The End of JLA Pt. 6: "Crisis of Conscience"

The five-part "Crisis of Conscience", which ran through 2005's JLA #115-119, is a probably a pretty good example of being careful what you wish for. 

A regular JLA reader at the time might have understandably wanted the title to start reflecting the goings-on of the wider DC Universe by the summer of that year, given that some rather big events were happening, all seemingly building towards something even bigger still.

And, of course, some members of the League were involved in various stories that one might assume would impact the Justice League team, like Wonder Woman killing Max Lord (who had suddenly, randomly and in defiance to decades of continuity been retconned into a murderous bad guy for the pages of that May's Countdown one-shot) or Batman building a super-spy satellite with its own army of nanotech cyborg enforcers in the pages of The OMAC Project miniseries. 

And, of course, there was the fact that JLA had been without a regular creative team for 24 issues or so, the last five story arcs all reading like fill-ins to one degree or another. 

What the readers ended up getting, though, was what was essentially the last JLA story. While it would be followed in the title by one more story arc, "Crisis of Conscience" had most of the team quitting and expressing various degrees of finality regarding their decisions (Wonder Woman, who shows up for a single scene, seems to have left the team somewhere between issues #114 and #115, while Plastic Man isn't mentioned at all, the arc's two writers and the book's editors seemingly being unaware of the previous story arc or Justice League Elite, both of which had Plas still an active member).

Also, in its final pages, in which Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern John Stewart are shown considering new candidates for a new JLA line-up, the Watchtower is attacked by someone in a red cape that the computers register as Superman. The Watchtower is destroyed, and J'onn is seemingly killed.

The story is the work of writers Geoff Johns and Allan Heinberg, the latter of whom was a TV writer whose only previous comics work was Young Avengers for Marvel (This decade of comics was, for better or worse—mostly worse—a period in which DC and Marvel seemed to quite actively court and recruit writers from other media like TV, film and prose to tackle their characters). It was drawn by artists Chis Batista and Mark Farmer. (The evocative coves weren't drawn by the Batista/Farmer team, though, but were instead penciled by the great Rags Morales, whose presence will make sense in a moment).

Now, unlike the five previous stories in the pages of JLA (covered in the last five installments of this series), "Crisis of Conscience" isn't much of a standalone or an evergreen story and, given the fact that it is a direct sequel to the miniseries Identity Crisis, it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense if one reads it out of that context. 

I mean, the art is great, it's full of familiar characters, and its pages are dominated by costumed heroes fighting costumed villains and arguing with one another, although the reason they are fighting one another is mostly just mentioned in dialogue that refers back to the events of Identity Crisis.

I suppose its readable as an example of superhero comics-as-professional wrestling, with Johns and Heinberg employing that one Johns trick—where a character announces their surprise arrival off-panel on the last panel on the bottom of one-page, only to make a dramatic on-page appearance in the splash page that follows—no less than a half-dozen times (Plus there are a few variations of these entrances). 

But the story revolves around the events of other comics, like Identity Crisis and Wonder Woman and, somewhat surprisingly, a Justice League of America story published in 1979 (Which was 26-years previous; I was only two-years-old when those issues were published, and if DC had reprinted them at all, it would have been in a Showcase Presents volume).

DC seems to have realized this book requires a bit of "homework" to follow along when they collected it. For the purposes of this post, I re-read it in the form of the 2005 trade paperback collection. The cover of it features a little red circle reading, "The Explosive Aftermath To Identity Crisis", plus a "The Story So Far..." page of text preceding the first pages of the comic, featuring a lengthy synopsis of Identity Crisis.  

While I would rather not, I suppose I will have to refer to Identity Crisis here. I'll denote the references to that book with a string of asterisks below; feel free to skip ahead if you don't want to read about Identity Crisis at all; I wouldn't blame you, as I'm afraid it might get slightly rant-y, as the story still irritates me. (Also, trigger warning for mention of sexual assault.)

