The End of JLA Pt. 7: "World Without a Justice League"

Finally, we come to JLA #120-125, the six-part "World Without a Justice League" story arc, which marks the end of 1997-2006 series. It's pretty much the definition of ending with a whimper rather than a bang, as writer Bob Harras and artists Tom Derenick and Dan Green present a story in which former Leaguers Green Arrow and Manitou Dawn face old Justice League villain The Key and various other heroes come and go as they are all buffeted by the events of the Infinite Crisis event series. 

These last issues mainly exist to serve the event—the 2006 trade paperback collection bears a band reading "Infinite Crisis Crossover" across the top of the cover—as the Justice League had more-or-less disbanded in the previous arc, and its last few active members were forcibly prevented from forming a new team by a mysterious attack on its last pages. 

And if you thought that last arc, "Crisis of Conscience", was one that required additional homework to follow, given that it was devoted to the fallout of Identity Crisis, this one is far, far worse. 

After two pages of the trade paperback collection devoted to a sort of roll call identifying the major heroes involved in the volume's story (which the last few collections have also featured) and a pair of villains (one of whom is only identified here, and not in the pages of the comics themselves), there's another page that includes this list:

Identity Crisis.

Day of Vengeance.

Rann/Thanagar War.

Books of Magic.

Villains United.

The OMAC Project.

Crisis of Conscience.

It's followed by a paragraph of text, starting off with the words, "All of these recent disasters have taken a drastic toll on the Justice League of America." It then mentions that J'onn J'onnz was the only member of the team to conclude that these seemingly random events might actually all be connected and recaps the destruction of the Watchtower and his going missing afterwards.

It ends with the words, "These are the events that follow those tragic moments..."

That list? That's...a lot of other, non-JLA comics to suggest a reader might need to be familiar with before reading a JLA story. 

Now, I was still visiting a comics shop every Wednesday in 2005 and 2006, when the individual issues of "World Without a Justice League" were originally released, and I was buying a lot of DC Comics. But even I hadn't read all of these. Looking at the list now, I'm surprised to see a "Books of Magic" mentioned, and I'm not entirely sure what that refers to. (Plugging that into Comics.org, I see the Books of Magick: Life During Wartime series ran from 2004-2005, but I can't imagine what it had to do with this arc, especially since it was a Vertigo series.) 

As for "World Without a Justice League" itself, I'm going to just delineate the plot, to give you a sense of just how big and disparate the cast is, and the zigs and zags taken as the story basically meanders from Infinite Crisis-related plot point to plot point, it's fight with The Key providing something of a throughline for a couple of the characters involved.

The first two pages open on the moon, where we see the shell of the Watchtower, and Harras and Derenick then take us to Gotham City's Arkham Asylum, where the mysterious narrator has apparently just escaped, having exerted some kind of mind control over the doctors. 

This is, spoiler alert, The Key, a Justice League villain who had been around since 1965. Grant Morrison had reinvented him for his latest attack on the team in 1997's JLA #8-9, the Oscar Jimenez-drawn two-parter during which Green Arrow Connor Hawke began his short tenure on the team. The artists had rather radically redesigned him, giving him gray skin, long white hair, red eyes and a skimpy and vaguely bondage-y looking costume, complete with keys over his fingers. 

Before this story, he was last seen in 2000's Batman: Gotham Knights #5 in a story by Devin Grayson, Dale Eaglesham and John Floyd, which established that The Key was sent to Arkham Asylum after JLA #9. Curiously, Harras both honors and ignores Grayson's story, as he has The Key escaping Arkham, but doesn't refer at all to his having previously escaped the League-designed mind prison.

We then turn to the story's other narrator, Green Arrow Oliver Queen. He is currently at a sparsely-attended ceremony at the League's original base in Happy Harbor, Rhode Island, which is being lead by Aquaman (Whom writers Geoff Johns and Allan Heinberg had erroneously told us in the previous issue hadn't been a member of the team for "years" in the previous arc)..

