Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Don't get me wrong, JLA has had some incredible high points - Steve Englehart's JLA run in the 1970s, from 140-149 being one, and Kurt Busiek's underrated, detail-packed JLA run a couple years ago is another.

But is it me, or has the concept just never worked? Ironic, since JLA's concept, of a company putting their solo heroes together in a single book, has been the most widely duplicated team idea ever, from MIGHTY CRUSADERS to the King Features DEFENDERS OF THE EARTH.

The concept of JLA is, I think, to some extent a broken, unworkable one.

In a team assembled out of characters that are teamed up from elsewhere, there are going to be problems. If you do a story with Aquaman and Batman, the story has to be contorted and twisted this way and that so that these characters can reasonably participate and contribute. Whenever the alien invaders dispatch the pods or whatever to earth, there's always ONE that hits the bottom of the sea, allowing Aquaman to justify his existence and dispatch it. Likewise, Batman has to have his one moment where he uses brains to outshine the muscle boys (which is not 100% fair to smart guys like Superman and Green Lantern).

This just isn't a problem in Aquaman's solo book, where Aquaman pretty much lives underwater and doesn't have to bother with nonsense like being useless because the League's fight against the Wizard and Icicle of Earth-2 is on land. Likewise, Batman works just fine in his detective/crimefighting context, less so when he has to fight Starro the Conqueror.

Then again, you have the other extreme. To be as blunt as possible...Superman just doesn't need the rest of the team. It is from JLA that we get nonsense like Kryptonite being annoyingly everywhere, not Superman's own books.

The JLA has never really "gelled" as a team with a solid reason for existing, because of its very concept as "the best heroes in the world." People call the Defenders the team of loners, but at least Valkyrie, Dr. Strange, and Nighthawk bonded and relied on each other. Kurt Busiek pointed out that the difference between the Avengers and JLA is that if Hawkeye or Wasp encounter trouble, they'd go around a corner and hit their Avengers Communicard. But if a JLAer had a problem, they'd try to solve it by themselves.

This "loner problem" got worse when Batman started to become a very different character than the other JLAers in terms of method and outlook. His participation was to be expected as a hero of great renown back in the Silver Age, when he had more or less the same "serve and protect" mentality as the other white male characters. Batman getting his own team in that Mike W. Barr book, BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS, was a true to life characterization...and to some extent inevitable. But because he was there at the start, writers keep roping him back in, no matter how little it makes sense.

The only members for which there was some degree of cameraderie were the characters that didn't have any other book: Green Arrow and Hawkman being rivals then friends, Black Canary and Hawkwoman as girlfriends, the Green Lantern/ Elongated Man with Sue and Barry, Zatanna, Red Tornado, and so on.

It's just you.

You can't go past the great early stories by such master writers as Gardner Fox. And I also really like the comics from the great Len Wein around the mid-70s.

I think at their best they "gelled" in this way: The mission was the thing. If Wonder Woman was feeling under-dressed, if Batman had cowl rash, if Superman was horny for Lois, if Aquaman had a water-logged ear, if Flash had corns, if Martian Manhunter had a longing for home, if Green Arrow had dry rot in the mansion, or if Green Lantern was feeling a little yellow, they didn't dwell on it. They got on with the job (and drove a great plot). Maybe they discussed all their petty problems back in the meeting room. Good writers made it work because they understood there isn't anything as unifying as a common cause.

If it Never worked, then how did they have so many incredible high points? That doesn't make any sense!

As I understand it, you're positing that a group book is stronger when the members have no great status outside of the group? 

I guess it depends on what you're looking for in a group book.  When the JLA was created, it was a place to find all of DC's heavy-hitters gathered together.  At the time, that was an exciting prospect, as it hadn't been done since the days of the JSA in All-Star (in fact, you could argue it had never been done before...even the JSA was a collection of second-stringers who, in the early days, were actually rotated out of membership if they ever got popular enough to win their own books).