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Identity Crisis was a seven-issue miniseries published between 2004 and 2005. It was written by the prolific prose novelist Brad Meltzer, writing what was only his second comics story following the six-part 2002-2003 Green Arrow arc "The Archer's Quest". It was penciled by the great Rags Morales and inked by Michael Bair.

It was presented as a murder mystery, the victim being Sue Dibny, the wife of The Elongated Man, who played a prominent role in various iterations of the League her husband was a member of, particularly the so-called "Detroit Era" and "JLI" era Leagues (If I recall correctly, her last appearance before Identity Crisis was in the pages of the 2003-2004 comedic series Formerly Known as the Justice League).

Her murder rocked the superhero community and was followed by attacks on the loved ones of other heroes, like The Atom's ex-wife Jean Loring and Robin's father Tim Drake, and threats to others, like Superman's wife Lois Lane. Whoever the killer was, they knew the secret identities of DC's heroes, even the best-kept ones, like those of Batman and Superman.

It also reminded a group of former Leaguers who were part of the Satellite Era of the team of a terrible secret from their past (And that past was a very long time ago, even then; for reference, the Satellite era was roughly 1970-1984). 

Apparently, the villain Doctor Light had once raped Sue, and, in order to protect her, this group of heroes—Hawkman, Black Canary, The Atom, Zatanna, The Flash Barry Allen, Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Green Arrow Oliver Queen—had voted to have Zatanna use her magical powers to attempt to "fix" Doctor Light so that he might never do such a thing again. 

When Batman walked in on the process, which Meltzer suggests resulted in Light becoming a dopey Teen Titans villain afterwards, Zatanna similarly used her magic on the Dark Knight, removing his memory of what he had just witnessed.

(At the time, I had assumed that Meltzer chose those particular characters from so long ago because they were no longer Justice Leaguers, and thus their extremely unheroic, not-very-Justice League-y actions wouldn't impact the current or future Justic League books, but, given that he would use several of them in his own relaunched 2006 Justice League of America, I would later realize he likely chose to set the events back then, and to build the story around them, simply because that was the Justice League he had read as a little kid.)

As I said, the story was presented as a murder mystery, complete with the introduction of suspects and a few red herrings and the real killer only being revealed at the end. Unfortunately, Meltzer didn't exactly play fair, and his editors didn't seem to press him to do so. 

See, the mystery sort of hinged on pre-Crisis continuity (with some hiccups), so anyone who, say, had been reading DC Comics in the previous 20+ years wouldn't have even thought to guess who the murderer actually was (For several reasons, really, but I'm just going to stick to the continuity one here, since this post isn't really about Identity Crisis). 

Sue's murderer turned out to be (Spoiler warning...? I guess...?) The Atom's ex-wife Jean Loring. 

Why did she want Sue dead? Well, apparently she wanted to get back together with her superhero ex-husband, and thought the way to do that would be to start attacking the loved ones of various superheroes, thus making The Atom worry about her and grow closer to her (Oddly, Meltzer chose to also indicate that The Atom wanted to get back together with her too, rendering Jean's plot moot).

So, she targeted Sue, which, fine, Ralph Dibny hadn't had a secret identity for most of his existence, and Sue openly worked with and/or for the Justice League for at least a decade within the DCU timeline. But, as I said, Loring's hit list also included Jack Drake and Lois Lane.

The problem is, of course, Jean Loring wouldn't know Superman's secret identity, nor would she know Batman's...which she would need to in order to figure out who the current (and third) Robin might be (Also, given that Robin wasn't one of The Atom's Justice League colleagues, he was an oddly chosen target, suggesting that the killer was after all superheroes, and not just former Justice Leaguers). 

Apparently, Meltzer was operating on the understanding that all of the members of the Justice League knew one another's secret identities and shared them with their significant others. 

