I gave up on comics at the age of fourteen, having discovered punk rock and decided that I was all grown-up. Specifically I started buying Sounds music paper on a weekly basis, which meant I could no longer afford to keep up with 2000AD comic, which, in any case, seemed to be treading water at the time. Five years later I made the acquaintance of Charlie Adlard and Garreth Roberts* while taking a fine art degree at Maidstone Art College. I was intrigued by the fact that both of them still read comic books, and even American comic books which seemed way beyond anything which could be excused by what turned out to be my first experience of nostalgia for something I'd enjoyed a few years earlier. Just when I thought I was out, as Al Pacino laments in the third Godfather movie, they pull me back in.
Anyway, just like junkies hoping to share their addiction, Garreth attempted to stem my uninformed guffaws by lending me a few things to read, notably the Frank Miller version of Batman, an issue of Micronauts, and Justice League of America #257, from which point on I was hooked, albeit not to those specific titles. The Dark Knight Returns impressed the shit out of me, and I was vaguely familiar with the Micronauts having once been obsessed with the toys, but the Justice League book was bewildering. I had no idea who any of the characters were, and the story, if it was a story, took place in a strange metaphysical landscape inside Zatanna's head - whoever she might be. I spent decades wondering what I'd read in that book, and curiosity eventually got the better of me - nearly forty years later - and what we have here is a complete run of the Justice League of America in their final incarnation before Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis hit the reset button, at least in publishing terms. The fact that this run of the comic seemingly remained almost universally reviled even years after its passing, combined with whatever the hell had happened in issue #257, appealed to my sense of mystery.
The point of the Justice League as I understood it from a distance, was to have Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and all your faves in the same comic. Growing up in England and being therefore more familiar with Marvel, this didn't hold much appeal for me. I've since developed an appreciation for the DC aesthetic, when it's done right, which differs significantly from the legacy of Stan Lee, but for many years it seemed dated, stuffy, square, and lacking the dynamism of Marvel; and so my impression of the Justice League would be Superman and his pals up against a guy wearing a giant purple top hat with a question mark on the front who cackles and very much enjoys being the bad guy - more or less Enid Blyton in spandex. Without having read any of the comics, for better or worse, the form struck me as limited.
The comic book hadn't yet quite pow! grown up back in 1984, but I get the impression that DC at least wanted to move the Justice League on from confrontations with anyone wearing a question mark, and so Gerry Conway shook things up, replacing most of the team with characters no-one had heard of. Len Wein had done it with Marvel's X-Men ten years earlier, replacing the perky apple-polishing college freshmen with a menagerie of previously unknown sideshow attractions. If this didn't directly serve as inspiration for the revision of the JLA, it was at least a good argument for what rewards might be reaped from a thorough shake up. Accordingly I'd expected to notice a few more parallels with the X-revision in this run of the Justice League, but Vixen doesn't really have much in common with Wolverine, and Gypsy echoes Kitty Pryde only in being young, and the rest can be attributed to their both being superhero books.
We kick off with a war between Earth and Mars in #228, the stretched point of which is that it might have been a bit less of a clusterfuck had the absentee Superman found time in his busy schedule to lend a hand in punching their big green faces all the way back to their home planet. Therefore the Justice League, despite having won, has let everyone down and we all need to go back to the drawing board. With the League's orbital space station in ruins, they move into a disused factory complex in Detroit - actually a super technological secret headquarters - specifically in one of the less salubrious neighbourhoods. This is where we meet Vibe, a young streetwise Latino with powers of er… vibration, who enjoys breakdancing and probably even smokes whenever Chuck Patton is drawing someone else. We also meet Steel - an angry cyborg, Vixen - an African supermodel with animal powers, and Gypsy - who is never quite explained but just seems to show up. We also meet half the neighborhood, and thus get issues where - in the absence of anyone wearing a purple top hat with a question mark on the front - Steel hunts down some kids who nicked a packet of Toffos from Mr. Papagaulos' corner store while Vixen helps Old Mother Windom find a treasured spoon - a family heirloom - which she could have sworn was in the cabinet in the hallway. Of course, neither of these tales happened, or at least not on screen, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise from the letters pages of subsequent issues. I guess this was the point at which the ratio of regular kids to comic book obsessives reading these things switched, arguably for the worse, to the latter.
The letters were a mix of positive and negative - those enjoying the changes against those who had paid good money for tales of Earth's greatest heroes and now found it very interesting that the same were conspicuously absent from the book and would therefore like to speak with your supervisor - although a substantial minority of the angrier letters would also have liked to know why DC comics were suppressing the deluge of hate mail directed at Vibe, Vixen, Steel and Gypsy, pretending that it didn't exist when it definitely did and was in fact the biggest mountain of complaint in the history of moaning.
Did DC really owe these people yet another fucking title with Superman or Batman punching the purple top hat off that guy's head yet again, given that this was still happening in every other book they published? I don't know, but having read a couple of the earlier issues - and the occasional interlude issues of this run bringing the familiar faces back presumably for the sake of pacifying the worst of the fandom taliban - this version of the JLA was a lot more fun for my money, and a lot more engaging by virtue of the restoration of mystery in characters which could still surprise us. Sure, Vibe was corny as hell in places and Gypsy dressed like Cyndi Lauper, but this was a comic book, not Crime and Punishment, and these were arguably hypocritical objections coming from those demanding the restoration of a rigorously traditional flavour of corn. Was it not enough that they still had to fight an android named Amazo?
For what it my be worth, I'd say Gerry Conway, Chuck Patton, and particularly Luke McDonnell did a great job on this run of comics, keeping things interesting, moving everything along, and without resorting to crowd pleasing clichés; and by the time our guys have to save the world from a three-eyed Godlike alien named Despero, it really begins to feel as though the wrinkles have been ironed out and we've found our feet, and it was as good as anything you would have read in - off the top of my head - an X-Men comic of the time.
Yet it was not to be, which I assume came down to sales. Gerry Conway - who had really shown that he knew how to write this stuff - was suddenly and abruptly absent without even the customary letters page farewell, and J.M. DeMatteis was brought in to perform what felt like a wack job, albeit a poetically loquacious one. Vibe was killed fighting another android built by the guy who created Amazo - thus inadvertently foreshadowing Poochie from that episode of the Simpsons - then Steel was next, with the other two deciding to take long holidays elsewhere as the remaining cast did a huge boo hoo and pretended they couldn't hear the joyful hooting and hollering of the fandom taliban.
The next month's issue was the first of the revival by J.M De Matteis and Keith Giffen, which was great, and which somehow kept the wankers happy without inserting Superman into every other panel or pretending it was still 1956. It's an ill-wind that blows no good, but I still don't see that there was anything wrong with this version of the Justice League; and if there was an ill-wind, it was surely the crowing of a new, profoundly unpleasant generation of comic book fans celebrating the death of a character they didn't like because they'd never heard of him. If it's occurred to you that we can no longer have nice things, I'd say that's one reason why right there.
*: Not to be confused with the former author of Who stuff, as should be obvious from the unusual spelling. Garreth was one of my very best pals for the duration of those art college years, and I have no idea how we managed to lose touch, aside from that he was always a bit on the flaky side. Whenever Charlie and I get together, we always have the inevitable whatever happened to Garreth? conversation.
No comments:
Post a Comment