On 2000's Batman: Gotham Knights #5

As I've been reviewing my way through the last few years of DC's JLA series, I knew the final arc would feature the return of the villain The Key, who last appeared in the title during its first year, menacing the team in a scary new form in JLA #8-9. In between, he showed up in a very unusual place for a Justice League villain: a Batman comic.

The comic in question was the fifth issue of the new Batman: Gotham Knights series, launched in 2000 as part of the Batman line's post-"No Man's Land" status quo. It replaced the canceled Batman: Shadow of the Bat, a third ongoing Batman book that had been launched specifically to give an ongoing home to the character's longtime distinctive writer, Alan Grant.

Gotham Knights seemed similarly created for a particular writer's vision. That writer was Devin Grayson, who had spent the last few years writing various Batman stories, various Titans stories (Arsenal, JLA/Titans, Titans) and at least one story featuring Batman and a Titan (Batman Plus Arsenal #1). What separated her from many of her peers telling Batman stories in the late '90s was, I think, her focus on character work and probing the various relationships between the heroes she wrote.

And Gotham Knights, at least at the outset of the 74-issue series, was the Batman "family" book. Grayson's issues—which comprised about 30 of the earlier issues in the series—almost always featured Batman prominently, but he was usually paired with one of his allies, and Grayson would explore his relationship with those allies during the course of the adventure. 

If that wasn't enough to entice readers, the book also featured beautiful covers from Brian Bolland (starting with issue #2) and maybe the strongest back-up feature of any DC book ever: Batman: Black and White strips that, like the 1996 miniseries of that name, featured some of the world's greatest comics creators telling short, self-contained Batman stories in, well, black and white (These back-ups were all collected in Batman: Black and White Vol. 2 and 3, by the way).

Rather than digging through my comics midden for the issue I wanted, I turned to my local library, and borrowed a copy of the 2020 trade paperback collection Batman: Gotham Knights: Transference, which was comprised of the first 12 issues of the series (Grayson wrote the first 11 of these, while the twelfth issue is a fill-in by Jen Van Meter; pencil art was split between Dale Eaglesham, Roger Robinson, Paul Ryan and Coy Turnbull). 

Now, when the Justice League defeated The Key at the end of JLA #9, new Green Arrow Connor Hawke having KO-ed him with one of his late father's boxing glove arrows borrowed from the Watchtower's trophy room, they imprisoned his mind in "a perpetually branching fatal maze" and his body in what looks to be a hospital of some kind.

In Gotham Knights, Grayson presumes that it was actually Arkham Asylum and that, I guess, is enough to make him fair game as a Batman villain. The story was entitled "Locked", and it was pencilled by Eaglesham and inked by John Floyd. 

Like the rest of the first ten issues that Grayson wrote, the story has an unusual form of narration. Blue boxes with a computer-y font that open with "File Number" and signifiers like "SUBJECT: BATMAN" an "CLASSIFIED". These narration boxes will impart information about the story, as narration boxes so often do, but they also comment directly on aspects of the character who might be their subject, that character's relationship to the Batman and feature tangents in which Grayson can meditate on whatever that issue's particular focus might be.

Essentially, these mysterious files allowed Grayson to both show and tell within the context of her stories, which, for the first year or so, were mainly standalone done-in-ones, unified by the files and building up to the reveal of a classic Batman villain, who would feature in the series' first multi-part story. 

I say "mysterious" because it is not at all clear who is writing the files. The obvious suspect, given the title of the book is, of course, Batman, but they always refer to Batman as "Batman" rather than, say, "I", and, additionally, some of the language feels a little...off. For example, in the second issue, featuring new Batgirl Cassandra Cain, the files refer to her as "the female". That same issue refers to Batman at one point as "The Detective," which seems to suggest maybe it's Ra's al Ghul writing them. (I won't spoil it here, in case you want to pick this volume up. I will note it's not exactly a shocking reveal though.)

"Locked" begins in medias res, with the first page's four panels showing dramatic goings-on at Arkham. A turn of the page, and we get a double-page splash. At its center is Batman, battling a quartet of muscular, gray-skinned, bald men, decorated with golden symbols suggesting cogs and key symbols (These are the Key's android henchmen, The Keymen, which Eaglesham draws far differently than artist Oscar Jimenez did in that JLA story). 

Standing on the left page and gesturing dramatically is The Key himself, drawn by Eaglesham and company as the same gray-skinned, stringy-haired, red-eyed ghoul that he appeared as in the pages of JLA. He is ranting about keys and escape and the nature of reality, using very big words; he will do so pretty much throughout the issue. 

Meanwhile, the case file narration boxes appear across the top of the fist page, referring to The Key as "an unrivaled escape artist, armed with hallucinatory psycho-chemicals as well as drug-enhanced  intelligence and senses." We are also told that Martian Manhunter had designed a "doorless fractal time-maze" to imprison The Key's expanded consciousness, "but the Key never stays put for long."

His plot here is that he has somehow—it is never quite explained how—sealed each and every door in Arkham, trapping the staff in whatever room they happened to be in, and keeping them from caring for the inmates. If someone doesn't do something soon, they will start starving. 

Batman defeats the Keymen and has grabbed The Key by the leather harness when Batgirl and Azrael arrive on the Arkham rooftop, and, when The Key threatens to do what he did to Arkham to the entire city, Batman starts pounding on him, to the point that Azrael has to pull him off.

"Stop!" he shouts, "You'll kill him!"

Batman tosses Azrael aside and, when Batgirl intervenes, he tries to throw her off the roof top; instead of falling, she grabs a lightning rod, spins around it and kicks Batman, leading to two panels of them fighting. But Batman breaks the fight off, swinging away, so Batman fans would have to wait a bit to see who would win in a Batman vs. Batgirl fight.

It turns out The Key had injected Batman with one of his chemicals, "unlocking" Batman's rage and violence. This is part of a plan to have Batman kill him, which will help him achieve two goals. First, there's the notoriety of fighting Batman and, second, this will allow him to escape life itself. 

So Batman runs around Gotham a bit, fighting crime more brutally than ever—at one point, he hurls a drug dealer off a rooftop, but Batgirl is right behind him, and manages to catch the crook mid-fall—before circling back to Arkham to kill The Key.

There, Robin Tim Drake has been called in to watch over the badly injured Key, but the Key paralyzes him, and lectures him about what he's done to Batman, repression, escape, walls, doors and so on (One gets the sense that Robin is only in the story to give The Key someone to talk to for this scenes). 

The last person standing in Batman's way is an Arkham doctor, who makes a little speech about how he's devoted himself to preserving precious life, which reminds Batman of his father, and he's able to overcome the influence of The Key's drugs. 

In a rather clever ending, Batman tells The Key: 

This routine is getting tired, Key. You're an escape artist and you escape. 

That's supposed to impress me? 

The only person alive who could impress me right now is the person who could actually find a way to contain you.

In the very last panel, we see The Key in a straightjacket and leather straps, various orderlies working around him as he instructs them:

--Don't care what you do for Mr. Zsasz, this simply isn't tight enough!

And how many times do I have to explain-- We can't weld the box shut until I'm in it!

Seeking to impress Batman, he has taken to designing his own imprisonment, one that even he can't escape from. 

It's a pretty interesting deep dive into the psychology of The Key...at least of Grant Morrison and company's reinvented version of him from JLA, and a compelling exploration of why Batman is the way he is, particularly his devotion to never taking a human life, and how his parents—particularly his doctor father—influenced him.

In general, I'm a fan of Eaglesham's work. He has a highly detailed style well suited to superhero comics. Revisiting this story, though, I'm struck by a few things, like his body-builder version of Batman, complete with bulging veins visible through his costume, and his similarly muscular, more Barbie-doll version of Batgirl, which is in such sharp contrast to how Damion Scott was drawing her in her own title at the time. (Eaglesham, by the way, draws short Batman ears, making him something of an outlier for that point in time; me, as a fan of Norm Breyfogle and Kelley Jones, I say the longer the ears the better).

Though now 25 years old, I think the story aged rather well, and reads perfectly fine today as an interesting, evergreen, standalone Batman comic. Like the rest of Grayson's run on the title, I'd recommend it. If you've never read any of her Gotham Knights, do check out that Transference trade. 