That may have been the case when Meltzer was reading JLoA in the late seventies and early eighties (or at least the Justice Leaguers knowing one another's ID's), of course, but that had changed post-Crisis. In fact, a majority of Mark Waid's JLA run was devoted to the fact that most of the Justice League pointedly did not know one another's secret identities, and Batman's refusal to reveal his to his teammates was threatening to break the League up. It was presented as a major moment when he did finally unmask for the rest of his team (which, of course, no longer featured The Atom). (Tim Drake, by the way, didn't become Robin until 1989; Jean Loring divorced Ray Palmer in 1983, the year before Jason Todd became the second Robin. Again, his inclusion in the plot at all makes no damn sense.)

In retrospect, it seems pretty clear that Meltzer was picking Jean Loring's victims off a list of characters DC must have said they were willing to let him kill off, rather than one's that make any sense at all.

Anyway, that was Identity Crisis. 

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"Crisis of Conscience" opens with a page of J'onn J'onnz on the surface of Mars, while a fight breaks out on the Watchtower, with Flash Wally West, Zatanna and Black Canary trying to keep Hawkman and Green Arrow apart. Apparently, The Flash had called them all up there to get them to agree to fess up to Batman about what they did to him, something Wally learned of during the course of Identity Crisis. A newly resurrected Hal Jordan and J'onn soon arrive. 

Hal refers to the events of 1979's JLoA #166-168 (I believe), where the Justice League at the time had swapped bodies with the Secret Society of Super-Villains, allowing the bad guys to discover their secret identities. Hal says they had Zatanna magically zap their identities out of the brains of the villains, which apparently presaged the later attempt to magically lobotomize Dr. Light, to use Green Arrow's term for what they did.

In addition to erasing about ten minutes of Batman's memory, they also used Zatanna's magic to block J'onn's telepathy from accidentally picking up the secret from their minds.

Let's pause to note how damn weird this story read in 2004. 

Not only is it based on a story from a generation previous to that—not an allusion to that story, or a reference to it, or a modern retelling of something similar to it, but an honest-to-God sequel to it—but some of these characters have never even appeared in the pages of JLA or its spin-offs, or did so in minor, supporting roles, as, say, Black Canary, Green Arrow and Hawkman did in "Syndicate Rules" and JLA/Avengers.  

Hell, Hal Jordan had never appeared in JLA wearing a ring; his only interactions with this incarnation of the League were when he was temporarily The Spectre.

Anyway, J'onn leaves to go talk to Batman, whom he said already knows what the Satellite Era Leaguers did to him, and no sooner does he leave then the Watchtower gets distress signals from two other former members, Red Tornado and The Elongated Man. 

The remaining heroes split up to attempt a rescue their former teammates, but they face fierce resistance from mostly unseen villains (There's an extremely dumb page where Ralph is shown retreating into his kitchen to grab his Gingold extract, which he has placed on the very top shelf of a cupboard, well out of his own reach. Why? He lives alone, not with any children. Apparently, Johns and Heinberg thought it would be ironic to show him trying and failing to stretch far enough to reach the thing that gives him stretching powers).

Meanwhile, J'onn finds Batman on a Gotham City rooftop, where he's having a flirty conversation with Catwoman (In this story's one genuinely funny moment, Catwoman attempts to close the distance between herself and Batman, perhaps to kiss or embrace him, and instead bumps into some invisible barrier; it turns out to be J'onn, standing between them invisibly). (Interestingly, the skies in Gotham are red; I'm not sure if this is meant to be a reference to Batman: The Animated Series, in which the night sky of Gotham was always red, or to Crisis, when the skies of the DC Universe rather notoriously turned red.)

The conversation doesn't get far before pieces of Red Tornado rain down on Batman from above, followed by the unconscious bodies of Ralph and the Leaguers who had just answered the distress calls. (Coincidentally, as I write this post, I'm currently working my way through DC Finest: Justice League of America: The Return, and in 1985's JLoA Annual #3, Red Tornado is also torn to pieces. This...happens to him an awful lot, doesn't it?) 

