grew his goatee.

But hang on, O’Neil explains why they’re being vilified. These bullies are followers of John Dough, “otherwise known as ”Mr. Average”!-- The most normal man in America!” Dough is conducting a two-pronged PR campaign against the League; one-part propaganda, one-part mind-control technology. He got his hooks in the Justice League’s mascot Snapper Carr, turning him traitor.

It’s a pretty fleet story, and while it’s certainly not one of “the greatest,” it is something of a turning point in League history, ending with Green Arrow bemoaning the problems John Dough has caused them: “We’ve got to establish a new secret H.Q…our mascot is having the biggest trouble of his life…”

The League would shortly move to their space satellite headquarters, and things would be queered with Snapper from then on (this is his only appearances in this book, for example).

I don’t know how influential this particular issue was on the stories that followed; it came up in that stupid story involving the, um, Star Tsar, and was re-explored at length in an issue of Hourman, one of the best superhero comics DC ever cancelled.



“The Great Identity Crisis” (Justice League of America #122)

So, does that title sound familiar? And guess who the villain of the piece is? That’s right; Dr. Light. This story isn’t one that Brad Meltzer references in his Identity Crisis, but we’ll get to that one soon enough.

This is “an untold tale from the Justice League of America Casebook,” a short story by Martin Pasko, Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin pitting seven Leaguers against Dr. Light in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, where the villain has launched an incredibly stupid plan (particularly for 1975).

He uses a mind-light gun, the aforementioned chunk of Amnesium and a special prism to steal the secret identities of the Justice Leaguers and then—and this is an idea with great story potential—completely scrambles them. So Oliver Queen puts on a lab coat and shows up at Ray “The Atom” Palmer’s university lab, thinking he’s research scientist Ray Palmer; billionaire Bruce Wayne thinks he’s Queen, and shows up at the tenement Ollie lives in, getting friendly with his poor neighbor, and so on.

Now, there are probably all kinds of ways to turn a profit and/or make life miserable for the Leaguers once you know their secret identities, but Light opts to bump them all off with elaborately prepared light traps.

They, of course, survive, and use the Amnesium to wipe Dr. Light’s mind (Hey, that sounds familiar), before Superman KRUNNNCHs it so it “will never confuse anyone again!” and Green Arrow proposes the Leaguers all learn one another’s secret IDs to prevent troubles like this in the future.

Then they all hold hands and agree:

This one may have been included in part to get another Dillin-drawn story in the trade. With an influential 12-year run on JLoA, he’s probably still the definitive Justice League artist; given how rarely most DC artists can draw 12 consecutive issues of a particular title, chances are that’s not going to change any time soon. (The current volume of Justice League of America has only been around for 22 issues so far, but in that time has had eight different pencil artists working on it).

I imagine Meltzer’s Identity Crisis had a lot to do with it too, given the mind-wiping, Dr. Light and the title and, perhaps, the revelation that the Leaguers know one another’s secret identities after all (one of the bigger stumbling blocks in the mystery aspects of IC was that it assumed that the Leaguers’ IDs were widely known among the superhero community and their loved ones, which wasn’t actually the case since the early ‘80s).




“The League That Defeated Itself" (Justice League of America #166-#168)

Now this, this is the story that seemed to have influenced Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis. In this 1979 three-parter by longtime League scribe Gerry Conway and the art team of Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin, The Secret Society of Super-Villains get their evil hands on a Bronze Age statue of a gryphon, and use its magical properties to switch their minds with those of some of the Justice Leaguers, Freaky Friday style.

So now The Wizard, Star Sapphire, The Reverse Flash, The Floronic Man and Blockbuster reside in the bodies of Superman, Zatanna, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Wonder Woman and Batman, and vice versa.

This is the story alluded to in flashback in the pages of Identity Crisis, in the discussion of how the Leaguers had to occasionally wipe minds to keep on Justice League-ing. There’s a scene where a character points out that of course the SSOSV peeked under the masks of Batman and Hal Jordan while they were in their bodies; it wouldn’t have made sense for them not to take advantage of the situation to do so.

I think this was one of the fundamental conceptual flaws of Identity Crisis, because the world of the Justice League need only work according to what’s logical there, not what’s logical in our world. It doesn’t make sense for the villains not to discover the heroes’ identities? Okay. It doesn’t make sense for the villains to imprison the heroes in a giant green diamond and throw it into the sun to kill them instead of just slitting their throats either. It doesn’t make sense for The Wizard-in-Superman’s-body to plan an elaborate museum heist when he could just fly around taking what he wanted in Superman’s body. It doesn’t make sense for him to try and trick and trap the other Justice Leaguers, when he could kill them all at super-speed in about ten seconds, tops.

