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.