If what you wanted was a place to see Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman all working together, the JLA offered a lot of bang for your buck (well, 12 cents).  It was only with the arrival of the Fantastic Four that we started seeing groups written as groups, which is to say that none of the members on his or her own was interesting enough to carry a book alone, but together they were hot stuff.  The FF, the X-Men, the Avengers and so on shaped our notions of what a group book should be (interrelationships, rivalries, romances, etc) but they all came AFTER the JLA, so I think it's apples and oranges.  The problem comes later when DC decides to emulate Marvel by introducing sub-plots involving Ollie and Dinah, Ollie and Katar, Barry and Diana, and so on.  They always felt tacked on or half-hearted.

I think the JLA was created on the assumption that what readers...kids mostly...wanted to see all the biggest stars of the company working side by side.  And history shows that it DID work.  In fact, the only points in history where the JLA stopped working were when the League was scaled back to rosters of primarily second-stringers, or in the 80s when it devolved into a sorry collection of lame-o nobodies (Vibe? Vixen? Gypsy? What the...?).  Note that even the Avengers have to keep in some combination of Cap, Thor and Iron Man to keep selling...you're one of the few people I've known who cherish the "Cap's Reform School" line-up.

Does the JLA "gel" as well as groups made of characters created just for their respective groups?  Not really.  But I think League fans read the book to see the biggest names at DC tackling the biggest threats imaginable.  If they want soap-opera romance and internal strife, they know which books to read.  Characters like Cyclops, Hawkeye, Ben Grimm and, at DC, Mon-El and Phantom Girl are among my favorites, but I wouldn't pay a nickel to see those characters outside their groups. 

To use a movie analogy, I think of the JLA like those old disaster epics, say "The Poseidon Adventure" or "Towering Inferno."  As a reader/viewer, you're wowed by the threat itself and along the way you're impressed by who shows up ("Look, there's Steve McQueen!  And Charlton Heston!  Hey, it's Fred Astaire!") It doesn't really matter whether Gene Hackman has a meaningful, revealing or insightful character scene with Shelley Winters, the point is all the big names showed up, and they're all working toward the same goal.

And there's another way to judge whether the JLA "worked." Consider: when the League debuted, everyone in the world knew who Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman were, but the Flash and Green Lantern were johnny-come-latelies, while Aquaman had never really taken off in a big way.  Yet suddenly here they are, all together in one group, treated as equals in every way.  And in short order, that's the way we all see them, too.  Yes, the JLA is a grouping of all DC's heavy hitters, but I'd argue it was the JLA book that helped MAKE Hal, Barry and Arthur into "heavy hitters."  Once we saw them in action next to Supes and Bats, we bought into the idea that they were the equal of those guys.  So in that sense, the JLA was wildly successful.

I can't argue with you about the over-use of kryptonite in the JLA stories, but on a planet that's 75% water, I think it's reasonable to assume a lot of things falling to Earth would land in the ocean.  In fact, logically any group devoted even in part to defending Earth from alien threats should have MORE water-based operatives.

Perhaps it doesn't work because the JLA has never had prose stories in its comics? Like Johnny Thunder?

Nah, I think it works. Consider, if you will, the fact that JLA comics didn't sell when they had so many second-stringers in the early 90s. Then Grant Morrison put the original members back together, and it sold like hotcakes. It worked so well that DC even shot Blue Beetle's freaking head off. Or, just consider the fact that there have been about 15 successful seasons of JLA cartoons.

In order for it to work, though, the stories do need to be self-contained and focused on the mission at hand, as was the case in All-Star Comics with the JSA. And something needs to be done about the villains...an outside threat, usually an alien, is better for the story than say, Lex Luthor and the Joker. The Legion of Doom, as a separate entity appearing only in Justice League stories, works okay too...but the JLA needs its own villains, and for the most part it has them. (like Amazo)

I've always thought the JLA headquarters should be moved to the bottom of the ocean, as a way to redeem Aquaman.

Aquaman did not become famous because of the comic, but the Super Friends TV Show. As a result, he has achieved world famous status. Everyone knows who he is! Being mention by Chris Rock in his comedy bits and being a key plot point for the HBO series Entourage. In many ways he is as much as a big of a pop hero as the big three, but his popularity ironically never translated to the comics where he came from!

There is even a whole Wiki entry on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaman_in_popular_media

Hmmm, this is an interesting point (though to be fair, Supes and Bats had a high absentee rate). It is interesting the JLA, like the Legion, where Mon-El and Bouncing Boy are side-by-side, has an interesting degree of egalitarianism.