You really have to be careful when you start pulling threads on these old stories, because it doesn’t take too long to unravel the whole thing.

At any rate, I’m sure the fondness Meltzer had for this story is the main reason its included here, as Conway and company had plenty of other stories to choose from if the idea was simply to showcase their run on the League, and show some of the Satellite Era members like Zatanna, Elongated Man and Red Tornado in a story (Poor Red Tornado gets defeated, like, three times in this story).

I don’t have it in front of me, so I’m not 100% positive, but I think this may also be the old Satellite Era adventure that was referenced in the Geoff Johns, Allan Heinberg, Chris Batista and Mark Farmer story arc “Crisis of Conscience,” which is an additional reason for inclusion.



“Born Again" (Justice League #1)

You’ll get no arguments from me that this is an issue that belongs in a trade called The Greatest Stories Ever Told. This is the first issue of the seminal Keith Giffen/J.M.DeMatteis run on Justice League, one of the creative highpoints of the franchise’s 40+ year history.

This first issue, drawn by Kevin Maguire and Terry Austin over Giffen’s breakdowns, is awfully early in the writers’ five-year run. Some of the team members introduced here won’t stick around on a full-time basis very long (Dr. Fate, Black Canary and Captain Marvel will be gone in a matter of issues), and some of the characters most associated with the JLI Era don’t appear here at all (Booster Gold, Fire, Ice).

But despite the somewhat opening ending—who is this mysterious Max Lord character who seems to be manipulating events and talking like he’s going to be taking over the Justice League?—this first issue is full of classic moments. There’s Green Lantern Guy Gardner rehearsing his nominating himself for leadership; there’s Guy picking a fight with the rest of the team; there’s Batman shutting him up with a dirty look and a few sharp words; there’s Blue Beetle casting about for a comedy partner to bounce his jokes off of; there’s the mix of character humor, superhero action and occasional melodrama that would make the next few years worth of Justice League stories among the best ever.

There were certainly one-issue stories during the Giffen/DeMatteis run that I would qualify as greater, but this is probably a pretty perfect introduction to that era, particularly since this is the only story a newcomer to the material could actually continue reading in trade format, since only the first handful of their run was ever collected in trade (Now, there are at least two handfuls of it in trade).

This issue features that classic cover of Maguire’s, which he himself would riff on over and over in the following years. In 1998’s JLA Secret Files & Origins Special #2, Christopher Priest would re-stage a few scenes from this issue beat for beat.



“Star-Seed” (Justice League Secret Files and Origins #1)

This is one of the three—count 'em—three origin stories for the Morrison/Porter League, counting miniseries Justice League: Midsummer's Nightmare and the first story arc of JLA, "New World Order." It originally appeard in the JLA: Sectret Files & Origins Special #1, the very first of DC's SF&O, and by far the most substantial. In additon to this story, there was another one by Mark Millar, an interview with Martian Manhunter by Millar, profile pages of each of the Leaguers featuring pin-ups drawn by the regular artists on their monthlies at the time, two pin-ups by Phil Jimenez featuring every Justice Leaguer ever and every Justice League villain ever, a year-by-fictional year JLA timeline/history and collecters cards.

This story features six of the Big Seven on the Justice League satellite—apparently before the Hyperclan knocked it down in "New World Order"—figuring out what to do about an alien invasion in Blue Valley. These particular aliens are these weird star-shaped, cycloptic face-hugger things, a scarier, slimier version of the old Starro face-huggers. They've taken over the city and The Flash, and is ranting about conquering the world. The U.S. government wants to nuke Blue Valley, and the League wants to save the day, but The Spectre arrives and forbids them. He gives them a vision of the future should they intervene, and they would inevitably be taken over by The Star Conquerer, who would then use them to conquer the universe.

They arrive at a compromise: The Spectre strips them of their superpowers, removing all risk of that future he showed them, and also getting around the Conquerer's defenses, since it was "primed" for super-humans.