Floating on a platform above Batman, J'onn and Catwoman are the reawakened members of The SSOS (Felix Faust! The Wizard! The Floronic Man! The Matter Master! (A) Star Sapphire! The original Chronos! Don't worry if you don't recognize any of them; the next issue opens with a roll call naming them all, and Johns and Heinberg are good enough at writing such fight comics that they drop their names into the fight patter and have them all demonstrate their powers).

"Hello, Bruce," The Wizard says. "Remember us? Because we remember... ...everything."

Oh snap! The Secret Society of Super-Villains have returned! And they have somehow had their memories restored and thus know the Satellite Era Justice Leaguers' secret identities again, like they did in 1979! Thank goodness Johns and Heinberg had Hal mention these events like 15 pages ago...!

That's the first issue. On to part two!

There's a big fight, during which Catwoman is fairly badly wounded, and then the villains disappear. So too does Batman, having taken Catwoman and the pieces of the Tornado back to the Batcave with him. The others all barge in, during one of those dramatic entrances that Johns so likes, although the way it is presented here, it makes it seem like eight superheroes all snuck into the cave simultaneously, and Batman didn't notice them until J'onn announced them. 

Batman punches out Hawkman, which is cool (Cool enough Morales made it the cover of this particular issue). I wish he would have then punched out Hal Jordan too, but alas, just as Hawkman picks himself up and grasps the shaft of his mace, threatening, "I hope it was worth it, Batman. Because I'm going to give you ten minutes you'll never forget," Hal pushes them apart with ring constructs.

Batman tells them all to get lost, and they do, while J'onn returns to the Watchtower. There he finds someone sitting in the monitor womb. "J'onn, I'm so glad you're here," the darkened figure says over his shoulder. "Someone has given the Secret Society their memories back."

This last bit is, of course, in the last panel at the bottom of a righthand page, and turning it reveals a big panel featuring a big, muscular Despero sitting in the chair, nude save for a cape. He has apparently spun the chair around to face J'onn, all dramatic like. 

"I wonder who that could've been..." Despero grins.

"Despero," J'onn says, apparently answering the question and identifying the character for anyone who might not know who the three-eyed, fin-headed guy was. (Why did Despero give the Society their memories back? How did he know they lost them in the first place? What does he care about a bunch of C-list League villains from like four incarnations of the Justice League ago? Johns and Heinberg never really clear any of this up, and so the Desperso/SSOV plots don't really connect in a satisfactory way...unless we are to believe that Despero is a bit of a gossip, I suppose, as there are a few references to the fact that word of what the Satellite Era team did to Light has been getting out of late...)

Part three!

As the pair of old enemies battle in the Watchtower, The Flash runs around the country, checking in on various heroes and their loved ones or teammates. He's on his way to warn Lois Lane of the Secret Society's return when the vey villains attack the Daily Planet building. (Allow me an aside to complain: "Who's next, Wizard?" Star Sapphire says, "Carol Ferris? Jim Jordan?" Those are the names of some of Hal's loved ones, of course. The Wizard replies, "Why not? Then Iris Allen, Tim Drake, Barbara Gordon..." Okay, so it's possible that Jean Loring did some research to find what black-haired young man Bruce Wayne spent the most time with these days and thus was able to deduce Tim Drake was Robin, but how in the fuck would The Wizard know who Tim is? Dick Grayson was still Robin at the time the SSOS discovered the Leaguers' identities.)

Anyway, it's another big, multi-page fight, this time with Wally and the mind-wipers joined in the battle by Superman. The heroes defeat the Society, knocking them all unconscious and binding them with ring constructs, and while Superman makes his disapproval of mind-wiping known, he asks aloud, "Then the question is... ...what do we do with them?" 

