BOUGHT:
The book features what we usually call "The Detroit League", a run of the book following "The Satellite Era," wherein Leaguers Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Elongated Man and Zatanna founded a new iteration of the team with brand-new characters Vibe and Gypsy, plus Steel, a new legacy version of a rather obscure character, and Vixen, who had at that time only had a pair of appearances prior to joining up.
That team officially launched in 1984's Justice League of America Annual #2 and started appearing in the main title with issue #233. The Return's first issue is #241 though, so it skips the annual and the first eight issues of this new (and ultimately short-lived) League's adventures.
Gerry Conway would script most of these issues, with J.M. DeMatteis coming in with issue #255 and writing the series' last issues. George Tuska penciled the first three issues herein, Joe Staton the fourth and then Luke McDonnell would take over for the rest of the run (The collection also includes JLoA Annual #3, a Crisis crossover written by Dan Mishkin and pencilled by Rick Hoberg, and an issue of Infinity, Inc. by Roy and Dann Thomas and some kid named Todd McFarlane).
The line-up would prove pretty stable. Aquaman leaves the team about three issues into this collection, Batman joins it as its new leader in #250, and Zatanna and Elongated man both leave around the start of the final story arc.
Over the course of the comics collected in this volume, the team would come into contact with old Justice League villains like Amazo, The Lord of Time, Professor Ivo and Despero (he in a storyline that explains how the fin on his head went from front-facing to sideways, I guess), as well as some formulation of the Tornado Tyrant entity that apparently lives inside Red Tornado's android body.
New threats include an alien plant creature that feeds off of lifeforce, a yuppy cult leader named Adam who wants to steal Zatanna's magical powers and Earth-2's Infinity, Inc, which is lead into battle against them by Steel's grandfather, Commander Steel, originally a war-time hero created by Conway in 1978 for a series set in the 1940s (and, according to DC's cosmology, on Earth-2; it gets needlessly complicated, but is apparently here he is a native of Earth-2 who crossed over into Earth-1, where he lived most of his life, and helped build his grandson into a super-strong cyborg hero).
These issues actually span Crisis on Infinite Earths, and despite a few minor tie-ins—Steel being shunted to the far-flung future for a one-issue adventure during which he gets a new, open-haired cowl, and what basically amounts to a "red skies" annual—nothing about the book really changes. It's last four-issue arc, "The End of The Justice League", ties into the Legends crossover event, though, and that crossover series seems to have had a much bigger impact on the team and title, as it ends the original JLoA series and leads into the DeMatteis and Keith Giffen's new, revamped team.
Perhaps the most fun stories collected here are those in which the "old" League teams up with the new. There's that annual, in which the Satellite HQ plunges from space, Red Tornado's body is destroyed and his mind and tornado innards cause worldwide problems that eventually need to be addressed by not only the official team, but also Superman, Green Arrow, Black Canary and Firestorm. Batman and a few of his Outsiders also put in an appearance.
Later, for the anniversary issue #250, Batman, Superman, Green Arrow and Green Lantern Hal Jordan answer a distress signal from their old, original Secret Sanctuary base, and end up teaming up with the new League (after which Batman agrees to stay on as new leader).
I enjoyed seeing the disparate heroes share panel space and occasionally butt heads, particularly the hot-headed old guy Green Arrow and the hot-headed new guy Vibe.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for me (I had previously only read a handful of issues featuring this iteration of the League, mostly from those earlier ones not collected here) was that the so-called "Detroit League" wasn't actually in Detroit that long.
In issue #246, the original Steel, old man Henshaw, kicks the team out of their Detroit HQ, and they all decide to move to New York City (where Vixen and Zatanna both have their own apartments already), while they headquarter their team in the Secret Sanctuary...which is actually a pretty decent drive and/or flight from NYC (Though it's supposed to be located near Happy Harbor, Rhode Island, Conway's narration repeatedly places it in the hills just outside of Metropolis).
Given that this collection skips the earlier issues, then, the Detroit League is only actually in Detroit for about 200 pages of this 580-page collection, spending the rest of their time between NYC and wherever in New England the Secret Sanctuay is. (I may be misremembering, but wasn't Metropolis thought to be in Delaware at this point...?)
Historically, this team gets a lot of grief and, I suppose, were one looking at it from the outside, it sure might seem like the nadir of the Justice League. Certainly, if I had never read any DC comics and you had somehow lined up, say, every Justice League comic ever published before me, these issues aren't the ones I would have gravitated towards first, and I might even save them for last (Although the Hal Jodan-led Justice League International circa 1993-1994 doesn't look so great based on its covers, either).