I don't know how true this is, as I hear Green Lantern when he came out was popular (and deservedly so), but to play Devil's Advocate for a moment...what about all the characters that JLA didn't carry to glory and 7-Up glasses? The obvious one would be John Jones. He was there at the ground floor, along with Wonder Woman...yet he started out a backup character and remains to this day a backup character.


Hmmm, now that you mention it, that statement does indeed ring true. DEFENDERS struggled to find its voice until Englehart's introduction of the Valkyrie, who singlehandedly stole the show. All the memorable DEFENDERS subplots in the Gerber years were about the people that didn't have another book - Valkyrie going to jail, Nighthawk's discovery his money was funding the Sons of the Serpent, etc. I would argue that every subsequent, post-Steve Gerber version of DEFENDERS has not been successful because their emphasis is on the famous marquee names like the Hulk and Namor and the Silver Surfer...which is a more marketable, but emotionally hollow thing to do.


If you mean to say that the JLA works best when it uses large scale heroes...I agree. Though I would hardly consider Red Tornado, Zatanna, Elongated Man, and Hawkman and Hawkwoman to be anything less than first string. If they ever were less, they've earned their current place in the roster (who remembers Elongated Man being the sole JLAer remaining and beating the Lord of Time's supercomputer?). As for Vixen...well, I love what's being done with her by the current writer. She'll make first string in no time, mark my words.

I'm not certain what a good idea it was to get the original roster together. Aquaman doesn't work as a League member and despite Busiek's big fat man-crush on him, John Jones is a terminal lame-o that isn't interesting even in a team context.

I found a lot of what Morrison did interesting, but he gets entirely too much credit for doing the single most obvious thing: getting a more classic JLA roster with gravitas instead of the nonsense Giffen and his lackeys subjected us to for nigh ten years. There was some jerkhole a while back that attempted to say that the Doctor Who episode, "The Five Doctors," was his idea. Here's the thing: pairing all the Doctors together is such an obvious idea that no one single person can claim credit for it.

Anyway, with only eight issues, Kurt Busiek blew Morrison out of the water...and Mr. Silver Age did it with a JLA roster that included Power Girl, Elongated Man, and Red Tornado.


True, but that's not the whole story. Avengers has always had a Cap or Iron Man or Thor, but the characters most essential to Avengers identity are the "Cool Whip" characters you wouldn't have on their own: the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, HAWKEYE, Hank Pym, the Wasp, Wonder Man, etc.


Gardner Fox is a great writer with a deserved reputation as a legend, but I've never understood the appeal of his JLA. It brought out all of his weaknesses and none of his strengths. Fox set the precedent for the JLA not working, and every flaw I have with his run can be taken as being also true of the JLA concept in general because he's influential enough that everybody repeats his mistakes.

Len Wein's JLA was fantastic, but if you compare Fox's work here to the incredible stuff John Broome was doing in GREEN LANTERN at the same time, Fox comes up short. It isn't just the over-reliance on the JLAers respective weaknesses (must...EVERYTHING...be yellow?) or Green Lantern being responsible for just about every victory, or Wonder Woman's darn lasso "vibrating," or Superman and Batman's monstrous absenteeism (which was not Fox's fault, but still causes the work to suffer), or the unmemorability of the majority of their science fiction and magical foes...

You still are left with superheroes doing things that just don't make any sense. At least GL's victories in his book were clear. Aquaman getting a dolphin to imitate his voice, though? Man, Aquaman must have had a cold that day. I don't know...I've been trying to rationalize that one for a while now and nothing comes up.

Then you have the Mike Sekowsky artwork. In today's climate of Mike Turners and Ethan van Scivers and Jim Lees, Mike comes off as a genius. But surround him with Gil Kane, or Carmine Infantino (you know, back when he still gave a darn what his art looked like) or BRAVE AND THE BOLD-era Joe Kubert, or MYSTERY IN SPACE era Murphy Anderson, and Sekowsky comes up as the bluntest crayon in the DC comics box. While reading my JLA Essential, I actually started to warm up to Sekowsky...until in the middle, they had a MYSTERY IN SPACE issue by Carmine Infantino. After that, it was hard going back to Mike again.