The End of JLA Pt. 5: "Syndicate Rules"

After 15 issues devoted to three story arcs that read a lot like fill-ins, interrupted only by the Justice League Elite-launching JLA #100 by the last regular creative team on the title, DC seemed to get the title back on track with 2004-2005's "Syndicate Rules", an eight-part epic by Kurt Busiek, Ron Garney and Dan Green. 

Unlike the rather disconnected fill-in arcs that preceded it, the story, which ran in issues #107-114, was built on stories that preceded it. Not within the pages of JLA proper, but in other, related books with "JLA" in the title. 

It was a fairly direct sequel to Busiek's own 2003 JLA/Avengers series, for example, and it further built on characters and ideas from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's 2000 original graphic novel JLA: Earth 2, which introduced the then-modern version of the League's old evil opposites, The Crime Syndicate of America.

That said, "Syndicate Rules" is well written enough that I don't think one necessarily needs to read "homework" in order to follow and enjoy it. Certainly its original audience was likely already very familiar with JLA/Avengers and JLA: Earth 2, and while anyone trying to read this story for the first time in 2025 might have some trouble getting their hands on that DC/Marvel crossover, the story makes sense without one necessarily having read it, I think. 

The necessary events are explained in the dialogue, even if Busiek obviously can't write the word "Avengers" here. Reading the crossover is really no more necessary than having read, say, the stories that introduced older characters like The Construct or the residents of Qward, who also appear in this story. (Although, having re-read JLA/Avengers not long before re-reading this, I think it does add a depth to "Syndicate Rules", and makes it feel relevant and, well, "important", something super-comics readers certainly like their comics to be).

Now, if you did read JLA/Avengers, you know that the Crime Syndicate of Amerika (with a "k"), which Morrison situated on the Earth of the anti-matter universe, since post-Crisis their home universe Earth-3 no longer existed, were in the midst of attacking Qward when Krona destroyed that universe. During the events of the series, the DC and Marvel Universes were pretty heavily messed with, ultimately being erased and re-created once the heroes managed to set things right.

If you didn't read that, don't worry. Early in this arc, Busiek essentially retells those events from the CSA's perspective, rewinding to show readers what lead up to the CSA finding and attacking Qward, and then what happened after their universe was "rebooted." The fact that it was rebooted is the main driver of the arc's plot.

The story actually begins in the pages of JLA Secret Files 2004 #1, with a ten-page story set on the CSA's Earth, wherein the villains conquer the last remaining country that had been resisting them, Modora. 

Then, bored, they start looking for new horizons to conquer. (The short is notable for introducing the CSA's enemies, The Justice Underground, featuring heroic versions of regular DCU villains. One of them, the good guy version of The Riddler, would end up reappearing in Busiek and company's 2008-2009 series Trinity, which I now plan on revisiting in the near-ish future too). 

In the pages of JLA proper, "Syndicate Rules" starts off with a leisurely pace that is unusual for the title, something that helps, I think, the eventually collected version of the story read more like a true graphic novel than simply a collection of a serially-produced story arc; it is, despite the foundation borrowed from earlier works and references to the goings-on throughout the DC Universe, quite complete unto itself.

Much of the current JLA (Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern John Stewart, The Atom and Aquaman, the latter of whom seems to have officially rejoined sometime before the arc begins) are off in space, studying the "cosmic egg", the baby universe that Krona was trapped in at the end of JLA/Avengers. 

Meanwhile, back in their lunar Watchtower base, Martian Manhunter and The Flash are engaged in the routine maintenance apparently assigned to two Leaguers on the third Thursday of each month.

Personally, I love this sort of day-in-the-life, behind-the-scenes business, which here includes checking in with various parties (like Shiloh Norman, the security chief of The Slab, as seen in 2001's Joker: Last Laugh) and making sure the containment system set up for The Construct is still working as it should be. 

Busiek has chosen the best odd couple for such scenes, as the meticulous J'onn has dedicated his whole life and career to Justice League stuff, while The Flash has his own life (and own book) that he's eager to get back to, and his super-speed impatience leads to him to doing origami, crossword puzzles and cleaning the whole HQ between their various assigned tasks.

This first issue ends with The Syndicate in a Green Lantern Power Ring bubble, looking in on the Watchtower. Notably, the spikey blond-haired, visor-wearing Power Ring, meant to be the evil equivalent of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner from Earth-2 and that Secret Files story, is here replaced by what looks like John Stewart's evil opposite, with a smooth bald head and a goatee, the true mark of a bad guy from a mirror dimension.

In the second issue, we flashback to sixth months ago on the Earth of the anti-matter universe, where Busiek reminds us of the characters of the CSA, their relationships and the nature of their world. When Power Ring finds a new planet, Qward, they set out to conquer it. 

Busiek and Garney devote six pages of this issue to introducing various characters on Qward and the particulars of their culture, something it's kind of impossible to imagine, say, Morrison doing (Had Morrison wrote this story, one imagines it would have only been about three issues, maybe four tops). 

This will tun out to be important groundwork, though, as the Qwardians will be major players in the story, and Busiek splits the focus between them, the Syndicate and The League; sure, two of those groups might be villainous ones, but Busiek gets us inside their heads and allows us to see their motivations and machinations in a way that is highly unusual for this particular title.

Anyway, as seen in JLA/Avengers, the Syndicate invade Qward, but the battle is interrupted , the colored panels on one page seeming to drain of color and become simple black lines on white paper as they shatter like glass, only to reassemble on the next page, which replays a scene from earlier in the issue, only instead of the Kyle-inspired Power Ring flying into their base with news of the discovery of Qward, it is now the John-inspired one. 

In the next issue, Power Ring's power ring and the Syndicate's "Analytiscope" come to the same conclusion: The universe was destroyed and rebuilt some months ago, with several revisions, like this Power Ring's presence. 

The epicenter of the cataclysm? Volthoom, the entity in the ring, says it was "Far from here...Source, however, is familiar: Positive-matter universe." (Though specifically referring to the events of JLA/Avengers, DC's multiverse/reality has been reset so many times between Crisis on Infinite Earths and, I don't know what the latest was, Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths maybe?, that this story probably reads particularly evergreen in 2025. The universes are always being reset now, it seems, and so here we get a story of the characters realizing it, and thinking of themselves as the victims of continuity, setting out to do something about it...and, I should note, a few years before Superboy-Prime would debut in Infinite Crisis with a similar motivation and agenda). 

And so the CSA decides to visit the JLA's Earth, investigating it in secret (This, amusingly, they do by wearing the costumes of their opposites on the League, attempting to play hero in the DCU, as out of their nature as it may be to do so, so that Ultraman poses as Superman, Johnny Quick as The Flash, and so on).

Meanwhile, the Qwardians get a new, more pro-active and war-like leader who wants to seek out the colorful, super-powered enemies that had attacked them. But first, they must find and claim a legendary sentient mega-weapon known as The Void Hound, a planet-razing horror the capabilities of which Busiek lays out in a 10-panel sequence that reads a bit like poetry over some vague images of galactic destruction from the art team. Thus equipped, they then head for Earth, too.

Eventually, the CSA fights the JLA—which, here, means the Big Seven plus Plastic Man—and they actually send the League packing, even with the intervention of Cyborg and Beast Boy, who happen to appear because the fight was set in the Teen Titans' then hometown of San Francisco (Refeshingly, Busiek makes full use of the DCU setting throughout, even name-dropping the title super-team from his own interesting but short-lived series, The Power Company). 

Owlman points out the true significance of their victory: 

Don't you see? Their world's been changed. Our world's been changed. We just took them apart on their home turf. 

The essential difference between our universes, that kept us from ever being able to triumph here-- --it's GONE.

He's talking about an aspect about their respective worlds that Morrison verbalized in Earth-2. The Justice League, obviously, always ends up winning, right? But on the CSA's world, the old Earth-3, now rechristened "Earth-2", the opposite is true, and evil always wins. This was because the Justice League were good guys, who naturally always triumph in superhero comics, and the villains from an "opposite" world must always win there, if that world is truly opposite. 

That was just the nature of superhero comics conventions, of course, but Morrison stated it as if it were some kind of law of physics, and Busiek picks up on the concept here, positing that when the DC Universe was last rebooted, it changed that one particular law, maybe (If this all sounds more goofy than meta to you, it's worth noting that Busiek has Ultraman continually note his skepticism about the "essential difference.")