But reading them today? They are fine comics. I liked them well enough, and reading through this big, fat collection of them never felt like a drag or work to me. They're certainly quite well-drawn and well-told, and though I know this iteration is somewhat notorious and some of the characters (well, just Vibe, maybe) are regarded as jokes now, I found the book rather engaging, the new characters an attribute, feeling fresh after the last few decades of barely-changing "Big Seven" line-ups.
I certainly admire the audacity of Conway (and/or his editors) here, taking a look at the Justice League book and thinking, "Well, let's get rid of, say, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and The Flash and replace them with these new guys I created and no one has ever heard of." (Conway had co-created Vixen and a Steel before this book, while Vibe and Gypsy seem created specifically for it).
I was curious to note that the table of contents included a little paragraph reading, "The comics reprinted in this volume were produced at a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously. They are presented here without alteration for historical reference."
I noticed it in the DC Finest collections of Golden Age comics I've read, those featuring Plastic Man and the Justice Society of America, which, yeah, certainly contained some pretty hideous caricatures of Black folks, Chinese and Japanese people, Native Americans and so on. I was a little surprised to see it here, though, given that these comics are from the 1980s.
I wonder if that appears in all of the DC Finest collections, or if it is something of a tacit admission that naming one of the new heroes after an ethnic group after a slur for an ethnic group in Gypsy wasn't a very good idea (UPDATE: Thanks to Jacob T. Levy for pointing out that important distinction in the comments below), and/or that the portrayal of Vibe wasn't...well, it wasn't always the most enlightened.
Now, I'm a middle-aged white, cis, heterosexual man, so I'm hardly the person to ask, but I didn't think Vibe was too much of a caricature here. Yes, he adheres to the "hot-blooded" Latin stereotype, but he didn't speak in an offensive dialect as I had heard (and/or remembered), although maybe that was in the earliest issues...? And, given the character's reputation, I was actually expecting him to be much more cringe-inducing than he ended up being.
While Conway and company obviously weren't the best comics creators to give the Justice League its first Hispanic superhero, it does seem that their hearts were in the right place at the time, and I think it's cool that, at this point, DC and some of its creators were at least trying to make their superhero line-up more representative of the real world (Not only was Vibe the first Hispanic Justice Leaguer and one of the first who wasn't a white or green person, but this iteration also gave us the first Black Justice Leaguer in the form of Vixen, and, in the early issues at least, there's another black character who is League adjacent and goes into action against Amazon with them, Dale Gunn). (Also, I think it's to be appreciated that Conway and company had created Vibe and Vixen out of whole cloth as new and original heroes, rather than trying to diversify the DCU through legacy characters, which is still a too-common practice, I think.)
DC obviously didn't see much potential in Vibe or Steel though, as DeMatteis killed them both off in the last story arc, making them the very first Justice Leaguers to die in the line of duty (And, somewhat remarkably, they both more or less stayed dead in the decades since, decades during which the completely superfluous Jason Todd and Barry Allen got resurrected, the occasional appearance as a ghost or Black Lantern zombie aside...although the New 52 era did introduce a rebooted Vibe...not sure if he's alive, dead or in continuity at this point or not, though).
I can't help but wonder if Vibe and Steel would have been killed off had Conway continued to write the series, given that they were his creations. Similarly, I wonder why Vixen and Gypsy were spared. Were they thought of as more viable characters with a fair degree of unrealized potential, or did DC think it would be bad to kill off female heroes?
The pair did end up with futures with the League, of course. Gypsy later joined Booster Gold's team The Conglomerate and reunited with J'onn in the pages of Justice League Task Force, regularly appearing in its first few years featured rotating teams of specialists and then, in 1994's #0 issue, she joined the new, stable team that starred in the title and stayed with them until the end of the series in 1996 (That's run that could use a collection, by the way; so far DC has only collected the first few issues of Justice League Task Force). Gypsy, like most of DC's female heroes, also teamed with the Birds of Prey at one point.
As for Vixen, she officially re-joined the Justice League in 2006's Justice League of America (after having rejoined J'onn and Gypsy in Justice League Task Force #7-8, probably the weirdest story of that series). She also worked with the Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey.