My primary, central objection to the Fox work was its utter predictability. If the Flash/Atom team-up meet disaster and are captured at the hands of the Easter Island headed giants, you know that the same thing will happen to Wonder Woman and John Jones too when it's their turn. If Johnny Quick of the Crime Syndicate lost their battle with the JLA but escaped by saying "Volthoom," you know the same thing will happen in every other CSA battle.

Likewise, Fox was never successful in creating the illusion of fear. Len Wein certainly could create fear (though he was backed up by an overwhelmingly powerful villain like the Construct), but there was never a sense with Fox that the JLAers were in real danger. It's an illusion, but an important illusion a good writer can create. Broome certainly put Hal Jordan in very scary, insurmountable spots where the reader could fear for him, for instance.

Oh, and Snapper Carr is firmly in the company of Jar-Jar Binks, Wesley Crusher, and Scrappy Doo. Thanks for nothing, Fox! This is yet another reason I don't like Gerry Conway: he was responsible for "redeeming" Snapper from being Star-Tsar. Snapper as a troubled youth who blames the JLA for his inability to make sense of his life, was much more interesting than the useless halfwit Fox wrote him as. I can't fault the Tom Peyer HOURMAN for using Snapper as a good guy because the precident had been set, but was that little snot REALLY worth redeeming, Ger?

And last but not least, until Marv Wolfman's TEEN TITANS decades later, no comic jumped the shark as absolutely spectacularly as the Fox JLA. By 1967, he clearly didn't care anymore. The 1967 JLA/JSA Team-Up was especially embarassing, featuring energy spheres from another dimension that turn a man against all sports everywhere (!).


The JLA high points I'm talking about worked in spite of the concept, not because of it.

Really, I'd be hard-pressed to find a title like JLA, that is long-running, yet that has had so few truly memorable runs. MIGHTY THOR might be another such title, though people underestimate Roy Thomas and Len Wein's contributions to that book.


I disagree. These kinds of subplots are when we the reader really started to care about the characters. An old friend of mine used to say that only moment the DC heroes were ever fully three-dimensional was during the Englehart League, and his efforts to give the League warmth and complexity, as he did with his run on AVENGERS, with Ollie as a loveable bigmouth suffering from perpetual foot-in-mouth disorder, Superman as a hardassed alien looking after the League's good name, and Barry as a plain, but gentle and friendly Midwesterner. Certainly, Stanless Steve built on a foundation set by Len Wein, but he also did things even Wein didn't do.

Really, the more I think about it, the more I like the Englehart JLA because of how un-JLAish it really was: it was big and cosmic and involved battles with the Manhunters, to be sure, but it delved into the characters lives in very shocking ways. It was only in line with traditional League stories on the surface. Watching Oliver Queen and Katar Hol lean on each other and get tipsy, clearly drunk (and having their girlfriends get black coffee for them when they get the mission signal), or Superman's personality clashing with Hawkman over Hawkwoman's admission. Even in the fairly straightforward "bad-guy-bash" issues such as the ones where they fought classic foes like the Construct and Doctor Light, the JLA still had an element of cameraderie and warmth that extended beyond being just members  - Wonder Woman teasing Flash about his Midwestern unhipness, for instance.


Yeah, but what about the Englehart JLA?


Yeah, but what about the Englehart JLA?

I agree. Those sub-plots (for want of a lesser term) were embarrassingly bad. I didn't like those comics the first time around, but I can't even read them now.

The Superfriends comic shows it can work, although it was a bit strained at times.

Even the recent Dini & Timm Justice League cartoon worked for the most part, although they had to get over their Batman is always better than Superman bias.

However, the in the 'mainstream' DC comics, it won't work.  The main reason are the facts that they have 'writers' whose egoes are bigger than Mt. Everest and Didio's decrees that humor has no part in decent storytelling.

Comedy is hard to pull off right.  The best one I can think of is the situation in Star Trek II when Kirk caused the shields around Kahn's ship to lower.  The look on Kahn's face....