Anyway, as the story moves on towards its climax and the League finds themselves facing and invasion from the CSA and the looming threat of the Qwardian Void Hound, they call in their reserves and split into three teams.

Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and a ship-bound Martian Manhunter are joined by Faith, Captain Marvel and Power Girl in a deep-space assault on the seemingly unstoppable Void Hound, reinforcements coming in the form of New Gods (and former Leaguers) Orion, Lightray and Big Barda. 

Aquaman leads much of Justice League Elite against the CSA in Tibet, where the evildoers are attempting to set up a base for themselves (As far as I know, this is the only appearance of the JLE as a team outside of their own book proper, making it a rare acknowledgement that the book actually took place in the DCU at all, really; Manitou Raven is missing, but I'm not certain if he had been killed off at this point yet or not).

And, finally, Batman leads a team consisting of Plastic Man, Black Canary, Hawkman and Green Arrow Oliver Queen to the CSA home world, travelling via Flash's super-speed and vibrational powers, although he ends up not making the trip personally. 

So, as he did in JLA/Avengers, Busiek writes the League as a particular line-up, but one with a well of reserves it can call on when needed—another essential difference from the Syndicate; given their distrustful, back-biting nature, their roster is constrained by the fact that they are really the only five characters from their world willing to work together. This allows for a JLA adventure that features plenty of guest-stars, including various characters that various fans believe (and/or argue online) should be on the team, like Hawkman and Power Girl or whoever. 

None of the three missions go exactly as planned—notably the JLE aren't able to completely defeat the Syndicate, who end up sitting on ring-generated lawn chairs in outer space, watching the Void Hound knock Superman and company around. There are some pretty effective surprises, so well executed that reading the story now, over 20 years after I originally read it, they surprised me all over again.

Ultimately, the Syndicate and the League join forces to take on the Void Hound, the particulars of the defeat of which, like the League's neutralization of the Syndicate, was foreshadowed (or perhaps telegraphed) in the earliest chapters of this huge story.

At the end, each team returns to the world they protect or rule. The last two pages return to the cosmic egg/baby universe, and features an appearance by Metron, a scene promising that this particular story isn't yet over. (Indeed it's not, although it would take a few more years before Busiek would get to tell it, in the pages of the year-long weekly 2008 series Trinity, with collaborators including Mark Bagley, Fabian Nicieza, Tom Derenick and others.)

As I said, Garney gets a lot more to do here than he did in the quieter, more character-focused "Pain of the Gods" which, after all, only featured a half-dozen different superheroes.

Here he's drawing something like 30 costumed characters, including about a half-dozen of whom are meant to be duplicates of another half-dozen, only with variations of their costumes and, of course, different attitudes, delineated by arched eyebrows and various sneers, frowns and evil grins. It's a pretty sizable swathe of the DC Universe, really, featuring a lot of practically Perez-style grids that make for rather dense pages, and yet Garney rather ably handles everything that Busiek throws at him.

There were a couple of points where I thought there was an art mistake, but, as I read on, I realized these were small tells tipping off one surprise or another. 

I think, in a perfect world—a world in which Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis were never published—Busiek and Garney would have made up the core of a new creative team on the ongoing JLA series but, of course, ours is not a perfect world. 

Instead, DC let Brad Meltzer write the gobbledygook that turned into the murder "mystery" of Identity Crisis and then let Geoff Johns rejigger DC continuity and the nature of the multiverse for the first major time since Crisis On Infinite Earths, an obviously imperfect rejiggering that DC hasn't been able to resist regularly re-rejiggering in the almost two decades to follow.

As the next—and last—two arcs of JLA would be tie-ins to event miniseries and dedicate themselves to the winding down of this iteration of the Justice League team and book, "Syndicate Rules" now reads like a last hurrah for JLA and the JLA, one last big, crazy adventure in which the World's Greatest Heroes would band together to save the world—or worlds, really—that takes full advantage of the DC Comics toy box.

It's fun—if, perhaps, a little depressing—to imagine what might have been had DC given Busiek a full run, rather than just eight issues. After all, he managed a pretty compelling synthesis of Morrison's big ideas with Mark Waid's character work while using the newer characters introduced by Joe Kelly. It therefore seemed like the natural direction for the title to take next.

"Syndicate Rules" was collected in 2005's JLA Vol. 17: Syndicate Rules and 2017's JLA Vol. 9. 

Next: Geoff Johns, Allan Heinberg, Chris Batista and Mark Farmer's "Crisis of Conscience" from 2005's JLA #115-119. 

Review: Invaders Now!

Not wanting to repeat the mistake I had made with last week's review of a Marvel comic, wherein I accidentally re-reviewed a book I had reviewed years previously, I took the time to search and see if I had already written about 2010-2011 miniseries Invaders Now!, which I know I had read before. I couldn't find a review of the collection on my site, so I guess I had either read it in single issues and reviewed it as part of my columns reviewing new releases, or I had read it in trade and never actually wrote about it.

The series was a collaboration between writer Christos Gage and cover artist Alex Ross, who share a "story" credit, and artist Caio Reis. Interestingly, the cover bears the logos for both Marvel and Dynamite Entertainment, and the credits page lists five folks from Dynamite. This, despite the fact that all of the characters are, of course, Marvel characters. At this remove, I couldn't even guess why Dynamite would be involved in a series like this; was Ross perhaps under some kind of contract with the publisher that necessitated their involvement...?

The stars are, of course, The Invaders, a Golden Age super-team retconned into Marvel Universe history by Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema in a 1969 Avengers story. Though some of the characters shared covers and occasionally crossed over—especially in regards to Namor and The Human Torch— in various Timely comics, they never really operated as a team during the war years. These days, they are basically Marvel's answer to DC's Justice Society of America. 

For this particular series, Ross and Gage have essentially reassembled the 1970s line-up, and added the Golden Age Vision, who functions as much as a plot device as a character. Of course, it picks up those various characters where they were in the Marvel Universe circa 2010, and so Bucky is serving as the "official" Captain America, Steve Rogers has a new, maskless costume and is the leader of SHIELD, The Torch and Toro are recently-ish resurrected, Namor is hanging out with the X-Men on Utopia and Union Jack is the Joseph Chapman version.

The story is pretty straightforward. There's a bizarre, terrifying attack at a hospital in the Netherlands, wherein a muscular, badly deformed man stumbles in seeking aid, and then attacks with what seems like super-stength and rage, his bite infecting others and transforming them into creatures like himself. Somewhat zombie-ish then, although the victims look a bit more like Hulked-out versions of Quasimodo than the undead.

Shown footage of the incident, Steve Roges, serving as Boss of All Super-Heroes, folds his hands and says, "I know what this is." Just as he's in the midst of ordering Maria Hill to alert various heroes, The Golden Age Vision and the other characters from the cover appear, Vision declaring, "Only The INVADERS can save this world now," the team's name appearing in a giant, stylized font as it does on the cover. (Though this Vision is an extra-dimensional alien rather than an android, his yellow-colored dialogue balloons are square in shape, with rigidly straight lines connecting them, which visually suggests a mechanical nature to his voice.)

We then get a series of flashbacks, showing Vision as he gathers the others in groups of two—the fact that the various Invaders were spending time with one another at this point of crisis, he intimates, was no coincidence, but part of the pull of a magical force being marshalled against them).

And then a more substantial flashback, revealing the truth behind a bombshell Steve drops at the end of the first issue. 

"She's talking about the darkest chapter in our history," Steve says of something that Spitfire breaks up while recalling, "...WHEN THE INVADERS MURDERED A TOWN FULL OF INNOCENT PEOPLE."

Pretty strong cliffhanger, right?

As for that story, it takes places in the Netherlands in 1945, wherein The Invaders were battling "the full roster of the Uberkommando", all of Hitler's superhumans: Master Man, U-Man, Baron Blood and Warrior Woman. The Nazi super-people are defending a nearby castle containing the laboratory of Arnim Zola, who was, at that particular point, still entirely human.

In that lab, he had cooked up weaponized disease glimpsed at the beginning of the first issue, the thing that turns civilians into deformed, muscular killer monsters and drives the to bite others, spreading the disease zombie apocalypse style.

Once they learn that there is absolutely no cure, and that the disease causes incredibly pain for those suffering from it, the heroes make a terrible judgement call, one that the original Union Jack refused to be a part of, even if he also said he wouldn't try to stop them from implementing it: The Invaders kill all of the infected civilians, burning down their village and flooding the whole area.

