Justice League of America: Breakdowns

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Justice League of America: Breakdowns (DC, 1991-92).



I'm not sure whether it's the book or the story that hasn't aged very well, but wow, this was an incredibly rotten read. DC has been repackaging and finally collecting Keith Giffen's five-year tenure as head writer of their Justice League franchise. These were mostly books that I didn't care to read at the time, having long abandoned DC for Marvel and, finally, 2000 AD, but I went back and bought all the run in the mid-nineties, mostly from quarter bins or three-for-a-dollar boxes. The final storyline of Geffen's run was "Breakdowns," which ran for fifteen twice-monthly issues, and I temporarily rescued it from the soon-to-be-donated-to-Egleston pile to give it a reread.

By this point in its history, JLA was plotted by Giffen and scripted by J.M. DeMatteis and Gerard Jones. There were actually two separate titles at this point, Justice League America and Justice League Europe, with art chores ranging from Darick Robertson to Bart Sears. The book was still printed on ink-absorbent newsprint.

I have no idea what could have been the reasoning behind this storyline. It looks like the creators wanted to give return matches to every one of their major recurring foes, one right after another, to give the League a series of big bangs with which to go out. There's the sudden revocation of the heroes' United Nations charter, a plot by the villainous Queen Bee, a two-part interlude where they make fun, very clumsily, of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, then their old enemy Despero, who was once a skinny mad scientist with a shellfish head but who now is the Incredible, red, Hulk, shows up, followed by a villain called Dreamslayer.

At no point is it in any way engaging. Perhaps the most interesting character is Captain Atom, who gets steamed over the UN ordering the JLA out of the Queen Bee's nation and goes off anyway. Amazingly, he is killed off between episodes, thanks to some idiotic crossover event that happens when the readers are blinking. At another stage, it is mentioned that Guy Gardner and Ice are dating. This is never shown, just mentioned.

I dunno... parts of it were not bad, and some of the artwork - principally Sears' - was pretty good, but reading this from the present perspective, it's amazing to think that once upon a time, it was ever considered important. Times Square is demolished during the fight with Despero, and several heroes are killed off, but it's all done very dispassionately on the page, and time would later prove that what wanted to be an epic was deeply unimportant in the eyes of the creators that would follow Giffen. It's barely competent, as superhero funnybooks go, but not very important to even the medium's fans. Not recommended.

Justice League of America # 194

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and sometimes, though not in this case, let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Justice League of America # 194 (DC, 1981).



I really shouldn't be bringing more old comics into the house. Several months ago, I resolved to whittle down from twelve longboxes to five, and I'm only partially there. (I've discarded, sold or donated three of them!) However, going through all these has revealed rather more holes in my collection of DC's Justice League of America during its classic era of, say, 1975 to 1983 than I thought that I had. So when a local shop, Marietta's Great Escape Comics & Games, announced a 50% off sale on their back issues, I headed over there with a wish list, just like I probably did when this particular issue was originally published and I was in middle school. Among their backstock were several kind of beat-up "reader quality" copies which they priced quite nicely at fifty cents apiece. Cover price!

I was eleven or so when I first read this issue and I was convinced that it was the coolest thing in the entire world. While unsurprisingly it doesn't really hold up that well, apart from the luscious art by George Perez, it still maintains a simple charm. Gerry Conway's by-the-numbers story is the sort of thing that Justice League's writers have been doing in their sleep for decades on the title. Basically, the heroes get smacked around by some villains, get together and figure out a new plan, use teamwork to save the day and defeat the villain. This time out, it's a baddie called Amos Fortune, who uses magic to confound our heroes.

It's the magic that made this one worth reading - when I was eleven, anyway. Fortune, whose motivation doesn't seem much deeper than "beat the good guys," somehow turns various Tarot cards into living entities who beat up on the good guys for him. One of them ages Superman into a doddering old seventy year-old, The Fool makes the Elongated Man distracted and goofy, The High Priestess bewitches Green Lantern and The Devil blinds Zatanna.