At any rate, with the fact that most characters are now under a house banner, Justice League won't work.  Superman characters under a Superman editor. Batman characters under a Batman editor.  This is why Nightwing got pulled back under the Bat offices after being on his own for so long and the entire mess with Doona Troy is also due to this policy in DC comics.

I think Meltzer's telling an interesting JLA story at the moment. What's not to like? There's Starro the Conqueror, Grodd, an ARMY of Red Tornadoes, and a now-intelligent Solomon Grundy. And I've never seen Canary as frightening and formidable anywhere else as she is here. Surely, the female is deadlier than the male.

What's interesting is the pacing as Meltzer tells his story. He's got the sense to have multiple stories going on at the same time: Vixen's mysterious quest, Black Lightning as a trenchcoat-clad detective investigating a drug ring based on the Parasite's blood, Ivo discovering he wants to die, Red Tornado becoming human for the first time, and the three founders working out a new League roster.

Amazingly, every few pages, Meltzer whips out a surprise. I won't ruin it for anybody that hasn't read the book yet, but every six pages, there's something that totally recontextualizes what's going on. Most comics have one big "surprise" per story arc. Meltzer has two each: the revalation in the DC-Earth there can only be twelve immortals, the new Amazo, the army of Red Tornadoes, the possibility Batman may not be a League member this time around...

Meltzer sure picked a winner with his JLA roster. I hope Black Lightning stays as a trenchcoat-clad, private dick forever. And it looks like the three members I've never liked in JLA, whose participation in the group never made sense: Batman, Aquaman, and John Jones, are not going to be around.

As an aside, I had the pleasure of meeting Brad myself at the Miami Jewish Book Fair. He signed my copy of ARCHER'S QUEST and we talked for five minutes - not about HIS work, but about SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS, classic Wein and Englehart JLA, and Maggin's Green Arrow tales.

Brad Meltzer is a cool cat, and he's one of us. He would fit right on this board. In fact, was I hallucinating, or a while back, didn't he actually sign up for an account with our forum?


There was a thread a while back where I made my feelings on "comedy" in superhero comics clear: namely, darkness and human depravity is many, many times the lesser of two evils than so-called "comedy," because at least to have darkness you have to take the character seriously and play it straight.

There was a thread a while back where I made my feelings on "comedy" in superhero comics clear: namely, darkness and human depravity is many, many times the lesser of two evils than so-called "comedy," because at least to have darkness you have to take the character seriously and play it straight.
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Except if the character is suppose to be funny like Plastic Man and Captain Marvel, who also had plenty of darker moments. Same with Superman, many stories are comedy tales others are not. Comedy has rules just like horror.

To take a serious character and make them silly is just as absurd as taking a light hearted character and making them dark.

anyway,

JLA does indeed work just as long as talented people are working on the book. No character or group of characters are fool proof.

That is a good topic for another thread.

As someone who loves Cap's Kooky Quartet and the second stringers who define the Avengers for me to this day, I think that Marvelizing the JLA was a mistake in the 70s, if only because it changed the nature of the group.  I don't think the JLA was supposed to "work"  --more than a plot-driven comic it was intended almost soley as a gimmick who's execution could never be anything but clunky.  Attempts to modernize or retcon that gimmickry betray it's reason for being: to sell a bland product with tons of superheroes on the cover.

(And yes I know that the JLA partly originates out of the first wave of fandom and nostalgia for childish 1940s comics but DC couldn't count on a tiny group of adult zine writers to buy a million issues per month.)

Hmmm, interesting point and interesting stuff.

I'm not sure if this proves or disproves what I'm saying. On the one hand, you're saying, "yeah, the JLA have never 'worked,' because they are not really supposed to." It goes beyond being plot-centered to the point of being a title whose sole concept is a gimmick, and saying it never "worked" is missing the whole point. Fair enough. My rebuttal to that would be that, yes, there are some gimmicky titles and combinations that make no sense - the issue of MARVEL PREMIERE by Bill Mantlo that introduced the "Legion of Monsters" with Man-Thing and Ghost Rider comes to mind - but if something is supposed to have longevity, as JLA should, it should really go beyond the gimmickry that's only believable in the short term.