And now these same characters (with a new Union Jack in for the old) are forced to face that situation again, as the infection seems to have resurfaced and, when they return to the town, they see it magically being rebuilt and find themselves facing the new iteration of the team of super-Nazis they fought during the war (Master Man, Warrior Woman and U-Man all seem to still be around, and are here joined by a huge robot battle-suit going by the name Iron Cross and two identical skinheads in matching shirts with swastikas on them; I didn't catch their names).

So, what exactly is going on?

Well, the villain is revealed to be a survivor of the town, one whose infection resulted in his being deformed, but not becoming a mindless killer like the others. He blamed the Invaders for the deaths of his family, and has spent his life studying the occult, trying to find a way to bring his family back to life...and hating these heroes the whole time.

It certainly didn't help that almost all of the Invaders have, one way or another, not only survived the war, but also cheated death and lived, young and vital as ever, into the 21st century. Hell, several of them have literally died and been resurrected through extraordinary means. (It must be unusual for those who lose a loved one to regard death in the Marvel Universe, where there are so many famous examples of people returning from the dead, and almost as many different ways to achieve those resurrections; one imagines the loss lacks the finality that it does here in our universe.)

Using his occult knowledge and the Spear of Destiny, the vengeful old man has summoned a Lovecraftian deity associated with the area (the word "fhtagn" is repeated a lot) and attempts to trade the Invaders' lives for those of the townspeople...a bargain the Invaders themselves seem willing to make, to his own surprise. (Two quick points of interest. First, when the magic-user holds aloft the Spear, he says that it was "lost during the closing days of the war," and an editorial note points readers to 2010's WWII-set one-shot The Twelve: Spearhead, completely ignoring the fact that a kid lifted it from a German museum during the events of 1994's Wolverine: Evilution; this is Evilution erasure! Second, that Lovecraftian entity, a one-eyed ball of tentacles, is Shua-Gorath; I didn't recognize it as a pre-existent character the first time I read this, but now recognize it from the film Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.)

Naturally, despite long odds and the surprise appearance of the now weird-looking, robot-bodied Zola, the heroes end up saving the day, defeating the various villains and even providing a cure to the new crop of infected victims, something they were unable to do in 1945, back before they had the likes of super-scientists like Reed Richards and Hank Pym in their contact lists.

The story is fairly simple, and of the plot-over-character variety, but it is quite well-told, moving quite swiftly through pages with very few panels on them and driven by some particularly hooky cliffhangers. Despite Ross' predictably realistic covers, the interior art occasionally leaves something to be desired.

Reis' art is fine so long as it involves super-people in costumes posing, of which there is a fair amount here, but he's much less able to sell the scenes of various civilians, even when it involves our heroes out of costume. I'm not quite sure about his female figures, either. Spitfire, who wears a full-body yellow suit with little ornamentation, essentially looks like she's naked in every panel she appears in, color artists Vincius Andrade protecting her modesty, and there's at least one panel of Maria Hill weirdly jutting her breasts out Steve in their office (Page 20, panel 1, should you have a copy in front of you).

The whole affair reads like it was meant to be a pilot series for an Invaders ongoing, ending with a two-page spread featuring eight-person team posing, flashbacks to past adventures appearing in the clouds of mist seeming to emanate from The Vision, who declares, "Should freedom ever again be threatened... The INVADERS will answer the call." 

The Invaders did indeed get a short-lived ongoing a few years later, with 2014's All-New Invaders by James Robinson, Steve Pugh and others, but it only featured half of this line-up—Steve Rogers (back to being Captain America), Namor, The Human Torch and Bucky Barnes (back to being The Winter Soldier)—and picking up a few other characters before its cancellation 15 issues later. Then in 2019, Chip Zdarsky helmed another short attempt at an ongoing featuring the same four heroes (Where was poor Toro in all of this?), this one only lasting 12 issues.

I think Invaders Now! was an effective enough reunion sort of comic, and could have served for a decent launchpad for something like a Marvel answer to DC's JSA, so I'm kinda curios why Marvel didn't commission such an ongoing from Gage, but instead waited a few years and had Robinson, who had actually co-written DC's millennial JSA for a bit, try his hand at a version of the team. 

Revisiting it today, I think it provides a fun opportunity to see some of the original, pre-Marvel Marvel characters interacting and see some of the lesser-used characters like The Vision and Toro doing anything at all.

There's also a particularly fun bit hanging on some Marvel Universe lore, as when Namor takes The Torch back to Utopia, and a couple of shy young mutants blurt out, "IS IT TRUE YOU KILLED HITLER?"

After a silent, beat panel, where The Torch looks taken aback and Namor smiles at him smugly, two of the boys looking like they realize they said something they shouldn't have, and another flashing back to The Torch setting Hitler ablaze, he finally answers:

It's all right, son.

The answer is yes... ...I killed Hitler. 

And I don't mind talking about it at all. There are plenty of things I did in the war I'd rather forget... ...but setting that monster on fire and watching him burn...

...I regret I could only do it once.

On the following page, Namor tells The Torch that his willingness to set Hitlers on fire is part of the reason the world of the 21st century needs someone like Jim Hammond around:

What you said to those boys, Jim Hammond... You must understand that is why you're needed.

The warriors of today...The Avengers, The X-Men...They adhere to a different code. One perhaps appropriate to the modern world...but limited. 

They are reluctant to kill...even the likes of Hitler. Those who are not averse tend to relish bloodshed. Often too much.

The world needs men like you. Who will do what is necessary without hesitation, but recognize that war and peace are different states of being.

With the short life spans of these humans, such men are swiftly fading from the Earth.

Namor sold me...which makes it kinda too bad we don't see more of this Torch in Marvel comics these days. 

And it makes me wonder, were Spider-Man in Hitler's bunker 80 years ago, would he have killed Hitler? Would Cyclops? Iron Man? Daredevil? Hawkeye?

The End of JLA Pt. 4: "The Pain of the Gods"

Writer Chuck Austen and artist Ron Garney's melodramatically titled 2004 arc "The Pain of the Gods", which ran twice-monthly in JLA #101-106, is probably the worst story published in the title's nine-year history. But that has less to do with the quality of the writing or the art than it does with the story's overall conception and premise.

You see, while it was a story featuring Justice Leaguers, it wasn't really a Justice League story...at least, it didn't really become one until its sixth and final installment, which is rather late in a story packaged and sold in sequential units.

The first five chapters are all organized around different members of the team, who would take turns as the main protagonist, Garney's strong, portrait-like covers showing which hero was that particular issue's designated star. 

For the first five issues, "Pain of the Gods" reads like a series of solo stories, in which the other heroes would only play small roles. In the first chapter, for example, the only character other than Superman to appear at all is Green Lantern John Stewart, and he only appeared on about two pages.

The problem with this is, of course, was that the Justice League was originally conceived to be made up of heroes who each starred in their own comics. And while the team's book got away from that concept for a long while between 1984 and 1997 or so, this title, JLA, reestablished the team as one made of DC's most popular heroes. 

So a series of solo stories starring the likes of, say, Gypsy, Vixen, Vibe and company in the 1980s might have made for a compelling read, a series of solo series starring a team consisting of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Martian Manhunter and a Green Lantern? Well, that seems nonsensical; four of those characters had their own books at that point, and two of those four had entire lines of their own books.

With "The Pain of the Gods" then, Austen seemed to be de-inventing the Justice League concept, ending up with a Superman comic book...? A Wonder Woman comic book...? What was the point, exactly?

Now, there is connective tissue between these six chapters. The first issue is a Superman solo story, guest-starring Green Lantern. By the second chapter, which focuses on The Flash (and has a really great cover by Garney, depicting a seemingly exhausted Flash, striking the pose of a winded runner taking a break), there are four other heroes, even though they don't appear until the end, on the last four pages. The next three issues have different groupings of the heroes essentially having interventions on behalf of whoever that particular issue's god in pain is. 

By the final issue, the one with Batman on the cover (has a Justice League comic cover ever looked like less of a Justice League comic cover than that one?), all six heroes appear together, essentially working a case together.

As I mentioned, there are some throughlines in these half-dozen issues of JLA, particularly regarding a plotline that is sort of in the background through most of the arc and then comes to the fore in the final issue, but until a reader gets to that last issue, "The Pain of the Gods" reads like a series of solo stories guest-starring other heroes. 