As Morrison's League run goes, it's not among his better stories, but it is fairly representative. It demonstrates the Batman as the hero of the heroes, who often ends up saving the day (particularly in "New World Order"), the stakes are as high as they are in every work of his (global apocalyse, if not universal or all reality), and it features Morrison's subtle diddling with the "rules" of superhero conflict, wherein the day is saved by the characters altering some part of the near-mathematical equation that is superhero comics. It also features an ending in which he comes out and offers a sort of mission statement for the League. Story-wise, it also functions as a bit of a preview of a two-parter in which the actual Conquerer comes to earth, and invades and subjugates the human race through their dreams (The Dreaming from The Sandman, who also guest-stars, in one of the rare and now non-existent Vertigo/DCU intersections).



As to why it bore inclusion above all the other stories of the run, I imagine it was a simply matter of space. Morrison and company had quite a few quite excellent two-part arcs—The Zauriel/angel invasion story, The Green Arrow story (although Porter didn't draw it), the Prometheus HQ invasion, the aforementioned fight against the Star Conquerer—but only one single-issue story. That would be JLA #5, which encapsulated a lot of the greatest attributes of the run, but also prominently featured the temporarily blue electric Superman, something that the assemblers of this trade might understandably have wanted to avoid. The Secret Files story worked better in that it avoided Electro-Supes, even if it did feature long-haired mullet Superman, and '90s-style Aquaman (the latter of which I liked, but has ultimately proven short-lived).



“Two-Minute Warning” (JLA #61)

If the Giffen/DeMatteis and Morrison eras were the League’s creative high points, then the creative team of Joe Kelly, Dough Mahnke and Tom Nguyen presided over the end of the success of Morrison’s vision for the team. Neither Kelly nor writer Mark Waid’s runs were quite as good as Morrison’s, but they weren’t bad either, and they kept the basic formula in tact—the JLA was a book about the world’s greatest heroes banning together to stave off apocalypses they couldn’t take alone.

Kelly was the last regular writer to work on a Justice League book. He wrote 29 more or less consecutive issues (there was a single fill-in issue during that time), and then JLA became something of an anthology title: three issues by Denny O’Neil, six issues by John Byrne and Chris Claremont, six issues by Chuck Austen, eight issues by Kurt Busiek, five by Johns and Heinberg, six by Bob Harras. Even when it was relaunched as Justice League of America, Meltzer only stuck around for 13 issues (four stories) and Dwayne McDuffie’s only written five complete issues so far.

It was an incredibly solid run though. Though did exceptional character work, getting a strong handle on all of the characters, even Martian Manhunter and Plastic Man, two that seem to give a lot of writers trouble. He managed to come up with threats that seemed to be big enough to menace such a powerful team, but he often had a light touch, and wrote in bits of humor that weren’t too far away from what Giffen and DeMatteis might have managed. He seemed like a nice compromise between the two greatest runs on the title, even if his wasn’t as good as either of them.

I didn’t always agree with the decisions he made—particularly giving Plas a bastard son—and I’m sure some were controversial among some elements of fandom (like the Wonder Woman/ Batman almost-romance), but his stories were always big, fun and full of creativity, as JLA stories should be.

This was his first issue on the title, and it seems a good one to represent the post-Morrison era. The team is the exact same as it was during Mark Waid’s run—save that Aquaman was time-lost and presumed dead—but he goes ahead an introduces the characters anyway.

The story jumps back and forth between “two minutes ago” and “now.” He introduces each of the Leaguers in their day-to-day lives, showing what they were doing two minutes before their emergency signals go off (J’onn was meditating in the shape of a sphere, Superman was trying to spend some quality time with Lois, Kyle Rayner was discovering he didn’t have enough cash on him to pay for the expensive coffee and scone he had just ordered, etc) and then jumping ahead to the amazing feats they do when “on the job” (Kyle uses his ring to lift the entire island of Manhattan into the sky, saving it from a tidal wave, Superman lifts an aircraft carrier out of the water, etc), before they all come together to solve the problem…a problem that, naturally, takes all of them working together.
(Above: Two minutes in the life of Wally West)

Kelly presents the Justice League as something like a job (on the first page, J’onn even sighs, “Work,” as alarms start going off), albeit one they are extremely good at and seem to enjoy doing. They’re neither as business-like as they were during Morrison’s run, nor as riddled with internal strife as they were during Waid’s. They all seem to know each other well, and needle one another, giving it that comfortable, just hanging out kind of felling that permeated the JLI days.

(Note that Flash isn't the only character in the first panel who seems shocked that Batman is actually touching him)

It’s a tone that pencil artist Dough Mahnke was well-suited to, as he’d done equal amounts of work in comedy and superheroics. He’s a gifted actor with the pencil, wringing a variety of emotions out of the characters, and draws them with a great deal of variety. J’onn and Superman may be built like body builders, but Kyle and Batman are slimmer, and Flash slimmer still. Plastic Man is tall and skinny, and Wonder Woman imposingly athletic—neither over-muscled nor like a too-thin, big-breasted supermodel. She also has a vaguely ethnic-looking facial structure, which is appropriate, given that she belongs to the vague ethnic group that is the Amazons.