Well, Plastic Man was always more weird and surreal than truly "lighthearted." If anything, I think Plas would lend himself more to an askiew "darkness" than to a portrayal that's a yuk-a-minute.

Yeah, some of those Cole Plas stories are grim --maybe "black comedy" approaches the mark?

Re: gimmick titles.  It's a tribute to the professionalism and creativity of the early DC teams (Fox, et al) that JLA managed at the very least to transcend its gimmickry.  They couldn't just leave it alone.  Whether they didn't leave it alone enough --whether they created art or even a high form of entertainment for children to rival Silver Age Superman-- is another thing.  And of course I appreciate the JLA in many of its incarnations.  Even the "marvel-ized" JLA.  The first comic I stole was #200 --a history lesson in one sitting.  You can't get anymore second string slice of life than having my least favourite character of all time, Firestorm, complaining about the Lucy reruns while on monitor duty in the Satellite.  Why do I remember this 30-year old comic?  The first JLA I ever bought was a black and white paperback collecting several satellite-era adventures (Skyjacked at 60000 feet!).  I love all of the Perez issues, especially the covers.  Among my first Earth-2 memories.  Began collecting older JLA when Crisis came out (ironic!) --trying to "read up" on the Crisis.  And of course I love the Superfriends!

They were still funny. I am amaze that once DC got a hold of him they got rid of the dark stuff, heck even during the Iron Age, they refuse to put it back in!

I think maybe the problem is not that JLA doesn't work as an idea as much as maybe it doesn't work as a monthly book. At least not as it has traditionally been structured since you are left with the colossal task of coming up with threats that require a whole team of that level of power to fight. There is also issues with character since you have members with their own books whose character stuff you don't want to step on. Making a team of second stringers doesn't help either since it stinks the wind out of the whole concept.

This is why I thought the way they went with JLU animated made alot of sense to me. I think this could even work for the comics. Every hero who is worth a darn are members. You can follow different sets of characters on different missions, playing up their interactions while also having a greater plot that affects all the DC heroes. This could be the centerpiece DC book and one stop shopping for seeing team-ups.

But now part of this would prolly mean nixing the JSA. Personally I think having them both in the same universe is just totally redundant so I would have no problem with that but I know the JSA name means alot to alot of people so for the comics that would likely be a tougher sell. Too bad there's no Earth 2.

Well...I dispute that, because as said above in greater depth, I've never thought much of the Fox JLA, in my view one of the weakest of DC's Silver Age books despite its popularity.

But I certainly agree that Len Wein, Steve Englehart, and others were able to tell amazing tales. But my point here is this: the guys that did JLA best were the ones that told non-Foxlike tales. Which brings me to my next point.



People keep on saying that in slightly different ways all through this thread, but I just don't understand the point. JLA was a weak comic and concept when it was plot-centered, and only when it became character-centered and "Marvel-style" did it really work.

We've mentioned Len Wein and Englehart, but I don't think enough has been said about the guy that followed Fox, Denny O'Neil. But Denny O'Neil was absolutely at his worst when following the League "formula" of plot centered tales with a large threat (e.g. nonsense like the "living suns," which would make sense in a 1940s issue of MARVEL FAMILY, but NOT ostensibly in JLA), and at his best when he was focusing on character: for instance, Black Canary moving to Earth-1 with the death of her husband, Red Tornado trying to fit in, and the lesser-powered members of the JLA arguing with the higher powered members over the League's approach to less than serious breaches of the law.

And it's not like "big budget, disaster movie" League stories are incompatible with characterization: Englehart in his very first story featured a secret conspiracy billions of years old ("NO MAN ESCAPES THE MANHUNTERS!") and ended his story in a battle that "engulfed half the galaxy" (!) but it was all dependent on characterizations like the Privateer discovering he was used by the Manhunters and his worldview ceasing to make sense, and Hal Jordan's guilt and sense of responsibility when he discovered he was "responsible" for the destruction of an entire planet.


I don't know if I agree with that. For one thing, Legion of Super-Heroes was able to do the very thing you're describing - battle these colossal, galaxy-shaking menaces, and they did so on a regular basis. And they were able to squeeze in all sorts of character bits too, though in all fairness, unlike the JLA, none of the Legion members have their own title.