Hawkman points directly at the Man of Steel and says, "We vote." This, of course, evokes the long-ago vote that led to Dr. Light's magical lobotomy at the hands of Zatanna. Here though she will just extract some information from their minds, rather than seeking to change them.

Part four! 

J'onn and Despero plunge from the Watchtower to Earth, fighting all the way. Despero seems to have J'onn on the ropes, when Aquaman makes his dramatic splash page entrance, having thrown a pointed piece of rebar through the villain's shoulder with a SHUNKK.

The assembled Leaguers all make their votes about whether to have Zatanna alter the minds of the SSOV again, and a few of those that aren't Hawkman make excuses for the way they vote (The ayes are Hawkman, Green Arrow and The Flash, the neighs Hal, Canary and Superman). Zatanna says she refuses to do it again though, and tells Hawkman, "For the good of the League... ...take me off the reserve list. I quit."

She teleports herself to Themyscira, where she briefly chats at the then-new, recently rebooted Supergirl, and then has a heart to heart with Wonder Woman. There, Wondy reveals that she's now estranged from the League, and that Superman and Batman think she's a murderer, just because she killed someone. 

She essentially advises Zatanna to zap the villains' minds again, saying that just as Zee doesn't want to use her powers like that ever again, she too doesn't want to use hers to take a human life again, "But in the end... ...it might come down to that for both of us."

Meanwhile, Despero has defeated J'onn and Aquaman, and with them in his mental thrall, he next visits the Batcave, where he then mentally dominates Batman as well. His control over their minds is signified by the appearance of a third, luminescent eye on their foreheads (Catwoman, trying to fight off Batman, scratches his cowl just so, ripping it to reveal his third eye under it).

Part five! 

Superman, Flash and the others arrive in the Batcave to duke it out with Despero's pawns (The best part? Hawkman bashing Batman over the head with his grandfather clock, shouting "Wake up!"). Red Tornado, who Batman has been putting together in his spare time, gets the same surprise splash entrance that Aquaman just had in the previous issue, but it's not enough to tun turn the tide. (Say, how come Batman is able to fix Reddy in a day or two with a screwdriver and the tools of the Batcave, but, in the pages of Justice League Unlimited, the team has yet to fix his body after he was "killed" during Absolute Power...?)

Zatanna, who reappears and shouts, "Orepsed-- --POTS!" is enough, though. 

She freezes Despero in place, banishes his influence over her friends' minds, and then disappears again, lingering only long enough to sass Hawkman and Batman.

As Batman tells the assembled heroes that they can show themselves out, J'onn and Superman broach the subject of the League. 

Hal Jordan decides to chime in.

The League? 

I don't know about you, Superman, but from what I've just seen...?

...There is no League.

Or if there is...this isn't it.

No shit, Hal. That's because it's not 1983.

But Hal continues to Hal-Jordan on to J'onn J'onnz, who had interrupted him.:

Now Batman's quit.

Wonder Woman's not coming back.

Arthur, Ollie, Dinah, Red Tornado and I haven't been members in years.

And Carter works with the J.S.A.

As of now, the League is you, John Stewart, Wally, and Superman.

Okay, a couple of things here. Hal is, obviously, wrong. Of course, he's been dead for years and his ghost playing host to a divine force of vengeance, so maybe we can't blame him too much for getting a few things wrong, but the fact that no one corrects him is a little weird.

True, Arthur had disappeared from the League after his death during Our Worlds At War and, after his resurrection, he took some time off, so that he was absent from the team between 2001's JLA #54 and 2004's #106, but those of us who had been reading JLA know that we just saw him on the team in the preceding story arc, "Syndicate Rules."

Ollie was on the team between 2002's JLA #69 and 2003's #76, serving as part of Batman's Nightwing-lead contingency League that served while the main team was time-lost in the ancient past, and he then joined the black ops team in Justice League Elite, serving with the Justice League offshoot between 2004 and 2005, and shown siding with the JLA at the climax of the series. 

