The "JLA" branding actually continued for a few years after the series ended, thanks to JLA Classified. Launched in January of 2005, around the same time that Kurt Busiek and Ron Garney's "Syndicate Rules" arc was starting in the main title, the secondary JLA book was intended to be an anthology series giving rotating creative teams a chance to tell Justice League stories that weren't necessarily bound to the month-in, month-out continuity.
The title started strong, with Grant Morrison returning for the first arc, in which he was paired with pencil artist Ed McGuinness for a sequel to Morrison's own JLA #24-26. He was immediately followed by the former "JLI" era team of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, returning to their "Super Buddies" concept from their 2003 miniseries Formerly Known as the Justice League. And their arc was then followed by one written by the then still popular, not-yet-disgraced Warren Ellis.
While creators with sizable fanbases would continue to show up for the remainder of the book's run, including the likes of John Byrne, Howard Chaykin, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Dan Jurgens and Gail Simone, the tile seemed to grow increasingly less relevant. Its final issue was 2008's #54. Only a handful of its arcs ever ended up making it into trade paperback collections.
Whatever the exact provenance of its various arcs—specifically commissioned for the book, inventory stories, repurposed miniseries—it was always clear that Classified was the B-title of the two.
The actual, official, totally-in-continuity Justice League would return with their own book in September of 2006 in the pages of Justice League of America #0, published just a few months after the last issue of JLA and, perhaps more importantly, the last issue of event series Infinite Crisis, which reset DC's superhero line (and tinkered with its continuity a bit).
The new Justice League series, which was using the Justice League of America title for the first time since 1987, was written by Identity Crisis' Brad Meltzer, pencilled by Ed Benes and inked by Sandra Hope.
It broke rather sharply from the "Big Seven" formula that powered JLA. Sure, the new line-up featured Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Flash, but that was it of the core JLA team. They were joined by former Leaguers Black Canary, Red Tornado, Vixen and Green Lantern Hal Jordan. Also joining the team were former Outsiders Black Lightning and Geo-Force, the JSA's Hawkgirl Kendra Saunders and former Titan Roy Harper, who changed his codename from Arsenal to Red Arrow for the occasion (ala Kingdom Come).
Most notably missing was probably J'onn J'onnz, who had been in one Justice League or another for at least the previous 20 years, as well as Aquaman, who had been on the team throughout much of JLA (disappearing for a while when he was temporarily dead, and then taking a sabbatical after his resurrection) and John Stewart, the team's Green Lantern for the last three years. Oh, and Plastic Man, who was on the League for the previous eight years or so (a short sabbatical during Joe Kelly's run aside). (I've never reread Metlzer's run—it wasn't very good the first time around, to be honest—and now I can't remember if, when putting the team together, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman offered rationales for why some of their long-time teammates weren't included.)
While it certainly wasn't the League I would have put together in 2006, it was at least an interesting line-up. I was thrilled to see Black Lightning finally on the team, for example. And Wonder Woman was joined by three other women (one of whom, Vixen, was also Black, so neither she nor Black Lightning seemed like a token character). And there was certainly some interesting potential in Roy, like Wally West before him, essentially "graduating" from the Titans to the Justice League.
Not that Meltzer would stick around long to do anything with the characters, though. And his line-up didn't last all that much longer than he did.
Meltzer only wrote the first 13 issues of the series (all of which were essentially one big story arc, devoted to assembling his new team, a crossover with the Geoff Johns-written Justice Society of America falling in the middle of it), and then he left the title.
Meltzer was replaced by Dwayne McDuffie, a comics writer and editor who had been working on DC's animated shows, including the Justice League one, and was thus probably an even better "get" for people who might actually read a Justice League comic than Meltzer ever was.
McDuffie immediately started tinkering with the line-up he inherited (His first issue featured Green Lantern John Stewart, for example, and thinking about it now, I don't know if Geo-Force even ever officially joined the team or just managed to pose with the others on Alex Ross' variant for JLoA #12, above).
McDuffie stayed on through #34—missing only four issues, three scripted by Alan Burnett and another by Len Wein—for a total of 19 issues. Benes had stayed on the title through McDuffie's run, although there were obviously fill-ins. A lot of fill-ins. Joe Benitez, Rags Morales and Joe Luis each penciled two issues apiece, while Ethan Van Sciver, Carlos Pachecho, Allan Goldman, Chris Cross, Shane Davis and the team of Ardian Syaf and Eddy Barrows each drew an issue apiece.