Maybe the reason Legion works and JLA doesn't is because the Legion has all the galaxy and outer space to work with.

Also, JLA doesn't necessarily have to oppose monstrously huge odds. My favorite issue of the Englehart JLA was #149, which featured no world-cracking menace, but had Doctor Light playing cat-and-mouse with the Leaguers.


This is what I was telling Nightwing: JLA's most interesting members, who were given the most to do, were the characters that didn't have other books.


I think we need a concise definition of what constitutes a second stringer, because none of the members of the Satellite League fall into that definition. I would be happy as a clam with a League roster made up of Elongated Man, Red Tornado, Black Canary, Green Arrow, Zatanna, and the Hawks.

(Okay, sure, there's Firestorm, whom Telle called his least favorite character ever and I can't help but agree. Another "triumph" for Gerry Conway.)


Hmmm, you might be on to something here.

I loved the team-up between Green Arrow and Captain Atom. They really "fused." What a wonderful "reaction." Ha ha ha.


I don't know if that's true. One of Geoff Johns's greatest accomplishments is the creation of a very unique JSA identity that doesn't overlap with the JLA - they have different members, different villains, different kinds of stories, and a whole different way of looking at themselves.


As much as I admire Martin Pasko, the big problem with his 70s-80s Plastic Man tales was that he tried to be lighthearted, and wasn't truly successful in capturing the tone of the original series. He "Archified" Plas, made him more brightly colored, and toned down the squirmy trippiness.

And the big problem with Plas circa the 1990s on - apart from Grant Morrison's weird obsession with him, is that the basic concept of Plas is that he is the straight man to a surreal world, not unlike Pee Wee Herman in Tim Burton's PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE. Plastic Man's "Jim Carrey on coke" characterization from the 1990s on was so unbelievably annoying that he actually made me get nostalgic for "Snapper" Carr.

Plus, Elongated Man would have been the better choice. I'm just saying is all.

Julian Perez writes:


Well, that makes all the difference, doesn't it?  Which I guess is what you were arguing at the start of this thread: groups composed of members created for the group work better dramatically than collections of, essentially, "guest stars" whose "real" lives are conducted elsewhere.

The Legion was great because things could happen, and did.  Members could fall in love and get married...and did.  Members could be killed in action...and were.  That opened up a lot of potential stories and subplots you'd never get in a book like JLA.  And when the Legion went up against a colossal menace, it was twice (maybe ten times) as dramatic because you really cared about the characters.  "What if Duo Damsel doesn't survive this mission?  And...and she just found love at last! It isn't fair!")

The beauty of the Legion...at least in the hands of someone like Shooter...was that the characterizations made the menaces more meaningful and the menaces made the characterizations more intense and dynamic.

So maybe I'm around to your way of thinking as far as that goes.  If you're talking about which team got me more involved and remains closer to my heart, the Legion worked a lot better than the JLA.


Wow, Englehart wrote that Manhunter stuff?  I hated that story as a kid.  The only guy I hated worse than the Privateer was the Star Czar.  Was that Englehart, too?  I gave away those books about 20 years ago and haven't missed it.


Well, I do think this is probably the best strategy a writer can settle for on JLA; give the character bits to the second-stringers and have the big guns out of frame until the fighting starts.  But even as a youngster, it was very obvious to me this is what was going on.  I always knew there were the members with their stuff together and the ones who were always melting down...and I'll let you guess which ones I favored.

That said, it was fun watching Ollie and Katar's love/hate relationship unfold, even if I could see it for the Spock/McCoy imitation it was.


I think we're saying a "second-stringer" is a character who doesn't rate his or her own book, especially if he/she doesn't have any world-class powers.  In terms of usefulness to the League, maybe it's not a fair appelation...after all, Ollie, Ralph, Dinah and the Hawks are certainly an A-Team compared to the likes of true second-stringers Ice Maiden, Booster Gold or Firestorm, let alone waterboys like Vibe and (Commander?) Steel.  But would anyone but you have bought the JLA line-up you suggest?  The world may never know.