Also in attendance, in case you're wondering, are a rather random group of former Leaguers, many of whom haven't been on the team for some time. Most  of them are on Daniel Acuna's cover for the first issue of the arc, seen above, but they are Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Green Lantern John Stewart, Black Canary, Zauriel, Plastic Man, The Flash, Captain Marvel, Batman, Mister Miracle, Big Barda and Manitou Dawn. 

That last character will play an important role in this story, but she probably won't be all that familiar to anyone who hadn't already read Joe Kelly's run on the Justice League books. She first appeared in the pages of JLA, being the wife of the League's shaman Manitou Raven. Like him, she had traveled thousands of years into the future at the conclusion of "The Obsidian Age" arc. 

If one had not followed Justice League Elite, they probably wouldn't know that she had an affair with team member Green Arrow, and that, when her husband died, she took his place as shaman, going from just plain Dawn to Manitou Dawn.

As League founders Aquaman and Hal Jordan make speeches and Ollie narrates, Dawn slips into the astral plane, where she's visited by J'onn. He assures her that he is not, in fact, dead, and tells her: "I will reveal myself in time, Dawn. When I may be of assistance...not just yet." He warns her that "a being of vast power has awakened... and yet in the current climate may be overlooked as a minor threat."

Ollie pulls her back to the real world before J'onn can name that being, but I can tell you it's The Key. 

Aquaman and Dawn, who the former says, "represent the more elemental beliefs," each take a handful of dirt from the cave entrance and then release it to be carried away by the wind, symbolizing a cleansing of bitterness and ill will. After most of the other Leaguers do the same, Dawn says that she senses the ceremony had failed. Ollie accuses Batman, who did not participate in the handful-of-dirt thing, of ruining it.

This leads to an argument involving the pair of them, with The Flash, Hal and Aquaman all chiming in. They're mostly still arguing about the same stuff they were arguing about in the previous arc. Aquaman brings up Batman's dossiers on how to defeat his teammates from Mark Waid and Howard Porter's "Tower of Babel" arc, and Batman mentions how uncomfortable he now is with such big concentrations of super-powered people like this.  Ultimately, Ollie accuses Batman of maybe, "just maybe" being the one responsible for destroying the Watchtower.

Batman eventually storms off, telling everyone he is now going to the Watchtower site to see if he can figure out who actually did destroy it. It is perhaps worth noting here how unworried all of these characters seem about its destruction and J'onn's disappearance. 

I mean, surely Green Arrow and Big Barda wouldn't be much help looking for clues on the surface of the moon, but you'd think Dawn's magic and the Lanterns' rings might be helpful...and you might think that they would rather be there than here, especially John, who was talking to J'onn when the attack happened (If you read Infinite Crisis, you know that Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman all show up there independently at the same time to investigate, so at least someone did...still, weird that Batman would squeeze in this cleansing ceremony before going to do so, right?).

Meanwhile, The Key, who still hasn't been named or revealed yet, has escaped into the sewers, where he has killed a man and scrawled "The JLA Made Me Do It!" on the wall with the victim's blood. He then hooks up with one of his robot helper Keymen (who Derenick draws to resemble those that Jimenez had drawn in JLA #8 and #9, rather than the more human ones Eaglesham drew in Gotham Knights) and he then engineers a suicide bombing. 

It will take a bit for Harras to ultimately reveal what The Key's deal is now, but apparently his old super-senses have developed into an uncontrollable psychic power during his imprisonment in the League-designed fractal maze at Arkham. 

He can now psychically dominate others and control their minds and actions, but he can't seem to block out the thoughts of others, and so he is being constantly bombarded with a cacophony of mental voices. The only thing that seems to relieve the pain, temporarily, is when he kills someone...or, in the case of the bombing, a bunch of someones. (The Key also looks a fair degree healthier than he did in JLA and Gotham Knights. His hair is now blonde, and his skin has resumed a flesh color, rather than the gray of his previous few appearances).