Read all at once, as I read it this time, it's a much better story, and what Austen was doing with the overall structure makes a bit more sense. But read 22 pages at a time, as it was originally published, it seemed to make little sense, and to be incredibly wrong-headed and, frankly, quite boring...especially for this title, which spent the previous 100 issues on often quite dense, action-packed stories in which somewhere between seven and twenty superheroes would team-up to save the world...or universe...or reality itself.

Lucky for you then, if you hadn't read it before, you have little choice but to read it all at once, as a final and complete story, rather than reading one-sixth of it every other Wednesday, while the DC Universe of superheroes continued to zip by.

In the first issue—which, by itself, is actually a very good done-in-one Superman story—The Man of Steel is helping firemen evacuate a burning building that is in danger of exploding at any minute, thanks to a gigantic tank of gas in its basement, where several firemen are pinned under debris.

He gets some unexpected help from a super-strong guy in a fairly generic superhero costume, who hefts the gas tank over his head and says he will hold it while Superman gets the firemen out. (He's introduced in a double-page splash, one of three in this issue which, if you were paying cover price for new comics from the shop, was awfully annoying; that's about a fourth of the comic right there.) 

Superman agrees, but while he's doing so, a spark of flame leaps up and lands on the newcomer's arm, to which he says to himself, "I guess I'm not invulnerable." 

Soon the tank explodes (another double-page splash), and Superman finds the mysterious man's charred corpse in the burning ruins. 

Cut to the JLA's lunar Watchtower, where Superman finds himself alone, and screams in anguish, tears the meeting table in half and starts smashing chairs. Green Lantern finds him later, saying that he heard the news report and "thought you might need a-- --a friendly ear." And so Superman talks about his feelings to the silent John for a page, thanks him for listening, and then goes to visit the dead hero's wife in a suburb outside of Metropolis, where he learns a little bit more about him. 

(But not much. And we won't over the course of the story either. Like I said, his costume was a bit generic—tights, briefs, a cape, domino mask—and while he seems to have super-strength, we don't learn anything else about his powers, nor even his superhero identity. Maybe it's expecting a bit much of Austen and/or Garney to invent a cool new superhero who seems like they could plausibly be a new character in the DCU who is only meant to last the length of a single story, but, well, Grant Morrison and Howard Porter did it with Tomorrow Woman in 1997's JLA #5...and John Arcudi and Scot Eaton did it with Antaeus in 1999 one-shot JLA: Superpower...and D. Cutis Johnson did it with Moon Maiden in 2000's JLA 80-Page Giant #3...)

Anyway, it's a perfectly fine Superman story, one that perhaps tangentially has something to do with the League, given John's appearance and Superman's actions on the last page to honor the fallen would-be hero's wishes.

But that's just one-sixth of the story.

Next, The Flash Wally West also comes upon a burning building, and, with his amazing super-speed, we see him rescue people and then return to look for any other survivors...and he stumbles upon a pair of children, who have already died from smoke inhalation.

Unable to get the sight of the dead kids out of his mind, Wally buys all the smoke detectors he can from a hardware store and then runs around installing them in houses at super-speed, pausing long enough to lecture a father about the importance of keeping a fresh battery in his smoke alarm, shedding a tear, exploding at the man and then running away...and into Superman, Wonder Woman, G.L. and Martian Manhunter, all hovering a few inches off the ground in his path. 

Wonder Woman embraces him as he breaks down, and then they adjourn to the meeting table, where Flash talks with them about it, and Superman offers some advice.

On the last three pages, we see a kid on a playground, the son of the hero who died in the first issue, and we see Superman is watching him. Other than that last scene, this is essentially a Flash solo story, although at least here there are more Leaguers and they play a slightly bigger role and fill more pages than John did in that first issue. 

And it's becoming apparent that Superman's interest in the man who died wasn't confined to that one issue, and that the Leaguers can experience devastating trauma in their work and that they are there for one another when it comes to dealing with it.

Next up is Green Lantern, who doesn't happen upon a third burning building, but is put in an even more unlikely situation, of the sort only a writer could come up with. He's flying between two buildings. To his right, someone is calling for help, "Someone, please help me!" And to his left, someone else is also calling for help, "Oh my God, someone help me!" 

What are the chances that two people would call from help from two apartments directly across the street from one another at the exact same time, the time at which John Stewart happens to be flying by? He does what he can with his ring, constructing a big "STOP" sign in one apartment, while he flies into the other.

He apparently chose the wrong one, though. He finds himself in the middle of a domestic abuse situation, and when he goes to check on the other one, he finds that a man has just murdered a woman in the seconds he was occupied elsewhere.

(If this seems like too much to be a coincidence, and you're wondering if maybe this is some supervillain's plot, I'm with you; I thought the same thing too back in 2004, but no, there's no villain behind it. This was all just some extremely contrived coincidence.)

After beating the murderer half to death (as depicted on the cover), John goes a little nuts, deciding he must be on-duty as Green Lantern 24/7 in order to protect everyone on the planet. Superman comes to talk to him at one point, apparently returning the favor from the first chapter, but John blows him off. It's not until he almost collapses from exhaustion while trying to save someone later that he realizes he must take a break, which Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and J'onn all insist upon.

At the end, we again see Superman watching over the kid on the playground, this time interrupting some would-be bullies, but the kid tells him off.

Next? The Martian Manhunter. This one is the most...off issue of the six. It opens with the same five characters around the meeting table, with John talking about what's been bothering him since the previous issue (there seems to be a reference to the vents of Cosmic Odyssey in there too), when J'onn J'onnz suddenly stands up and announces, "Excuse me-- --But I need to be somewhere."

He goes off to get a job with a detective agency as John Jones, incongruously wearing a trench coat and wide-brimmed hat. While he narrates about how he feels alienated from his fellow teammates, he throws himself into his new work, his weird behavior making his bosses and new coworkers very suspicious of him. They even have a fellow detective try to cozy up to him to figure out what his deal is, and J'onn's super-weird with her too.

Eventually Superman, Flash and Green Lantern track him down to his mostly empty apartment, and they share their insights about J'onn: Apparently, as soon as he starts to feel comfortable around others, as soon as he starts to feel happy, he removes himself from their company, in order to protect himself emotionally, all the result of his lingering survivor's guilt related to being the last-ish Martian.

Again, it's a fairly strong Martian Manhunter story, but it doesn't really make sense for a present day Martian Manhunter story, one set some decades after he arrived on Earth (It's been a while since I've reread the 1998-2001 Martian Manhunter series, which would have been quite current in 2004, but according to that, J'onn was already on Earth when baby Kal-El arrived here, so he's been living among humans in one form or another for a good 30 or more years now, depending on how old Superman was meant to be when he debuted post-Crisis...and J'onn would have been with the Justice League for at least 10 of those years). 

Rather, it read like a "Martian Manhunter: Year One" kind of story.  No mention of the son of the dead hero from the first chapter in this issue.

Next? Wonder Woman. After a brutal nine-page fight with a new, unnamed supervillain foe (two pages of which are devoted to an unnecessary splash), Wonder Woman is upset by the fact that she very nearly died in combat and goes to the Watchtower to find someone to talk to. 

Flash and G.L., busy playing videogames, don't seem interested in listening to her, which might seem odd given that she was just comforting them. J'onn asks her, "Are you in need of emotional support, Wonder Woman?" When she starts talking to him about what just happened to her, he cuts her off: "Well, Superman is on Earth, following the child of the man who died in that factory explosion." He then turns and walks away.

She goes to Earth and finds that Superman is indeed still creeping on a playground. This time the bullies are picking on some other kid, and the dead man's son shows up in a cape and domino mask to save the bullied child. Superman and Wonder Woman have a brief heart to heart, and then look back to the playground, where they see the kid playing superhero isn't actually playing: He has super-strength. 

And that brings us to the final issue. It has Batman, who hasn't appeared in any of the previous issues at all, on its cover, but this isn't anything like a Batman solo story, nor does it focus at all on his dealing with any sort of trauma. One imagines this is probably because of how many thousands of pages of comics have already been devoted to Batman dealing with emotional pain and trauma and being in various states of mental health crisis. 

Instead, it opens on the playground, where the super-strong kid punches out Superman, sending him flying on the issue's first double-page splash (He's pretty pissed about Superman letting his dad die, it seems). 