Another factor in judging "second-stringer" status is permanence.  The Trinity has been in the League in almost every era (though hardly every issue) and some version of Flash and GL is a constant, too.  But the others come and go (Firestorm may have been in as many issues as Hawkman, for example), so I think there's a tendency to regard the "core" members as first-stringers and everyone else as replaceable, if not disposable.  That is to say, many would argue it's not "the League" without Superman or GL or the Flash, but the non-inclusion of the Atom or Elongated Man is hardly a deal-breaker.  Or going back to Star Trek a minute, a Trek episode without Sulu or Uhura is still a Trek episode, but one without Kirk and Spock, not so much. 


I think Plastic Man really only worked for Jack Cole.  He came from Jack Cole's heart and wonderfully twisted mind, and only Jack Cole could give to Plas with what Plas needs to work...namely, Jack Cole. 

Plas is like Popeye or Dick Tracy...still active in a sort of undead state though he really died with his creator. 

I would buy a JLA with Plastic Man, Popeye and Dick Tracy.

When we are talking about team books that focus on the characterization and sub-plots of second stringers (non Big-3 or Big-5) we are talking about a marvelized book --the second-best formula for team books after the self-contained team (FF, Legion, X-Men, Doom Patrol, Titans).  The marvelized JLA did work better than the gimmicky Fox JLA (which worked better than, say, a book full of pin-ups).  At least it was more fun or rewarding to read for a certain age group.  Now I just get off at looking at weird clunky art and soap-opera heroics don't work in small single issue doses.

A bad all-star team was the one with Flash Gordon, the Phantom, and Mandrake.  Potentially good, but who cares if you are going to water it down?

Who'd win:
Golden Guardian, Flash, Zantanna, and Green Arrow
vs
Captain America, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, and Hawkeye?



 

 

Well, it's nice to know that I am not the only one who thinks that the Silver Age Fox JLA is overrated.

Overrated by who, exactly?

You either like them or you don't. I remember what neat stories they were back in the day. I was just looking at "Crisis on Earth-Three" (a very old, dog-eared thing), and I re-read it a lot when I was a kid. The situations run to a formula, but then so do Bond films, Marvel Comics, and Westerns. There's a reason for that.

When I first read this comic, I recall being really intrigued by Power Ring and his magical power ring given to him by a monk...

Certainly there has been a lot of lip service paid to the SA JLA over the years, especially by older pros and early zinesters.  Obits for Fox were full of paeans to the JLA.  The Roy Thomas types.  Gerald Jones's history of comics devotes a lot of positive attention to it.  Heck, even my big intro to the JLA (not counting the Superfriends) in #200 included a big text piece lauding the JLA and its many achievements.  Certainly it was a landmark series, historically important.  It did give us the FF, after all, and thus, n a round about way, Marvel and the Marvelization of the JLA!  But it's not even the best-written superhero comic of its time.

 

But I still like parts of it, at least visually, and because it has the JSA in it!  :)

For me, reading about it is better than reading it. The ideas introduce were better than the execution. Plus the artwork was really bad, IMHO.

Yeah, when I say second stringer I'm guess I am mainly thinking of League incarnations that were very pointedly non-marquee names. Now that's not to say you can't have fun with those characters, I just don't like having a Justice League team where that's all you get. So you can prolly tell I'm not big on the Detroit era. :P

Setting up the book JLU style would give ya the best of all IMO. Plus I liked that there was usually at least one Big 7 person present which made for some interesting contrast. I hope by my evoking the animated series stuff so much I'm not coming across as saying it's the end all/be all. Those shows have some of their own problems to. But I think they made some really good decisions more often than not especially when compared to roads the comics have gone down which just baffle me.

That's too bad! I bet we could all have been friends! Sure I have my personality quirks but doesn't everybody?

Hey, I live in the Detroit area and didn't care for it much at all. 

The problem is that trying to keep continuity between the JLA and the characters who have their own books is hard stuff.  Superman's initial JLA adventures were almost in a separate reality from what happened in his own books.  Add Batman, GL, Flash, etc. and it just gets nasty. 


The DCAU works because there's one big point of control.  You don't have S:TAS and B:TAS events happening at the same time that crash with each other.  It took them awhile to get to JLU, and there were stumbling blocks along the way.  I'm glad to see that McDuffie appears to be going in that direction.