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.
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.
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