Batman doesn't appear until the sixth page, upon which Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash and J'onn talk to the dead man's widow in her living room, while Batman is "investigating" her daughter. 

He discovers that it wasn't just the dead man who got powers from a meteor during a camping trip, but the whole family. And the League needs to intervene to stop the widow, who seems to be the most powerful member of the family, before she takes matters into her own hands to avenge her dead husband, going after the man who owned the building her husband had died in, as he apparently cheated on building codes and paid off inspectors, making the building unsafe.

It ends with a silent sequence in which Superman is standing over the grave of the man who died, gradually joined by first John, then J'onn and Wonder Woman, then The Flash and, in the final panel, we see Batman appear, although rather than standing by Superman's side, he's in the branches of a nearby tree, looking on.

As with "The Tenth Circle", there is obviously a lot going on here and, I think, it never all quite comes together.

J'onn's out-of-character alien behavior aside, Austen seems to have a pretty good handle on the characters, and here attempts to do something I don't think I've seen anyone do with them before, presenting the Justice Leaguers like other first responders or soldiers, people with incredibly stressful jobs that occasionally break down, or are faced with debilitating traumas and have to genuinely struggle just to keep doing what they do.

How do they manage? By talking to their peers, who are always willing to listen and, when they see that one of their members is in crisis, to intervene. 

If this were the only Justice League story you ever read, you would be forgiven for thinking they are not so much a superhero team as they are a support group as, aside from the investigation of the super-powered family in the sixth and final chapter, the only things they really do together is talk about their traumas.

The problem with what Austen does here, I think, is that by organizing the stories around the throughline with the super-powered family, he limits the time in which these events take place, so that in a very compressed time—a few weeks, maybe?—each of the members of the Justice League (at least those he's concerned with in this arc, anyway) is subjected to an out-of-the-ordinary event that shakes them to their core.

Like, what are the chances that Superman sees a fellow superman die in a burning building just as The Flash is seeing dead kids in a burning building just as Green Lantern is in the middle of what sounds like a philosopher-conceived moral dilemma and so on? Like the situation Green Lantern was in, it just feels too coincidental, too artificial, too...well, too written. 

I don't think superhero stories need to be realistic. Certainly no other story in JLA is anything approaching realistic. But they do need to be believable...that is, a reader has to be able to believe in them, no matter how ridiculous the characters and events of the plot may be. Like, nothing Grant Morrison wrote during their run, the one that launched JLA, was the least bit realistic, but I still believed in every story they wrote. 

But "The Pain of the Gods"...? No, I couldn't help but see the strings. 

Now, I hated this story when it was originally released, for some of the reasons I already articulated—the fact that it was a series of solo stories featuring characters who already had their own books, how disconnected it was from the DCU in general and from the stories that preceded it in this very title—and a few that I didn't, like its space-wasting splash pages (devoted to what were big moments within the story, sure, but not ones that actually needed all that paper to detail).

I like it considerably more today than I did 21 years ago, perhaps because I was able to read it all in one sitting rather than stretched out over the course of three months (And that I wasn't paying for each issue but reading it in a trade collection from the library). And/or perhaps because at this remove, it's easier to see it in the context of the whole weird last years of JLA and I'm thus not surprised at all by any aspect of it (In 2004 though, you can imagine how weird it was to read this story, while spin-off Justice League Elite seemed to be the "real" Justice League title). 

In retrospect, I think DC would have been better off publishing this as an original graphic novel, or perhaps a mini-series, or waiting a bit and running it in the pages of JLA Classified (which would launch just two months after this arc concluded) then in JLA proper. 

I do think it aged quite well. Perhaps because it is so focused on its own events, and because of its relatively small cast, it's not necessarily tied to a particular time in the DC Universe or the greater Justice League story (Looking back, based on the character involved, it seems as if this could have occurred pretty much anywhere between 2004's JLA #90, when J'onn had rejoined the League after a brief sabbatical, and 2005's #119, when he is seemingly killed by Superboy-Prime. I think it might also have worked as a story set in the universe of the Justice League cartoon series too, actually). 

In that respect, it's definitely a more timeless, more evergreen JLA story than many...perhaps most of the others. Even if it is, as I said, perhaps the weakest overall. 

Garney, who inked as well as penciled his work here, does a pretty fine job. By this point in his career, his figures were big, bold and powerful-looking, and Austen's script gave him a lot of very emotional material to work with, as well as some relatively big superhero moments. 

I've complained a bit about the splash pages, and there are a lot of them. The book actually reads a bit like manga, given how few panels are on each of the pages. It was annoying to twenty-something Caleb shelling out $2.25 per issue (Wow, comics used to be less than $3?!), but now I don't mind so much, as it made for rather lightning-fast pacing. 

Reading this story, one might find themself wondering what Garney might be able to do with a "real" JLA story, one with lots of superheroes, supervillains, superpowers, battles and exotic settings. Good thing then that Garney would stick around for the next arc too, which was much more business as usual for the title. Which is, of course, a compliment. 

"The Pain of the Gods" was collected in 2005's JLA: Pain of the Gods and 2016's JLA Vol. 8.

Next: Kurt Busiek, Ron Garney and Dan Green's "Syndicate Rules" from 2004's JLA #107-114.

On 2017's Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness (again, apparently)

(UPDATE: So funny story, and by "funny" I mean "slightly alarming." I wanted to revisit 1991's Hearts of Darkness due to some of my recent reading of Ghost Rider comics, so I looked for it in my library catalog, found the above 2017 collection, checked it out, read it and then spent a few hours writing, oh, almost 4,000 words about it. Once I was finished and was attaching tags to it, I noticed that I already had seven for "ron garney" which seemed like a lot to me, so I clicked on that to see which of the comics he drew I had already reviewed and—surprise!—I had already reviewed this very trade, back in 2017, when it first came out. What's worse, that review was much shorter, punchier and funnier than the one I had just written. So not only is my memory deteriorating to the point that I can't remember which comics I've already written about—hell, I didn't even remember having read Dark Design before, and thought I was doing so here for the first time—but my comics-writing-about skills are apparently deteriorating, as I've grown increasingly used to writing super-long posts and publishing once or twice a week, rather than writing something daily-ish. So that's...great. Just great. Anyway, since I wasted an afternoon re-reviewing this book, I might as well go ahead and post it. But do keep in mind there's a shorter 2017 review that makes pretty much the exact same points as this one, only in fewer words. Ugh...)

This trade paperback collects a pair of Howard Mackie-written team-ups featuring three of Marvel's most violent, most badass and most popular heroes of the 1990s: Ghost Rider, Wolverine and The Punisher. 

The first, sub-titled Hearts of Darkness and featuring art from John Romita JR and Kalus Janson, was released in 1991 as a $4.95 special, with a spine and sturdier cover, essentially what DC Comics used to call "prestige format." 

The second, 1994's The Dark Design, was a fairly direct sequel, gathering the same heroes, the same villains and even a supporting character, but this one was drawn by Ron Garney and Al Milgrom (And, I see, cost a buck extra, which seems like a lot of inflation for just three years). 

As I mentioned in the first of my recent posts about Marvel's Ghost Rider character, I had actually read Hearts of Darkness before, shortly after it came out, when I was around 13 or so. If I recall the circumstances correctly, my grandfather had taken my sister, brother and I to downtown Ashtabula on a Saturday afternoon, and I convinced them to let me stop into the comic shop that was then on Main Street. My grandfather offered to buy my little brother a comic too, even though he wasn't a regular reader like I was. 

I suggested he try a Marvel comic, as I figured it made no sense for both of us to read DC Comics, and if he started reading Marvels that would double my access to comics. This book, which had a neat wraparound cover, the right half of which was reused for that of the collection, is what he chose (Why my grandfather agreed to pay almost $5 for a comic book, given that he grew up buying them for a dime, I can't imagine).

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the title characters beyond what I read in that comic (and had gleaned from the covers of their books I had seen previously in the shop), and less than that about the book's villain Blackheart, and his adversary/father, Mephisto. 

