Satellite Era Spotlight: Justice League of America #147

Justice League of America #147 (1977); “Crisis In the 30th Century!” by Paul Levitz, Martin Pasko, Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin


Let’s see, the JLoA, JSoA and LoSH…Gee, I wonder if Brad Meltzer and Geoff Johns have read this issue?

Regardless, you just know this is going to be an exciting story, and not just because there are three teams of heroes within, but because it’s broken up into chapters, and each one of them has an exclamation point in its name!


Chapter 1: “Terror of the Time Plunderer!”

On the Justice League satellite, we find a few members of the Justice Society, who are about ready to return home to Earth-Two with Psycho-Pirate in tow.









See kids, this is why they collapsed the Multiverse in the first place.

Any time you need more than one panel full of text explaining which dimension a story is taking place in, it’s officially too confusing. That goes quadruple for explanations requiring a drawing of a giant hand halting the reader.


The heroes from the two teams do a little bonding, and that bonding is awfully damn creepy, at least when it comes to Power Girl and Superman:



Like, they’re still cousins, right? Even if from alternate universes?


Before Power Girl and Superman can make a mistake they’ll both regret, they and the rest of their assembled teammates are whisked away to the year 2977, by the power of Mordru, back when his wardrobe was less Matrix and more disco-meets-Dungeons & Dragons.




Meanwhile, back in 1977, the Joker attacks a ringmaster with a blowgun, in an attempt to get a little payback for being turned down from a job as a clown at the circus.





You know, that must be the most roundabout way to stop the Joker ever. Once they figured that he was the Joker, why not, oh, call the police?

(On the subject of Delicious Hostess Fruit Pies, after reading a half-dozen or so of these ads in the course of my Satellite Era back issue reading, I went out and bought a Hostess Cherry Pie because I haven’t had one in…well, at least a decade, maybe two. They’re not really that good. I mean, they’re okay, and probably worth the buck oh five they cost, but the “real fruit filling” didn’t taste all that real to me, nor did the tender crust seem especially tender. I call bullshit on these ads.)

When the heroes try to go all Lilliputian on Mordru’s ass,



he captures them in the Gloden Globe of Transkalla, and has them at his mercy. So, naturally, he decides to tell them all an exposition-filled story about his plot to use the fabled bell, wheel and jar to summon the Demons Three and steal their powers and blah blah blah.

Originally he captured some Legionnaires in an attempt to force the rest of the Legion to go out and acquire the artifacts for him, but they failed. So now he sticks Black Canary and Green Arrow in a giant hourglass and sends the rest of the Justice teams out to succeed where the Legionnaires had failed. Which brings us to…


Chapter 2: “Crisis on a Cosmic Quest!”

So, just how annoying is Legion continuity?



Even Hawkman finds it annoying to think about it, and that guy’s been rebooted exactly as many times as the Legion.

So, those Wheel People Hawks mentioned? They’re some primitive shapechangers who have found the Wheel of Nyorlath (recently seen in 52 disguised as a wheelchair wheel) and, being primitives, decided to worship it and transform themselves to resemble it.

They’d also totally captured Sun Boy (who really looks as if he should be going by Sun Man now…he looks, like, 35 at least) and Wildfire, who could easily escape, but not without inadvertently killing some wheel people, so they had no choice but to remain hostages forever.

Good thing Dr. Fate and Superman tricked the Wheel People into worshipping fireworks, rescued the Legionnaires and absconded with the wheel.

Meanwhile, on the planet Vaxon, Batman and the two GLs find a species of giant space dragons hovering around the outer atmosphere, apparently too scared of the “Bonng”-ing sound of the magical Green Bell of Uthool to descend.

Brainiac and Princess Projectra have been negotiating with the Vaxonites to acquire the bell, but they’re using it to scare off the space dragons, and won’t part with it.

Luckily, Batman has a plan:



"In fact, I know one you guys can have! Just give us a minute to pop back to Earth and get Dr. Crane out of his cell in Arkham!"

No, actually the plan is to have the GLs create gigantic sculpting tools to terraform the entire planet into the shape of a Xanthor, the space-dragons’ only natural predator, thus scaring them off permanently, so the Vaxonites no longer need the bell.

This, by the way, is the origin of the term “a plan so crazy it just might work.”

And what's a Xanthor look like? Like this:



I'm almost positive I've seen one on the side of a cabinet of an arcade game at the roller rink when I was eight-years-old.

So that was Chapter 3: “For What the Bell Tolls…”

The final errand occurs in Chapter 4: “The Final Errand!” for which The Flash (original flavor) and Power Girl go into interdimensional limbo and encounter some frog people things to get the jar.

With the artifacts finally his, Mordru performs his ritual and releases the Demons Three, who turn on him and seek to destroy the artifacts, leaving them free forever to rule the world:



But I don’t have that next issue. So I guess I’ll never know if the Demons Three ended up killing all the good guys or not.