Several Leaguers have stayed behind in Happy Harbor after the ceremony. Aquaman and John Stewart are working on re-starting the Justice League...in one form or another, even if only as a precaution against Batman's OMAC Project gone wild or the prospect of a superhero versus superhero civil war of some kind ("You think people are going to start choosing sides?" Green Arrow, who has never read Marvel's Civil War, asks. "Us versus them?")

Dawn, meanwhile, has sought more answers from the astral plane, where she encounters the spirit of her husband and then The Key, but she's interrupted by explosions...the sound of Ollie shooting exploding arrows around the cave to blow off steam. Black Canary arrives mid-shot, and the two have a heart-to-heart (Acuna's cover for the second chapter captures this moment and seems to imply the two are fighting within the book, which they are not). 

During their talk, Ollie confesses to Dinah that he had a relationship with Dawn and how the guilt has been tearing him apart (this was explored in Justice League Elite, of course). Harras has Canary make the relationship seem even worse than just the adultery with a woman married to one of his teammates, though:

That girl is just that-- a girl! And what's worse is that she's displaced from another time!

She was vulnerable-- and you took advantage of that. As usual. 

I don't think Dawn's age had ever come up before, but Black Canary certainly makes it sound like there was a very problematic age gap at play here, on top of everything else. 

While the men go off and attempt to make their first recruit, Canary has a similar chat with Dawn.

That recruit? Nightwing, whom they find in the midst of a fight with the assassin Brutale. They make their pitch, Aquaman saying that even if there is no longer a League, there's nothing to stop "heroes like us...getting together from time to time-- --just to ascertain situations, share information-- basically to watch each other's back."

Realizing that they came to him because of his closeness to Batman, Nightwing turns them down.

Meanwhile, The Key has kept up his killing spree, finally drawing the attention of various heroes. Aquaman and company, joined by Canary, Dawn and The Flash, investigate a crime scene. (Flash is shown to be sweating, and characters repeatedly mention how bad he looks; I have no idea what this is about, and the story doesn't make it clear...something going on in his own book at the time, I guess?) 

Supergirl arrives, and they pitch her on joining their kinda sorta League.

And then a bunch of OMACs attack. There's a fight scene, which Red Tornado shows up for. Then the OMACs all freeze, perhaps because of something going on in Infinite Crisis...? During the battle, The Key captures Dawn. 

Then Donna Troy shows up, says she needs some powerful heroes for an unnamed mission, and she then leaves with Supergirl and Red Tornado to go do something in some other book. 

At this point, John Stewart and Aquaman both decide they have other stuff to do too, and they take off too. 

That just leaves Ollie and Canary to rescue Dawn. 

The Key has taken her to the top of Wayne Tower in Gotham City, and he plans to use her powers to commit a city-wide mass murder to silence the voices in his head. Ollie and Canary arrive there, as does Batman, and, rather randomly, a big green creature that readers can see but the characters mostly cannot. 

This is, apparently, Envy, one of the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man from the Captain Marvel franchise, who if I recall comics I read 20 years ago correctly, was released from imprisonment on the Rock of Eternity when it was destroyed during the events of Day of Vengeance. I think. I assumed that's who it was while reading, given that he was green, but, as mentioned previously, he's only ever named in the roll call in the collection's pre-story pages. 

I assume he only showed up at all, like the OMACs, to tie into the goings-on of Infinite Crisis and the multiple miniseries leading up to it, but, once he gets there, his influence seems to provide a reason for the heroes to fight one another (You can see Ollie and Batman doing so on the cover of #125, the very last issue of the series). 

At some point, Envy is distracted and looks away—presumably at the events happening in another book—and The Key, the only one of them who seems aware of the spirit's presence, blasts him with his new psychic powers. 