As for the cover image, I have no idea from where it was taken. It's not the cover of any of the comics collected within this trade, nor is it a splash. Batman and Aquaman's tenure on the League never overlapped, and The Atom doesn't appear in the book at all. It's an...interesting choice though, excluding as it does Gypsy, Vibe and Steel. (UPDATE: In a reply on Bluesky, Kurt Busiek pointed out that it was Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez's art, and by searching his name plus "Justice League" and "Vixen", I found that it was apparently taken from a wraparound cover for 2017's JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE DETROIT ERA OMNIBUS. As for where Gypsy, Vibe and Steel are, they are all in the foreground of the half of the picture that would have been on the back cover of the omnibus, along with a handful of "old" Justice Leaguers, like Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and Green Lantern. It looks like that omnibus was even more than complete, too, as not only did it contain all the relative JLoA issues, but it also had much later comics featuring that iteration of the team, like a JLA CLASSIFIED arc and a DC RETROACTIVE special.)
Having now read the first trade paperback collection, which includes the first five issues of the new series, I'm not entirely sure.
Regardless of the latter, it is certainly the former. Apparently inspired by the 2004-2006 animated series from which it takes its name, Justice League Unlimited features the biggest Justice League line-up ever, apparently comprised of just about every superhero in the DC Universe, even characters who are aleady on different teams, like The Titans and The Justice Society, whom we are told in the first issue have their own headquarters within the gigantic satellite base the new mega-team operates out of.
Those characters at the core? The expected Justice Leaguer heroes, really.
That's hardly a comprehensive list, of course. Waid has written himself the ultimate toybox comic and fills its pages with more heroes than your average crossover event series. It's sure to be appealing to pretty much any DC comic fan. Certainly, the world's biggest Tuatara fan will be over the moon to see him appear in a panel, and good news Thunderlord fans! Your boy gets multiple panels in this collection!
All that said, is it a story?
But it all feels a bit unfocused, with no real point-of-view character or regular cast (Airwave acts as POV character for a bit, but only for the first issue/chapter, really, and he then comes and goes like all the other characters, though Waid regularly checks in on him).
Of course, that might be because it is still in progress, the last issue collected within ending with a cliffhanger reveal identifying the villains (Which I will spoil in a bit, so quit reading if you don't want to be spoiled). This is, therefore, very much part one of a story, rather than a whole story, and I think that's a mistake when it comes to kicking off a new title with such a new and different premise as this one.
Just as The Flash is giving Airwave (and readers) a whirlwind tour of the new Watchtower in the opening pages, Superman is leading a team against a bunch of War Wheels devastating South Africa, while Batman and his old Brave and the Bold cartoon ally Blue Bettle Jaime Reyes are investigating what turns out to be a Parademon breeding ground in Costa Rica.
Later, the Amazon rainforest is in danger of being burnt down (um, at a larger scale and at a quicker pace than it is in danger of being bunt down in real life, I guess), which requires a squadron of magic users to go into battle (Zatanna! Xanthe Zhou! John...Constanine...? Does he have a Justice League membership card too...? And if you think that's weird and unexpected, wait until Tefe Holland shows up).
The villains behind it all—well, behind most of it; I assume the Parademon business is part of the bigger, line-wide story about Darkseid being dead-ish—are mysterious hooded figures who call themselves "Inferno" and seem familiar with the League, even if the Leaguers don't seem to know who they are.
Well, a Legion of Doom, anyway. Based on some of the characters we get a glimpse of—Scarecrow, Captain Cold, Bizarro—and the familiar black domed structure rising from a swamp, it seems to be a version that hews closely to that of the old Super Friends cartoon.
This one comes courtesy of writer Tate Brombal, a relative newcomer whose previous credits include DC's Green Lantern Dark and work for Dark Horse and Boom Studios (none of which I've ever read), and artist Takeshi Miyazawa, whose work I've seen and enjoyed off and on since 2000's Sidekicks (notably, if I saw the interior art here without credits, I likely wouldn't have recognized it as his).
Brombal certainly seems to have done his homework on the character. Throughout the course of the story, it's clear he seems to be trying his best to honor Cassandra's whole history, as confused and contradictory as too much of it has been, due to terrible editorial decisions (like her "One Year Later" heel turn) and attempts to retcon them into something logical (like, um, this). He certainly seems to be operating under the "Everything Happened" rubric.
There's even a panel in which Shiva rattles off the number of different identities Cassandra has used in her relatively short career, and "Kasumi", which seems to indicate that Brombal has even read Justice League Elite, a very good 2004-2005 title that I feel has kinda been unjustly forgotten because of when it was published, and that maybe a lot Cassandra Cain fans might miss due to the secret nature of her role in it (Which I guess I am kinda indirectly spoiling here, but, in my defense, it has been 20 years now!).
The story, as the subtitle likely suggests to you already, involves Batgirl's mother, the assassin and (probably*) the world's greatest fighter, Lady Shiva. The book opens with the two of them in a tense meeting in a Gotham City building, Shiva having come to Cass to tell her of a terrible peril that they need to flee together.