I didn't remember too much about it, other than that I kinda liked the art (At that point, the only name I was familiar with on the cover was "Klaus Janson", which I knew from reading a friend's copy of The Dark Knight Returns). That and, despite the chains, claws and guns, it must not have really spoken to me, as I didn't start following the adventures of any of these characters after that. (My brother went on to read Wolverine #48-50, which I still have in a longbox somewhere....Say, that fiftieth issue with the claw marks through the outer cover didn't ever end up being worth anything, did it...? Oh, and I did pull Ghost Rider #33 off the new rack out of desperation a few years later, but otherwise it wasn't until about 2000, when Marvel started hiring favorite DC creators and launching their new reader friendly Ultimate line that I started reading any Marvel comics regularly.)

I was curious to revisit the comic now, in part because reading Wolverine: Evilution and the first couple hundred pages of the '90s Ghost Rider comic put me in something of a mood to see more of those characters from that time period, and in part because I was curious to see how much the experience of doing so at this point might differ, decades and hundreds of comics later, when I was so much more familiar with the characters, having seen them in various cartoons, movies and TV shows...in addition to the comics.

Oddly, I have to admit my regard for Hearts of Darkness hasn't changed all that much. I still think the art is pretty great (in the years since 1990, I got to know the name John Romita JR, and gained a great esteem for his work, although I think this is maybe the earliest of his comics I've read), and the story so-so, a somewhat strained plot offering little in the way of characterization, beyond a very tell-not-show summation of these darker superheroes as belonging to a newer, more modern breed of Marvel champion.

The 46-page story opens in the town of Christ's Crown, apparently so named because of a nearby hilltop ringed in thorns, like Jesus' own crown of thorns. There some people in hoods and cloaks have gathered by torchlight to sacrifice a pretty blonde woman, her modesty preserved by a blanket, in the name of a devil that sounds more like that of an X-Men character than something from the Bible: Blackheart. 

Apparently created by JRJR himself just about a year or so previous, with writer Ann Nocenti for their Daredevil run, the character is the son of Marvel's devil figure Mephisto, and has an interesting look: He's an all-black humanoid with a tail, giant red eyes, thorny skin and a huge mane of hair that looked more like porcupine quills than dreadlocks to teenage Caleb (Wes Bentley played him in the 2007 Ghost Rider movie, although he looked far more like Wes Bentley than JRJR's weird design in that movie). 

He bubbles up from the blood spilled to summon him, strips the flesh from the bones of all of his worshipers, and then seems to have a nervous breakdown of sorts, complaining to himself about his lot in life, that his father stripped him of his free will and, holding the skull of one of the victims' head aloft like Hamlet, he talks about how "There is a new breed of man...one whose fall towards the corrupt will not be so far", a breed of man that will help him kill his father. 

Cut to Dan Ketch motorcycling into what seems like a pretty typical small town, arriving at a local boarding house with a big sign reading "BOARDING HOUSE" on it, and meeting its proprietor, a woman named Flo, and her daughter, a little girl with a ponytail bouncing a ball in the driveway.

He's only the latest boarder there, and he meets the other two at dinner: A "Mr. Logan", who, thanks to his distinctive hairstyle, any reader would immediately recognize as Wolverine, and a "Mr. Frank," who looks a lot like The Punisher wearing sunglasses indoors...save for his pencil-thin mustache.

"Something about these two," Dan thinks to himself. "I feel like I've met them before."

He has, of course. According to Comics.org, Hearts of Darkness was cover dated December of 1991; Ghost Rider met Punisher in issues #5 and #6 of his own book, September and October of the previous year, and he first met Wolverine in a string of issues of Marvel Comics Presents during the winter of 1990-1991. 

Dan apparently can't see through their disguises and aliases though, and they don't recognize him without his skull on fire, I guess, although Wolvie will later tell The Punisher "something about him tickles my nose," regarding Ketch.

This happens at night, when Wolverine sticks a claw through Punisher's door with a "SNIKT" and a "Guess who?" 

"Mr. Logan?" Punisher says, opening the door. "Thought it was you. Didn't think you'd recognize me."

"The phony mustache ain't that good of a disguise," Wolvie answers. "Besides you've got the stink of death on you, Punisher-- --Just like me!" 

Here Frank peels off his mustache, which, sadly, never reappears throughout the rest of the comic.

They compare notes, and we learn what brings the three anti-heroes to the Christ's Church boarding house: All three received short, hand-written notes signed "B.H.", each promising what might seem like their heart's desire. Knowledge about the Ghost Rider, Wolverine's true origins and how he received his claws, and who really killed Castle's family.

So not really all that sophisticated a plan, for a demon, really, this anonymous mail scam. For some reason, they had to come to Christ's Crown, too? Is that where Blackheart lives? Can he not tempt long-distance?

Anyway, that night Blackheart appears to all three separately in their rooms, apparently simultaneously, tempting them further, and talking about them as a new breed of hero:

All three of you represent humanity's newest breed of hero.

A hero that isn't afraid to approach the edge when need arises.

It's an intangible thing. A gray area which resides within each of you, in a place that my father would call your soul. 

I mean, I guess...? But it seems more of an aesthetic thing, at this point. The Punisher and Wolverine seem to kill enemies without compunction, and not fret over the morality of doing so all that much (I wouldn't exactly say The Punisher works in a "gray area," for example; he just seems to murder bad guys and save good guys). 

And while I'm obviously not sure about what happens later in his career, but at this point, Dan's Ghost Rider has never killed anyone.

Anyway, Blackheart's pitch involves making them more powerful, helping them tap into the gray area of their souls and, in exchange, all he wants from them, he says, is their help in killing "the greatest evil your race has ever known, my father, Mephisto." A little later, Blackheart refers to Mephisto as "your world's devil," which seems pretty appropriate.

Still, all three don't want to work with Blackheart, and all three answers in a curt declarative: "No."

Blackheart then, realizing he will have to try a different approach, disappears from their rooms. Flo and seemingly all of the people in the town start to walk as if in a daze towards the top of the hill. As for Blackheart, he's stolen Danny's bike and abducted Lucy.

Punisher and Wolverine struggle to get through both the mass of innocent people and then, later, the thorns. Dan, meanwhile, shouldn't be able to transform into Ghost Rider without his bike, but then looks at his palms, and sees symbols on each. His hands then burst into flame, the flesh melting off of them, and then off his face, and, transformed, he jumps onto a motorcycle stolen from a sports store and speeds through the thorns.

After a bit more tempting (during which Blackheart refers to Ghost Rider as "Zarathos! If that is who you are"; it is, we will eventually learn, not who this Ghost Rider is), the heroes all follow Blackheart to hell in an attempt to free Lucy, and there they fight hordes of little green, frog-like creatures (those seen on the wraparound cover), and, eventually, take on Blackheart. 

One would think such a thing would be impossible, but Ghost Rider takes off his gloves to reveal boney, burning fists, and shouting "Feel the pain!" he lays into Blackheart, punching him so hard he pulps half his face. Another punch, and his fist breaks through Blackheart's torso, exiting the demon's back.

From there, Wolverine lops off one of Blackheart's arms, and then Punisher spends a few panels shooting him with what I think are a machine gun ("BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA") and a grenade launcher, maybe? ("POOM POOM POOM POOM"). I don't know; I've never read an issue of The Punisher Armory, so I'm not sure what guns he carries when. 

Soon, Blackheart is just a severed head sitting in a pool of black goo, but as much punishment as his physical body seems to have taken, he can't be killed like this, and his body starts to reform. Before he can do so though, the heroes are all dismissed by Blackheart's dad, Mephisto.

This Mephisto looks nothing like the red-skinned devil with the cape and fright wig that John Buscema and Stan Lee created for Silver Surfer in the late-sixties. Rather, he looks more like a behemoth red humanoid frog of sorts, with a prominent beak, a long, long tongue and prominent breasts, each with a long, ribbon-like nipple. His weird head is crowned with an explosion of thick red hairs or tentacles, and he's surrounded by gingerbread-shaped forms that I assume are meant to be human souls in long-shot.

He scoops up the puddle of Blackheart and swallows him, making a vague threat to Ghost Rider: 

Go now, Ghost Rider-- 

--But we will meet again. 

Soon. And there will be no gray areas involved.

The truth will be revealed.

And that's pretty much the entirety of the adventure, our heroes reappearing atop the hill with Lucy, who they reunite with her mother. And while the skeptical Punisher asks Wolverine if all of that was real, and what he thinks of the business about "us being close to the edge," Ghost Rider gets the last word in, saying that, "As long as the innocent are protected-- --our cause is just."