Well, once they all get together and teamwork-teamwork-teamwork their way to victory, Fortune reveals his master plan and sics Death on them. Honestly, I'm pretty sure that if somebody had shown eleven year-old me that legendary ABC Warriors with the robots with bazookas riding on dinosaurs, I would probably have been so excited that I would have dropped stone dead, because eleven year-old me had to pick up his eyeballs and jaw from the floor after this guy showed up. Death's appearance - a skeletal knight in a storm cloud - was the neatest and most blindstorming thing I'd ever seen. I'd been reading Justice League whenever I could find it for about six years by this point and loved this book absolutely, but suddenly SKELETON DEATH DUDE trumped EVERYTHING that came before.

Within a year I discovered Ghost Rider, and Don Heck started drawing JLA, awfully. Soon, the only DC book left that I wanted to buy was Legion of Super-Heroes. I concluded that the Tarot cards featured in this comic were so hotdamned cool that I saved up twelve bucks and had my mom pick me up a Rider deck from Eddie's Trick Shop. Twelve year-old me didn't get the point of all those Minor Arcana cards, when the Major Arcana was much cooler, although some of them cards had bare boobies. Thirteen year-old me brought the deck to school, and, completely misunderstanding exactly how one was supposed to do Tarot readings, I did a fortune-telling for a friend named Cy James and drew Death. I explained that the card didn't necessarily mean death but "great change." About three weeks later, Cy killed himself.

While logically, I knew that the creators of this comic had nothing to do with how that turned out, and also that Cy must have been in the middle of a horrible home life with so much inner turmoil and that my "fortune telling" has nothing to do with his final decision, I blamed myself and this comic for ages. That was why this comic had been absent from my collection of classic era JLA for so many years.

I think that I'm still missing the one where Green Arrow quits, though.

Nightmare Edition with the Addams Family and Justice League

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of My Crowd (Fireside, 1970) and Justice League of America: The Lightning Saga (DC, 2008).



I found a new copy of this great book, an edition issued in 1993 with oddly revised artwork to tie-in to the Raul Julia/Anjelica Huston film, and happily found it a new place on my shelves. My previous edition was lost in some move or divorce or something. Anyway, the Amazon listing erroneously says this only has 96 pages. There are actually twice that number, and around 100 have the gleefully macabre bunch that became known as The Addams Family and were turned into the best comedy of the 1960s. But the whole book's a treat of dark humor and things you probably shouldn't chuckle at. Recommended, but, in all honesty, The World of Charles Addams is certainly the superior choice.



"What manner of diseased beast died to produce this thing, I wonder?" That's not my line. I don't recall the writer, the periodical where it first appeared, nor the album it described, but it was in one of those Rock Yearbooks you used to see in the '80s and it stuck with me. And boy, is it ever apt.

I must explain to newer readers that I have a stupid weak place for the Justice League. JLA was my first "favorite comic," back in 1975 or so, and like a weakling, I occasionally go back to this stupid, stupid thing even after it's stabbed me in the back too often. I finally thought I swore off the damn thing and removed it from my pull list, but the combination of the classic Legion of Super-Heroes and a 40% off coupon from Borders sucked me back in for some agonizingly bad comics.

This is the second of two JLA books written by some novelist called Brad Meltzer, who's written some political thrillers of the sort I never read, and who DC would have us believe brings some industry cred to funnybooks. He wrote six of the eight issues reprinted here, and the inexplicably popular Geoff Johns wrote the others. I believe it was Alan David Doane who noted that Johns' approach to comic book writing is akin to a small child playing in the bathtub with action figures, and so with Meltzer and Johns collaborating on a three-superteam-get-together, readers can expect some very bland comics, with the only dramatic notes being sounded by the arrival of a new character to the narrative.