Apparently, there is an order of killers called The Unburied, a literally underground society, who have targeted Shiva for some offense against them, and, since Cass is Shiva's daughter, she too is on their hitlist. The Unburied are basically presented as your standard issue '80s action movie or superhero comic book group of ninjas, although, somewhat refreshingly, they are outfitted in blue costumes, rather than the more customary black and red (Mike Spicer colors Miyazawa's art, though the color choice might have been Brombal's, given that it ties into an aspect of the plot that will eventually come out).
They attack by page six, and Cass and Shiva will fight running battles with them throughout this volume, as they try to make their way to a train out of town (Um, is a train really the best way to travel when pursued by ninjas in 2025?), meet some unlikely allies (some extant DC characters, some who seem new) and are ultimately taken captive.
Her thoughts tend to have a lot of ellipses, as does her spoken dialogue, which is terse and reserved, sometimes with odd word choices.
His other innovation regards the Order of Shiva, a death cult that worships Shiva and appeared in Cass' original ongoing series, which Bombal presents as something of a civic organization that also does a lot of good, not just a group of fighters obsessed with a death-dealing killer.
In structure, it's basically a sort of chase, with Shiva trying to evacuate Batgirl and the Order from Gotham, the Unburied ninjas on their heels. Eventually, they capture Shiva, Batgirl mounts a rescue and gets captured herself, and then they try to escape. Pretty simple, really, but well told, character-focused and gradual in its reveal of key details.
The problem, and there is one, is that Cassandra often seems to make some inexplicable decisions, presumably for the needs of the plot, and Brombal doesn't manage to justify them in such a way to mask them, so that Cassandra sometimes seems reckless, cowardly and kinda dumb.
The first of these comes in the second issue. Having just been told she can't go to Batman and her Bat-family without risking their lives (and, obviously, warping the story Brombal wants to tell, and turning it into a Batman story instead), Cass instead leads to Shiva to a group of civilians she knows, wherein Shiva can have what looks like a relatively minor arrow wound stiched up.
The civilians are an older Vietnamese woman Cass calls "Ba Bao", who runs a restaurant, and her grandsons (Ba Bao, in her age, relationship with Cass and profession, reminded me a bit of Jackie from Sarah Kuhn and Nicole Goux's 2020 original graphic novel Shadow of the Batgirl). Apparently, Cass is friends with them, and trades martial arts training for the grandsons in exchange for food, and training in Ba Bao's own martial art, Vovinam.
The character is interesting, her conversation with Shiva important but, naturally, the Unburied attack, and though the restauranteers can and do fight, they are all seemingly killed, and Shiva flees with an injured Cass...who she takes to her Order on the train, who have their own healer among them and, obviously, could have handled stitching Shiva's wound himself.
Long story short, if Cass isn't willing to endanger her circle of superhero friend with ninja attack, why endanger the folks at the restaurant?
Later, Cass spots a ninja from Ras al Ghul's League of Shadows, and attacks, leading to a five-page fight sequence which, sure, looks cool, but it turns out the League are actually Shiva's allies against the mutual threat of The Unburied here, as Shiva tries to explain during the fight and Cass, who we know can read people's intentions like a book, ignores her (and her own reading, I guess?) to fight them.
Finally, at the book's end, Shiva tells Cassandra to flee The Unburied while she holds them all off, seemingly sacrificing her life against, like, ten guys to allow Cass to escape, shouting cryptic orders that will be rather suggestive to DC fans and will likely pay off in the next arc, like, "Go and find the Bronze Tiger...He's the only one who can help you now...Find Benajmin Turner! Ask him about-- --The Jade Tiger!"
Again, this seems to happen because the plot dictated it must; Brombal didn't really sell me on Shiva deciding she need to fight them in order to buy Cass time to escape, that she was really in mortal danger, or that Cass would flee and abandon Shiva (or anyone) to sacrifice themselves for her.
I suppose this is meant to evoke the scene in Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's "Batman: Year One", where Batman escapes the SWAT team that has him cornered under cover of a flock of bats. Of course, Batman did that with a special high-tech device he had developed. How did Batgirl do it here? No idea, and if she had just, like, through some rocks at the bats shown in the stalactites above her and like yelled at them to get them to fly where she wanted them, well Brombal doesn't show it (Presumably because doing so wouldn't be as dramatic).