This creative team packs a lot of detail into panels, and these details describe the characters. Plas’ shape-changing and Kyle’s ring-structures are in almost constant flux, moving as quickly as they think (just as they would in real-life), and J’onn’s shape-changing is downright amoeboid, as he contorts to fit emergency situations.

Rereading this at the end of the collection, it seems like a much greater Justice League story than I remember it the first few times through. Divorced from continuity, it’s something else entirely than the then-new creative team’s first issue. It’s not really that great a comic, but it is a great character piece, introducing seven superheroes and, more importantly, their relationships to one another.

When Crises only took two issues...

Crisis on Infinite Earths was a 12-issue series. Zero Hour: Crisis in Time was five issues long. Infinite Crisis? Seven issues. Final Crisis? Also slated for seven issues. And, of course, each of those stories had/continue to have/will have several dozen to several 100 tie-in issues, crossovers, prologues, epilogues and so on.

But when Gardner Fox, Godfather of the Multiverse (thank/blame him) wrote a crisis, he did so amazingly efficiently. Why, he could imperil the existence of two universes and resolve the conflict within the space of a single issue of Justice League of America. Two if he was really cooking. Tonight let's take a look at one of those early crises, given the accurate but not terribly exciting sounding title of "Crisis Between Earth-One and Earth-Two!" which ran through 1966's JLoA #46 and #47. It's been reprinted at least two times that I know of, in full re-colored color in Crisis on Multiple Earths Vol. 1 and in black and white in the recent Showcase Presents: Justice League of America Vol. 3.

Here’s the cover of the first issue.


Now, this is a very dangerous cover to think about, at least any more deeply than “Wow, if you hit Batman hard enough, you can actually knock the dignity right out of him,” or “Wouldn’t it be nice if all DC comics continued to have that checker pattern across the top?”

If you think about the interaction of the sound effects and the characters too long, it will set you on the road to madness (I speak from experience). Because the way these characters are interacting with the sound effects challenges what I thought I knew about the way these things are supposed to relate to one another, and if that’s wrong, perhaps everything I think I know is wrong too.

For example, Wildcat is being punched through the O in the POW (Nice aim, by the way, Blockbuster). But what generated the sound POW, calling those big green letters into existence? The sound of Blockbuster’s fist hitting Wildcat’s face. So, if the punch sends Wildcat flying, shouldn’t it appear on the other side of the flying Wildcat? It would emanate from the point of the punch, not a few feet away, right?

The same hold true for the others. The SOK! of Solomon Grundy’s punch doesn’t appear quite as far away as the POW of Blockbuster’s, but his fist goes right through the O, meaning it was called into creation sometime after he punched Batman. Is this a physics thing, having to do with light traveling faster than sound, perhaps?

Finally, most frustratingly, Batman and Sandman fall to the ground, apparently crushing the sound effect THUD! under them. If the THUD! is the sound of them hitting the ground, then how did it get between them and the ground? And, if its merely the sound of Batman falling on top of Sandman, then why is it down there on the ground, beneath them?

See, best not to think about this stuff.

Do pay attention to the lower left hand corner though, wherein we’re told that Anti-Matter Man is “Too overwhelming to be shown on this cover!”

But apparently he’s wasn’t so overwhelming he couldn’t be shown on the very next issue’s cover:


Me, I found myself a little underwhelmed by A-M Man, particularly after that build-up.

Anyway, it’s summer time, and that means its time for a JLA/JSA team-up, probably involving at least two Earths.

Fox and artists Mike Sekowsky and Sid Greene present this nerve-shattering epic (According to the first page; my nerve’s are actually all right at the moment).

We open on the roads of Moro Mountain, and Hawkman (the space-man version with the awesome helmet, so Earth-One, I guess) chasing fur hijackers through the mist, intent on clobbering them with his mace.

The truck disappears, however, replaced by an armored car. So Hawkman clobbers those men with his mace instead. Hawkman’s not picky.

Meanwhile, on Earth-Two, Sandman Wesley Dodds is following a stolen armored car in his Sand-Car (Fox’s term, not mine), when it’s replaced with a hijacked fur truck.