The result of their collaboration is an overlong, repellent mess of tangled continuity, half-remembered references and subplots that don't go anywhere. The principle deal of the Legion of Super-Heroes' presence in the present is to facilitate the resurrection of the Flash, a character who was killed off about two years prior to these stories. Now, admittedly, it's been several years since I reread the old Paul Levitz run on LSH, but I'm pretty certain that Jeckie didn't adopt the Sensor Girl costume until after Karate Kid was killed. Maybe they brought him back, too. Or maybe Geoff Johns and his ilk just don't care; these are the action figures they assembled for the evening's bathtub play. I mean, among the characters assembled in this story is a girl with wind powers who is Ma Hunkle's granddaughter. Either you have no idea what that means, or you know that it's retarded, or you're Geoff Johns and think that's super-wicked-awesome-cool that DC has such a proud history of tradition and lineage and then you shit on other people's stories anyway.

Then there's another issue, by Meltzer, where two characters that nobody has ever cared about are trapped in a hole under a collapsed building. Twenty-two pages of that. I suppose that's what passes for character development. I'll accept that in M*A*S*H because we cared about Pierce and Houlihan, and this was a show where characters genuinely might die. But Meltzer, nobody gives a shit about Red Arrow and Vixen apart from Nightwing fanfic writers, and if they did get killed, Johns would just resurrect them in nine months so he can play with them in the bathtub with Kingdom Come Hawkman and the great-nephew of the Anti-Matter Universe's Sinestro-Prime of Earth-2.

Then there are the glimpses of the future shown in JLA issue 0, which preceded Meltzer's run and which is appended to the back of this volume. Apparently at some point in the future - it's been two years and I don't think they've written this story - Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman kill Lex Luthor's son, and he puts on a kryptonite ring and beats the shit out of them. Well, get back to me when that story does appear. Like eight or nine other "flashforwards" arranged around the flashbacks, they're hints at subplots that Meltzer personally has no plans to write. This point isn't a complaint about the material, but honestly, how the heck far forward do they plan these things, I wonder.

At any rate, I know better than to buy JLA comics, and I want my 40% off coupon back to buy something good. For more than twenty years, Justice League of America has only been a worthwhile purchase when the editors and publishers have allowed proven talent to write the book. In the hands of anybody other than Keith Giffen or Grant Morrison, JLA hasn't been worth the paper it's printed on since the mid-80s. I had my girlfriend dump a giant stack of early 90s JLA comics at a hospital in Athens for kids to read. This, however, is culled from a beast so diseased that it might make kids even sicker, and should be discarded with greater care.

(Originally posted May 27, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Essential Defenders Vol. 3 and JLA Vol. 9: Terror Incognita

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



I loved The Defenders when I was a kid. This was a bizarre book which teamed kid-favorite the Hulk with a host of B- and C-listers. I had more than a third of the books in this collection of thirty issues, but the last time I read any of them was twenty years ago, so this sparked all kinds of half-memories and nostalgia. It's occasionally frustrating to see the various writers introduce ongoing subplots that they didn't get to finish before they were moved to another title, most notoriously a serial killing elf in Steve Gerber's fun run who shows up to gun down strangers with a big revolver. It's big fun until an overwritten and ponderous three-part story about demons by the otherwise reliable David Anthony Kraft which closes the collection, and it's frankly odd to see this motormouth villain called Lunatik who is the spiritual grandfather of DC's Ambush Bug. Recommended for readers familiar with 70s Marvel Comics.




I also loved JLA as a kid, and periodically indulge patches where I buy the damn thing no matter how awful it is. Every so often, I swap my singles at Wuxtry for a collected edition. This reprints a four-part story by Mark Waid about some evil aliens - "Pale Martians," if you must know - making their second bid for global control, and two one-off stories. It's really odd, the way the creators decided to make Plastic Man the "junior member" of the team of seven and write him as utterly annoying and disliked by half the team, and then acted surprised to learn that the fanboys didn't like him. The one-off where Plas improvises a bedtime story about Santa Claus being a member of the Justice League is occasionally funny, but overall this is superheroes by the numbers, unoriginal, dull and not recommended for anybody.

(Originally posted October 10, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)