Thus freed of Envy's influence, the heroes KO Key and bicker about what to do with him. Dawn takes it upon herself to mete out justice, as she phrases it, making him disappear. There's some more bickering among the heroes, with Ollie pointing out that Batman needed help from Canary and Dawn during their fight with The Key and Batman saying over his shoulder, "Give it up, Ollie...The League is dead."

When Dawn walks away, we see where she sent The Key: To the astral plane, where he is finally in a place of utter emptiness (Indeed, as Derenick draws it here, it is now just blank panels full of whiteness, in which The Key hovers cross-legged with his hands in prayer). J'onn and Raven both appear to Dawn there for the space of a few panels, giving her a few attagirls.

On the last page, Dawn retreats into the cave entrance of the Happy Harbor base, and from there the scene shifts to the wreckage of The Watchtower, the now at-peace Key getting the final word, saying of the League that, "unlike me... ...I suspect their story is... ...far, far from over."

So, as you can probably tell from all that, Harras' plot did quite a bit of ping-ponging about, and one gets the sense that, before he sat down to write the arc, he was given a list of characters to include, when and where to pick them up and when and where to leave him, and various plot points that should be mentioned. 

While I wasn't too terribly fond of the arc when I originally read it about 20 years ago—especially as a last JLA story—I imagine it must have read better serially as originally published, rather than as a collection so many years later.

Then, were one reading other comics in DC's superhero line at the time, they would probably have a decent handle of where the various characters were coming from and going to, and what the specific events referred to or even just alluded to here actually were. 

Decades later, I've forgotten many of the details of Infinite Crisis and its many tie-ins. (Which may have to do with the fact that it's not a story I've read and re-read over the years, despite my fondness for the work of its artist Phil Jimenez, probably the second-best choice for a "crisis" book following George Perez in the early '00s. At this point, I mainly only remember a few scenes, and mostly for the wrong reasons: The Trinity arguing in the ruins of the Watchtower, Batman seemingly having a panic attack, Bizarro and some other supervillains murdering Uncle Sam and the other Freedom Fighters, Superboy-Prime slaughtering various Titans characters, that weirdly un-finished battle scene in the streets of Metropolis at the climax.)

Therefore, much of this particular book now reads like it's full of random creative choices, devoid of context, set-up or payoff. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't encountering it as part of reading or re-reading Infinite Crisis...unless, perhaps, that person is a really big Manitou Dawn fan, as this is the only story I know of that features her so prominently (In fact, after this, she never really appeared much; consulting Comics.org, I see only a cameo in a Kurt Busiek-written Superman comic and some appearances in Justice League Dark, a book I never read much of).

Despite so many obvious (and, perhaps, excusable) drawbacks to the story, Harras' writing has its virtues. He does manage to tell a mostly coherent story arc, one dealing with a standard superhero vs. supervillain plot (The Key business) and some comic book soap opera emotional content (the evolution of Green Arrow and Dawn's relationship), even if he has to do so in-between and around so many other goings-on.

Harras seems to have a decent handle on all of the characters, and they all seem to sound and act like themselves, a few curious choices aside (Like everyone pausing for that ceremony while J'onn was missing and the Watchtower in ruins, for example). 

Harras also seems to have read JLA (and JLE!) and thus be familiar with the cast and some recent plotlines, something that Johns and Heinberg certainly didn't demonstrate in the preceding arc. 

I've always liked the work of artist Tom Derenick, although I also have always kinda felt badly for him, as, more often than not, he seems to be assigned particularly books for his speed rather than anything else, and therefore many of his comics tend to feel shoddily planned, comics with weird deadlines or changes in directions dictating an artist who can churn out work fast.

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure I can name a really great Derenick-drawn comic, then, though I've never been disappointed to see his art. Here he gets to draw a decent swathe of DC characters, and everyone manages to look right and properly heroic and powerful, even when arguing rather bitterly with one another.

Given the overall weirdness of this arc, Derenick's pencils are honestly probably the highlight.

"World Without a Justice League" was collected in 2006's JLA: World Without a Justice League and 2017's JLA Vol. 9.