It includes four different stories drawn by four different artists. Only two of those stories are connected to each other. And only two of them are written by Waid who, given how busy original artist Dan Mora is drawing other stuff around the line, is at this point the only creator whose work one really expects to see when picking up an issue of this series.
The first and biggest of the stories is "Shadows Fall", a three-parter pitting the Satellite Era Justice League against Eclipso, drawn by artist Adrian Gutierrez. I'm afraid I had some trouble reading this one, as it failed to really engage me, raising a bunch of questions that I felt like I should know.
Now, I never read the original 1960s Eclipso comics from House of Secrets, even though DC did conveniently collect them in 2007's Showcase Presents: Eclipso (Which, like all of the Showcase Presents volumes I failed to buy, I now regret missing out on). My familiarity with the character, and the various rules by which he operates, thus come from the Eclipso: The Darkness Within storyline that ran through DC's 1992 annuals (which I would love to see a complete collection of!) and the short-lived Eclipso ongoing that followed it.
Meanwhile on Earth Bruce Gordon has become possessed by Eclipso (I think?), but not really Eclipsed...? At least, not in the traditional sense...? Rather, Eclipso had manipulated him into grabbing the black diamond's "golden twin", which seems to also make Gordon evil...and give him light powers...? (Colorist Tamra Bonvillain gives both Gordon and Eclispo swirling auras of light shaped a bit like the symbol of the atom, the former's yellow and the latter's purple, which they can use like weapons).
Together, Gordon and Eclipso down the League satellite, trap the League, Eclipse Superman and Batman and then go about enacting a plan to down the rest of the world's satellites in a bid to plunge the world into chaos.
Gutierrez's art is a rather sharp departure from that of Mora. It's a lot more expressive, and the characters are more exaggerated and a bit more cartoony, which is fine, that's just the style. I think it lacked clarity at several points though, thanks to a couple panels in which the artist seemed to be taking shortcuts (And, as mentioned above, there were a few points upon which I wasn't sure what exactly was happening).
For example, multiple times throughout the issues the heroes are shown in long shot, reduced to silhouettes. Sometimes this seems like an artistic effect, and sometimes it seems like an excuse to not have to draw them (Take Red Tornado's entrance into the JSA brownstone, for example, or the weird scene where an Eclipsed Batman seems to be...bouncing the bat-signal like a dodgeball on the roof of Gotham Police HQ, maybe, and various indistinct muscular figures jump around, apparently the JSA diving out of the way...?)
Also, Gutierrez repeats one panel, in which Eclipso looks up and laughs maniacally, in two different issues. Poor form, Gutierrez! (At least the artist draws the bat-symbol correctly, though, rather than drawing the Batman '89 one that Mora always puts on Batman's chest in this series...!)
It's a Batgirl/Jimmy Olsen team-up then, with each family's dog playing a big role.
It's a pretty fun story, of course, but it took me a while to get used to the art, given the coloring's somewhat garish, airbrush look and the computerized backgrounds behind the figures.
The first, "Livin' Free", is drawn by artist Lucas Meyer, colored by Marcelo Maiolo and finds the title heroes on a road trip (A road trip? Or the road trip? Unclear). They're attacked by Deathstroke the Terminator, who neither has ever mat at this point, although fans will recognize him immediately, even if he is given a new/old costume here, one that's basically a gray and black version of the one George Perez designed for him, minus the more dramatic elements, like chainmail and pirate boots.
Deathstroke has apparently been contracted to kill Team Green and he tries to do so. He comes close, but the heroes hunt him down and almost defeat and capture
The art in the Flash story is much brighter than that of the lead story, and has a more comic book-y, drawn look than that of the GL/GA one, which tended toward the photo-realistic in a way that struck me as unnatural looking...but then, I do tend to have old-fashioned tastes when it comes to superhero comic book art.
It ends with Deathstroke escaping again, and a somewhat cheeky box in the last panel reading "The story continues in The New Teen Titans #2, Dec. 1980." (Say, does this help us further narrow down the exact time in which World's Finest is set? Since Firestorm has appeared in its pages, we know it has to be after March of 1978, and this suggests that it's before December of 1980, so I guess that gives us a pretty good ballpark.)
Rather than a single epic adventure to fight their way through the tower, the kingdom's military has been engaged in a long and protracted military campaign to conquer it, advancing and retreating through its levels, and sustaining quite visible injuries...and enough casualties that they have taken to drafting soldiers from the surrounding villages.
One such draftee is Yuva, a brave and quite strong farm boy with no military experience.
I don't know that I've got a good sense of what Nihei is attending here, given how straightforward the basic plot and premise is and how different the designs are, but I'm curious enough to pick up the next volume.
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