Oh, and then there was issue #25, for which Benes was joined by five more pencil artists, presumably because it was an anniversary issue: Doug Mahnke, Darick Robertson, Shane Davis, Ivan Reis and Ian Churchill.
That is obviously a lot of pencil artists for so few issues, and I remember McDuffie's run as being particularly chaotic, with characters coming and going more quickly than ever, and the increasingly inconsistent art often being rather poor (To be fair, I didn't care for the work of "regular" artist Benes at all, either).
That chaos was apparently because of what was going on behind the scenes, as McDuffie reportedly kept finding his plans for the title thwarted, characters he might be able to use one month suddenly being off-limits the next in accordance with the goings-on of other comics (Last-minute changes to his plots and scripts would certainly help explain all those guest artists). (I suppose one could speculate as to why McDuffie seemed to get none of the same deference Meltzer did in terms of his plans for the book, given that the latter seemed to have a greenlight to do whatever he wanted in Identity Crisis and his 13 issues of JLoA, but maybe we shouldn't get into that here.)
After McDuffie's final issue, Wein returned for a three-issue fill-in arc drawn by Tom Derenick and several different inkers.
Finally, Starman and Justice League: Cry For Justice writer James Robinson came on with issue #38, and he would remain on the title until it was cancelled with 2011's #60, a total of 26 issues. He was originally paired with pencil artist Mark Bagley and inker Rob Hunter, who drew 15 of Robinson's first 16 issues (only needing a single fill-in, wherein pencil artists Pow Rodrix and Robson Rocha split duties for an issue).
Bagley and Hunter were then followed by the team of Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund, who drew four issues, and they in turn were followed by pencil artist Daniel Sampere, who closed out the title, drawing the last three issues of the series (one of which he got an assist from Miguel Angel Sepulveda on).
While the creative team was obviously a bit more stable for Robinson's run, the team line-up was more chaotic than ever. Robinson added some fun (and extremely unlikely) characters into the mix, like Congorilla, Starman Mikaal Tomas or Dick Grayson-as-Batman, but his line-up could and would change issue to issue. Even ones whose covers (and scripts!) seemed to promise new line-ups (like #41, for example) could see many of those characters completely disappear within the space of an issue or two.
At this point, I'm not entirely sure how long Robinson could have kept the title going, but by fall of 2011, it was a moot point anyway, as DC cancelled all of their titles for the new, rebooted (and, ultimately, temporary) continuity of "The New 52."
It included a new Justice League title, of course, this one simply called Justice League, by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Scott Williams. It resumed a "Big Seven" approach, only with Titan Cyborg replacing Martian Manhunter (J'onn was appearing instead in a new Stormwatch title, for some reason). There was obviously still a bit of chaos behind the scenes, as the book didn't always match up neatly with the continuity of other New 52 titles, some of the plans Johns mentioned in interviews never came to materialize and, if you look at one of the many covers for the first issue, you'll see characters in the background who never ended up appearing in the book (Like The Atom and Element Woman). On, and Lee drew Wonder Woman in the long black pants that were apparently supposed to be part of her new, New 52 costume, but DC ended up backing off of.
That volume lasted 52 issues (of course), sometimes overlapping with other Justice League-branded titles (a new Justice League International, a new Justice League of America, Justice League Dark, Justice League United), and has since been followed by other Justice League books (another Justice League, another Justice League of America, Justice League Odyssey), but I kind of stopped paying attention and/or caring, which "The New 52" reboot seemed to encourage me to do.
After reading the last few years of JLA and then taking a look at the series that followed it, I confess that part of me considered re-reading this volume of Justice League of America. Like those last few JLA arcs, I had only read Meltzer, McDuffie and Robinson's runs the first time around, as they were originally being released (in large part because I didn't much care for them), and I am a little curious if they read better or worse now, divorced from the context in which they were originally published, and without the weight of expectation being a factor (If I had to guess, I would imagine the Meltzer run might read a bit better, while the McDuffie and Robinson ones, which had to dance around other comics so much, probably aged particularly poorly).
I looked into my local library consortium's holdings, though, and while Meltzer's run is collected in a pair of trades, the first volume of McDuffie's is only available digitally, and I don't really want to spend the time re-reading comics I didn't like the first time around in a format I dislike. Especially since there are so many great comics out there that I've yet to read. (I'm only eleven volumes into Haruichi Furudate's Haikyu!! as I write this, for example; that means I've still got 34 volumes of it left to go!)
The latest Justice League book, Mark Waid and Dan Mora's Justice League Unlimited series, is fairly promising though...
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