Also, I know I've said this before, but you (and by "you" I mean Hal Jordan, as well as the writers and editors) forgot Plastic Man.

These are things that people actually reading JLA in 2005 would have known, and it's weird that the writers and/or editors didn't seem to. 

As the book winds down, Wally says that he needs some time away from the team too, mentioning the birth of his twins, and Superman basically ducks responsibility for the team, telling J'onn, "You've managed to rebuild the team more than once...And when you do, I'll be there."

Meanwhile, as Wonder Woman seemed to intimate, Zatanna does indeed make the Society forget the Leaguers' identities, with as "Uoy LLIW Tegrof!"; J'onn visits Batman in the cave and we find out exactly why Zatanna and the others messing with the minds of villains might have pissed him off so much, as he reminds us that Catwoman  was part of an incarnation of the Secret Society and that he "thought she'd changed, but... ...Maybe it wasn't her choice";  and then we see J'onn before a monitor full of headshots on the Watchtower, John Stewart's head appearing in a an apparently ring-conjured GL symbol, his voice coming through it in green dialogue bubbles.

Oddly, given that John has been the team's Green Lantern for the last 43 issues, this is his only appearance in this story about the League reacting to the fallout of Identity Crisis and breaking up. He appears in just two panels and speaks about four sentences of dialogue.

Anyway, if you're curious about such things, the headshots J'onn is considering belong to Zauriel, the late Blue Beetle, Nightwing, Vixen, Fire, Gypsy, Metamorpho, Huntress, Booster Gold, Hawkgirl, Animal Man and the brand-new Firestorm (Meltzer also killed the Ronnie Raymond version of the character in the pages of Identity Crisis).

John is in the middle of suggesting Vixen when J'onn becomes distracted marking Blue Beetle deceased. He then rattles off references to the events of The OMAC Project, Villains United, The Rann/Thanagar War and Day of Vengeance. Then the computer recognizes Superman, and J'onn turns to face someone in a red cape. 

And then the Watchtower explodes in a big KROOOM that fills the final page. A little tag at the bottom reads "Not The End..."

I know I've basically just been summarizing the plot and complaining about elements of the writing. I should note that, despite all those complaints, the book looks good, both inside and out. 

Obviously, Morales' covers are great; I don't think I've ever seen less than stellar artwork from Morales, going back to when I first encountered it, in the pages of 1989 DC/TSR series Forgotten Realms. 

Batista is now slouch, either. The story basically treats its characters like action figures that Johns and Heinberg are playing with, and Batista follows suit. All of the various characters he draws, almost all of whom are superheroes or supervillains, are all big and muscular and usually in the act of posing, but Batista manages to sell the images of them as compelling, and he similarly succeeds in making them seem fluid, alive and emotive. 

Sure, some of the posing is a bit cheesy—Aquaman attacking Despero and then, rather than bracing for a counterattack, standing there with his arms crossed struck me as particularly odd—but Batista manages a decent amount of character work. Like Garney in the previous arcs, I could certainly see him as a worthy artist for a JLA ongoing. 

But, obviously, JLA wasn't going to be doing too much more going-on. 

As for where this story picks up, well, there is, of course, one more arc in the title, "World Without a Justice League". That follows Green Arrow and Justice League Elite's Manitou Dawn as they battle The Key and react to the events of Infinite Crisis. But for the actual resolution regarding the attack on the Watchtower and J'onn, and what becomes of guy doing the attacking, and what happens next to our heroes, well that story is actually told in Infinite Crisis. The next (and final) arc of JLA doesn't really address any of that.

"Crisis of Conscience" is collected in 2006's JLA Vol. 18: Crisis of Conscience, 2012's The Infinite Crisis Omnibus and 2017's JLA Vol.  9.

Next: Bob Harras, Tom Deranick and Dan Green's "World Without a Justice League" from 2005-2006's JLA #120-125.

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.