The price tag would have been fairly steep for a book that's only twice the length of a regular comic book—that month's issue of Ghost Rider was only $1.75, after all—but I have to imagine Marvel fans appreciated the opportunity to see three of their favorite heroes in a single story like that, and Mackie certainly writes them all well (even if Ghost Rider, whose book Mackie was then writing, seems to get the most attention), and he does a fine job in the tough guy, alpha male personas (Originally, I took this as 100% straight; re-reading it today, I wonder to what degree Mackie might have been parodying a certain kind of action hero with Mr. Logan and Mr. Frank's macho portrayals).

I really can't say enough good things about JRJR and Janson's renderings of the characters (colored by John Wellington). They are big, thick and bulky as one comes to expect from JRJR, but they all also look like "themselves" in ways that other artists aren't always able to pull off (And I appreciated JRJR making Wolverine so short, particularly when standing next to the big Frank Castle).

Did the story deserve a sequel? Well, probably not, but it got one anyway, in the form of Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Dark Design.

Things have changed a lot in Christ's Crown in three years, and things have changed a lot for at least one of the heroes. At this point, Wolverine has exchanged his brown and yellow costume with the big red belt for his blue and gold one, complete with the shoulder pads I don't think make any sense.

Additionally, he seems to have lost the metal on his claws, as here he has those jagged bone claws he sported for a while.

Oh, and for some reason, his eyes are red much of the time, whether he's wearing his cowl or not. Other times, they are white. Should we blame colorist Paul Mounts for this? Maybe, but we'll come back around to the coloring in a little bit.

The plot begins in media res, with Ghost Rider on foot, carrying a now much bigger and older Lucy, while a woman wearing a tank top crop top with no bra and carrying a big shotgun urges him on. Garney's Ghost Rider has the same basic design as the one I had gotten used to, save for in his drawings of him, G.R.'s skull seems to float in a pillar of flame rather than be connected directly to his torso, and, for some reason (the nineties, I guess?), there is often strings of spittle between his skeletal jaws.

They are on the run from Blackheart's followers, who are apparently members of the town who have been corrupted by his touch. They now all have prominent black veins visible in their skin, they dress in revealing, tight-fitting black clothes that look like they might have been worn to a goth dance club or a fetish ball, and they wield weird-looking sci-fin guns that seem to shoot lasers.

They are after Lucy, who seems to have maybe developed some kind of (mutant?) power around the time she "began...coming of age". 

The town has been physically transformed into some sort of weird hellscape with scary-looking buildings more bizarre than those even the most creative artists might draw in Gotham City. And the population divided between Blackheart's corrupted, who want to capture Lucy for him, and the regular folk, who are trying to defend Lucy from them.

Our three heroes have returned to the city, compelled by psychic distress signals from Lucy who, as Garney draws her, has apparently hit puberty in the intervening years, although her breasts aren't as prominent as those of all the other women he draws in this issue, corrupt and uncorrupt. 

Meanwhile, Blackheart is hanging out in a cathedral of some sort, looking much as he did before, only now wearing a trench coat. He talks to himself, ranting about his descent into madness, while his father, in the form of a dove, seems to torment him.

Ghost Rider, the first hero we see, has his hand touched by one of the corrupt, which spread their infection to him. In order to try and stave it off, he turns back into Dan Ketch.

Wolverine, who Garney draws not with that weird wolfman hairstyle and prominent muttonchops he always sports, but with a long, lion-like mane; after his first skirmish with the corrupt, when The Punisher saves him by gunning down a wave of a half-dozen attackers from a rooftop, Wolvie suits up, and I can't imagine how all that hair fits so snugly beneath his cowl. 

Shortly after the heroes all meet up at a camp, the corrupted attack and make off with Lucy who, back at Blackheart's cathedral, is dressed in a white wedding dress (complete with veil), where she is apparently to become his child bride, and the key to his victory over his father.

Our heroes attack, are briefly strung up on strands of ink black something-or-other and subjected to mental images to torment them. A naked Wolverine, his hair seemingly having gotten even longer, has no patience for this when he seems to find himself in the snow Canadian wilderness: 

GRRR! The north country...Canada! 

Pretty original takin' me back to my roots.

It's been tried too many times.

Don't even know what's real myself anymore.

Don't really care! Get out of my mind, Blackheart!

He's able to get through to Ghost Rider and Punisher, and once again the three triple-team the demon, Ghost Rider beating him with flaming fists, Wolverine slicing him with his claws, Punisher pumping rounds into him.

What's different this time? Well, this time Lucy runs from the heroes back to the fallen Blackheart, seemingly offering him forgiveness, at least according to Mackie's narration. But when Mephisto again arrives to collect his son, Blackheart pulls a knife, the tip of which is dripping with blood.

"I do not need the child," he says. "Only this! The blood of a child. INNOCENT BLOOD!"

So I guess Lucy either slipped him a knife with her blood on it, or, when she went back to forgive him, allowed him a bit of her blood...? That, or he cut her just deeply enough to get a few drops of her blood on his blade a few pages earlier, when the heroes first stormed his base and he briefly held a knife to Lucy's throat.

At any rate, that's apparently all one needs to kill Marvel's devil (temporarily, I assume), as Blackheart stabs his dad to death, and the last panels shows Blackheart standing triumphant, having doffed his trench coat and raised his arms in victory: "Mephisto, King of Hell, is DEAD... Long live the new king!"

I imagine that was a significant event in the Marvel Universe and was probably reflected in a few comics for a while, but I also imagine it was relatively short-lived. Certainly, I've seen Mephisto alive and well since (notably in Jason Aaron's Avengers run, which I read the first two-thirds of or so. And now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw Blackheart in a comic...).

For Mackie's part, I think the script for Dark Design suffers from the classic affliction of so many sequels, that of repeating something because it was popular and there was demand for more of the same, and not because there was anything new to say. The story thus suffers from diminishing returns.

Also, because it is essentially just a few action scenes strung together, only interrupted by Blackheart ranting at his father, it doesn't have anything as fun as seeing the characters in their secret identities...or The Punisher's clumsy attempts at a disguise that we saw in Hearts of Darkness. 

And then, of course, there's no real need for Mackie to meditate on the dark nature of these heroes, because, well, he already did that three years previous, and, in that time, they all just kept on doing what they've been doing with, I imagine, little change (In this story, for example, Ghost Rider refuses to kill human beings, even those corrupted by Blackheart, while Wolverine and The Punisher mow them down without a second thought). 

I did not care for the art at all, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, given that I genuinely like Garney's art on JLA about a decade or so later (He drew the "Pain of The Gods" and "Syndicate Rules" arcs toward the end of the series). I suppose we can blame much of that on the times, as even a quick flip-through will reveal this to be a very nineties looking book.

Aside from his specific design choices, the colors, the letters and their various fonts and special effects, the layouts, the inset panels...the story reminded me a lot of the look of the earlier issues of Spawn I had read, and seemed a significant departure from the first year or so of Mackie and company's Ghost Rider, or Hearts of Darkness. 

Indeed, because it's just a page-turn away from Hearts of Darkness, I think Dark Design suffers in comparison, although I wonder how much of this is really a matter of, say, the JRJR/Janson team being better at telling a comics story than the Garney/Milgrom one, and how much of it is due to the first being published in 1991, and the second in 1994. 

Certainly, the advances in comics coloring technology and lettering style (and/or technology?) seems to have informed the latter book, which seems to take full advantage of all the new choices a colorist had to work with in the mid-nineties, whether it necessarily ended up benefiting the book in the long run or not. 

Reading both stories back to back today, Dark Design looks much darker, muddier and harder to read than Hearts of Darkness. (Also, one can't tell from this particular collection, but Dark Design was apparently published on glossy paper, which might have accounted for its higher cost, whereas I don't think Hearts of Darkness was. I'm now a little curious what similarly glossy paged books from the time might now look like in trade collections, but I'm not even sure where I could look to see...). 

Anyway, I disliked Dark Design as much as I liked Hearts of Darkness, and I would hesitate to recommend this particular collection to any reader...unless, of course, said reader was simply curious about Marvel Comics in the first half of the nineties, in which case I guess this book is a decent encapsulation, both good and bad.

Oh, and as I mentioned on Bluesky, after reading this particular trade paperback, I now find myself, for the first time in my life, as a person with opinions about Wolverine. Those being that the brown and yellow costume > than the blue and gold one, and that metal claws > bone claws. 

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