Justice League: A New Beginning

Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire & others
Justice League: A New Beginning (1989)
I've always been interested in the mechanics of humour, what works, what doesn't, and why. I've found it particularly interesting since moving to America because it often seems as though our respective chortles are drawn from quite different places. On close inspection, this isn't actually true but is rather a very much generalised reading of variant forms of humour in mainstream entertainment. One might propose a model wherein English humour tends to be at its most characteristic in a broader context and is thus presented without ceremony as part of the general narrative so that, for example, there's more to your average episode of Steptoe & Son than just the funnies and it is the environmental details which support the humour and give it power. By comparison, the American equivalent enters the room with a smirk, announces that you should be ready for laughter, and then tells a joke which isn't particularly funny whilst winking and digging you in the ribs with an elbow. Unfortunately, should we compare - off the top of my head - Miranda with Parks & Recreation, my stupid theory is revealed as simply differentiating that which is funny from that which isn't whilst having bugger all to say about the difference between English and American humour.

The Justice League of America was, as I'm sure we all know, DC comics banding together all of its most financially lucrative superheroes into a single gang and having them fight crime by means of teamwork. I tend to regard the strength of superhero comics as reliant on elements other than the superheroics, and barring one or two exceptions, DC never scored highly in this respect, being a stable of clean-cut role models who go outside the law to foil bank robberies or deliver the stolen wallet back to its millionaire owner like the Nietzschean boy scouts they are; and no matter how hard you might try to get Superman hooked on crack, the wholesome never quite washes out; but on the other hand, no-one really wants dark Superman, at least not over and over again. So when the Justice League was revived in 1987 they decided to go for laughs, presumably given that Watchmen already existed.

Although I can't really speak for anything more recent than September 1991 - the point at which I lost interest - the humour in American superhero comics has tended towards the heavy-handed, cornball and cutesy with nothing to alarm a concerned parent. We'll be able to see the gag, such as it is, coming from at least four pages away, and it will in any case have already been foreshadowed by a cover featuring all of the major characters pulling wacky faces.

Mercifully, Giffen's Justice League tried something different. It was the usual mix of slapstick, comedy turns to camera, double takes, eyes rolled and foreheads slapped in exasperation except for being played more or less straight against a backdrop of fairly typical superheroics and rendered in Kevin Maguire's beautifully understated, almost photorealist style. So here, in these first seven collected issues we have terrorists threatening the UN, a conspiracy, supervillains from another dimension, a team of bad guys based on playing cards, and another chapter in DC's war between the forces of chaos and order. It's mostly what you would expect to find in an eighties comic book named Justice League, except for the peculiarly dry focus on the epic and improbable as background to an otherwise realist narrative which is more or less soap opera, with the humour arising naturally from the contrast. Happily, this also allows the comic to do the usual superhero stuff without it seeming necessarily absurd.

I know. Sounds hilarious innit. Well, it was at the time. Thirty plus years later, I find I'm not laughing quite so hard although it still raises a chuckle here and there. I think this may be me rather than the comic book. Returning to Batman, the Green Lantern and others after time spent away, it takes me a few issues to see past how ridiculous these characters are, for the most part - which I don't really get with Marvel comics of equivalent vintage for some reason. Skipping ahead to a couple of later issues once I was done here, it also seems that the story was still finding its feet in this collection. Nevertheless, regardless of possibly subjective imperfections, this was a mostly great book, streets ahead of anything taking the Jerry Lewis approach to humour in comics, and of what became of this book once Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire handed in their cards.