Most of what I know of the original Sandman comes from Matt Wagner and company’s quite excellent Vertigo series Sandman Mystery Theater, so I guess I never realized how stupid the character was, but apparently he fights crime with sand-related gimmicks in the ‘60s?

For example, he throws a handful of sand up in the air, shoots it with “an oddly shaped energy-rod” and it turns into a cement wall.


(Wait, “The Grainy Gladiator…?”)

Then he turns that sand into glass handcuffs.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mid-Nite finds himself in Barry Allen’s grip, while Batman is transported from the middle of a fistfight with two crooks to the middle of a fistfight with Wildcat. Throughout the two worlds, people seem to be switching places, with hilarious—well, mildly amusing—results.

Something even bigger is going on out in outer space. The Spectre finds himself being drawn away by a mysterious force, while…

Hey, check it out. Fox calls swamp monster Grundy “The Macabre Man-Thing.” This is about five eyars before Marvel’s swamp monster Man-Thing would debut in Savage Tales. Just saying.

After landing on Earth-One, Grundy starts wrecking the joint, so Hawkman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Flash Barry Allen and Grundy’s fellow visitors from Earth-Two Dr. Mid-Nite and Black Canary show up for a fight scene.

It’s pretty epic. Grundy is apparently so strong that, when Doc Mid-Nite blasts him with a laser beam, Grundy picks up the laser blast with his bare hands and, like, throws it…?

Speaking of destructive man-monsters being transported to alternate earths and going on rampages, Earth-One’s Blockbuser (who looks like a Caucasian Hulk wearing strappy ladies’ shoes) is coincidentally sent to Earth-Two, where I have a feeling he might end up fighting some superheroes too.

Oh yeah, he beats the hell out of Wildcat, Dr. Fate, Sandman and Batman. Sandman tries another stupid sand trick, encasing Blockbuster in block of glass, but he just busts right out.

Those aren’t the only fights raging though! In the strange space between the Earths, The Spectre encounters the gigantic Anti-Matter Man, whose bizarre energy seems to weaken the Disembodied Detective (Hey, it’s better than the Grainy Gladiator).

Unfortunately for the embodiment of God’s vengeance, every time he comes into contact with the Anti-Matter Man, his physical body is warped, leading to his rather hilarious defeat:



What could be causing all these between-Earth swaps? Perhaps it has something to do with the new space-warping device Ray “The Atom” Palmer’s hot Italian exchange-scientist assistant Enrichetta Negrini is testing.

Perhaps we’ll find out next issue.

Okay, yes. Yes it has something to do with Negrini’s space-warper.

Just as Batman and friends have managed to calm down Blockbuster, the big galoot changes places with Grundy, and the fights on again.

Sandman throws some sand that he changes into cinderblocks (?), but Grundy bats them back at them, so Dr. Fate does the only sensible thing and magics the cinder blocks into custard cream pies (?!), leading to this scene:


I love Grundy’s smacking all three of them at once there.

While he’s making stooges out of this set of heroes, Blockbuster is beating the holy hell out of the other group, and then Dr. Fate and GL bring everyone out to outer space to fight the Anti-Matter Man.

The fight is so nonsensical that there’s really only one word to describe it—


Suffice it to say the good guys win, and the Anti-Matter Man is forced back into his own universe.

But what of Grundy and Blockbuster? Green Lantern had the foresight to bring them to the same place at the same time while the Justice teams were saving their worlds, so Grundy and Blockbuster have been beating on one another until…

Zokko Krow, a double knock-out!

And when they come to they…

…hug?

All of which has lead us to what may be my (new) favorite panel in all of Justice League history:

There’s just so much awesome stuff going on for a single panel.

You’ve got the obvious Justice League cuddle

but the dialogue is great too.

“They knocked the hate out of each other!”

“If only we could get people and nations to knock hate out of each other without going to war!”

Yes Dr. Mid-Nite, violence really is the answer! If only people and nations could hit each other instead of resorting to fighting each other, they could resolve all their problems through violent fighting, as opposed to…violent fighting? What are you talking about, Dr. Mid-Nite?!

And then you have square college professor of physics Ray Palmer saying, “Like peace, man! Real peace!”

This was apparently a very influential story on Justice League history, as it established the organizing principle of their next 42 years of adventures: Working for peace by punching people in the face.




RELATED:

You know, once you look for a picture of a Green Lantern’s butt to post, it’s kinda hard not to see Green Lanterns’ butts everywhere. For example, here’s an image from this story, cropped to make Hawkman look even gayer than usual: