JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA

Playing in a New League

Dan Jurgens & Gerard Jones believe fighting for Justice is a serious business. Mostly.

By Drew Bittner

Scanned from Comics Scene #26. "Playing in a New Lague." Drew Bittner. May 1991:25–28, 52. © Starlog Publications.

Justice League = Comedy. That was the concept when Keith Giffen revamped DC Comics' best-known superteam five years ago and then later spun off Justice League Europe. It became one of the company's hottest titles and brought silly superheroics into the mainstream.

All things must pass. Now, with Dan Jurgens and Gerard Jones chroni­cling the adventures of these two teams, big changes are coming to the Justice League.

Jurgens and Jones will be steering away from the broad comedy shown in both titles. The humor will not be eliminated, they stress, but it will be toned down to make room for more serious tales.

"Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and [editor] Andy Helfer had been on first one book and then the other over the last five years," Jurgens says, "and in that time, they made a name for themselves by going with humor. In JLA , we'll be getting into solid stories, where the humor comes out of char­acters' reactions to and interplay with each other.

"Some people have gotten the im­pression we're taking out the books' humor, but we're not-we're just changing its nature," Jones adds. "It's not schtick, and they're not going to be as big a bunch of goofs as before, but we're still doing a lot of humor. I mean, with Elongated Man and Flash on the same team, you have so much potential for fun stuff. It just won't be as broad and slapstick-minded."

This revamping of the League has the familiar back-to-basics refrain. DC's heavy-hitters will return to the League. Superman, Aquaman; the Atom, Hal Jordan, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, and Wonder Woman will rejoin , thus approaching the feel of the old Justice League of America.

Jurgens and Jones foresee signifi­cant changes, setting their own stamp on the books as of Ju stice League International Spectacular #1, a one­shot pairing the teams and setting them off in new directions.

The biggest change in the JLA is that Superman will become the leader. The Man of Steel's decision to join the JLA will spring from the re­cent "Panic in the Sky" storyline in the four Superman titles.

"Superman realizes there is a place for him working with these other heroes, which steers him toward leading the JLA," Jurgens notes. "He couldn't have [worked with the JLA] five years ago, especially not with Max Lord in control of everything. Now he can."

Adds Jurgens, "Superman has been segregated too long. He has appeared in his own books, but he hasn't been active elsewhere. There has been a feeling in our offices that he is and should be the preeminent hero of the DC Universe. This will help get him more involved in things outside his own continuity."

When Superman takes over, the change will go smoothly at first, but eventually there will be friction within the group.

"We have all these people—Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire and Ice—­who live at the League's HQ," Jurgens says. "They know each other pretty well, socialize during off-hours and they all get along. Now here comes Superman, who doesn't even tell them he's Clark Kent. How are they sup­posed to feel? Their own leader doesn't even trust them with his se­cret identity, so how can they confide in him? Guy Gardner thinks he  should be leader, and he'll go through some struggles dealing with this situation. "

Meanwhile, Max Lord is far from out of the picture.

"Max will continue to play a role, and should have about the same visi­bility, but his days as boss are over. Superman sees to that," Jurgen ex­plains. "He basically tells Max, 'We'll let you come along for the ride, but we decide where we go and what we do for ourselves.' This group doesn't ex­ist because Max put them together; [they're together] because they see a need for the Justice League to exist."

Jurgens' favorite character at present is Blue Beetle. "I'm having a lot of fun with Beetle," he says. "I'm taking Blue Beetle back to what Steve Ditko had made him. He's maybe 5' 6", by far the shortest guy in the League. His gestures and posture are more buglike. I want to get back to him being an inventor. Anybody who can make stuff like a flying beetle for a vehicle is pretty sharp."

Bloodwynd is Jurgens' new mys­tery-hero for the JLA, a character he has found "fun to play with. Any time you create a new character, it's a blank slate you fill in as you go." Bloodwynd's origins and background will occupy much of the first year's storyline.

The League gets another new member when Maxima joins, follow­ing her role in the "Panic" scenario; her imperious personality will cause conflicts. "She has been the ruler of the galactic empire and is used to the power and perks that go with it," Jurgens says. "There will be some problems down the road. For in­stance, she'll want to know why she can't have 32 personal slaves."

Some characters are entering tem­porary retirement. "I wanted to get Martian Manhunter out of the book," Jurgens admits. "He had gotten too silly; he had lost the dignity I felt he should have. He's out, so readers can forget about him, then we could bring him back when the time's right. He's off in space for the time being."

The new JLA will be fighting some veteran League villains when Star­breaker takes over the ruins of Maxima's homeworld and the League goes to help out. "This is the first time some of these people have been off­planet," notes Jurgens, "and they'll have some reactions to that. Do guys like Blue Beetle and Booster Gold be­long in outer space? They'll wonder if this isn't a little beyond them."

A new incarnation of Amazo will also show up, while an original ver­sion of the Key may appear in the fu­ture. Other enemies include the Royal Flush Gang and Weapons Master.

Jurgens' challenges on this series will be considerable. "Part of the problem will always be that since these characters show up in other books, it's probable I won't be able to use Superman or Guy Gardner for a time. Juggling continuity may be a problem," he says.

Additionally, he had to convince some writers, editors and artists that this really was an all-new League.

"There were some creators who fought to keep their characters out of the League for awhile," he acknowl­edges. "They didn't want their people to become comedy figures, so they kept away from the League. One of my jobs will be overcoming that im­age, by building up the League's sta­tus. Ideally, I would like to see the League become the prestigious group it always was, to become the axle of the superhero wheel."

Writing and drawing two comics, not to mention extra mini-series as­signments (including Metal Men), might be difficult but Jurgens is looking forward to the challenge. However, he admits he thought twice before taking ILA.

"I had just finished up Armaged­don 2001 and was getting offers on all kinds of stuff when [League editor] Brian Augustyn called and asked if I would be interested in doing JLA," Jurgens relates. "I wasn't sure; it would depend on if I had any ideas. Once we hung up, of course, I had a few dozen ideas, so I called back and said, 'Let's go for it.'

"I'm looking forward to doing a team book like JLA," Jurgens adds. "There's a lot that can be done with this bunch."

Gerard Jones says his team, Justice League Europe, will also go through roster shifts.

He says, "I'm bringing in Green Lantern-that's Hal Jordan, Aquaman, Dr. Light and, later on, Batman and Metamorpho. Batman won't be a regular, but Metamorpho might be. Power Girl, Elongated Man, Flash and Crimson Fox will stay."

He says that the title's continuing characters will undergo some changes, pointing to Power Girl as the one he intends to transform.

"She'll be very different," Jones promises. "We find out, for instance, that her wild mood swings are really a medical problem caused by an al­lergy to artificial sweeteners. Too much diet soda and she freaks out! We'll also be getting into her Atlantean heritage; we'll be develop­ing a bond, maybe even a romance, between her and Aquaman as she re­alizes he comes from her ancestral people. It'll be an infatuation, and can't really be much more than that, since he has his own book.

"Dr. Light, meanwhile. will be join­ing the team. I've been working out how to rebuild her; her background will include more from her Japanese heritage and Buddhist upbringing than we've seen so far."

Both Power Girl and Dr. Light will also be part of a roman tic triangle with Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern who's equally drawn to both women.

"He's attracted to them because in their own ways, they're both combat­ive, strong-willed and difficult women. Hal likes a challenge! Beyond that, they're completely different.

"I like tangled relationships," Jones continues. "And I know Hal can get involved in this kind of set-up because I'm writing Green Lantern, too. Crimson Fox and Metamorpho will be getting together, then Metamorpho wonders if he should take another stab at settling down with Sapphire and his baby."

Jones plans to change how certain characters were presented in the past.

"Flash won't be so much a dope," he says. "Elongated Man is still a clown, but he won't be stupid or silly, just peculiar. He'll be going through some rough times with [wife] Sue, since she becomes the team's new coordinator. There'll be some difficulties, some power struggles between Sue and Hal, the same way that coaches and general managers in baseball sometimes face off. So, Ralph's going to be stuck in the middle, between his wife and one of his best and oldest friends."

The "traditional element" of the group will be Green Lantern, Flash and Elongated Man, heroes with very strong ties to the original Justice League of America. "Hal and Ralph were part of that group and Wally knew all of them from his Kid Flash days, so these three can talk about old times. The others are more on the outside, though most of them have been part of JLE since the beginning."

This slight schism between the old and the new may exacerbate some of the team's problems, Jones says. "Dr. Light will have trouble with Hal's style of leadership; she's very con­trolled and rational, while Hal, the test pilot, is intuitive and flies by the seat of his pants."

Right off the bat, the European team faces some brand new menaces. First up will be Deconstructo, whom Jones describes as "a crazed English artist who comes upon this super-scientific wand that deconstructs the world. The story deals with the nature of reality, playing with language and our perception of reality.

"They'll also fight Echidna, the mother of mythic Greek beasts like the Hydra and Cerberus. That's going to be a journey into the Underworld of Greek myth.

"Echidna is this half-woman and half-snake, and the conflict with her will be dark vs. light, but it won't be the stereotypical 'dark equals evil' approach. It's more like darkness equates to Dionysian chaos and anar­chy, while light is Apollonian reason and stability.

"Their third storyline pits the JLE against Sonar, a second-string villain until now, and a host of European su­per-villains. I used Sonar in the Elongated Man mini-series as a springboard for something like this, to boost him into the big time. He's a su­per-technologist who comes from Modora, a typical fictional country in Europe. Ralph deposed him in the mini-series, so Sorrar decides to take over the former biggest country in the world: the ex-Soviet Union."

Beyond issue #51 , Jones hasn't got any plans. "What I want to do with the book is what Gardner Fox did with the League: Take a small oddity of science or culture, religion or philosophy, and blow it up into this world-threatening danger. I think this approach will appeal more to today's comics reader, who seems older and better educated than the typical reader was 20 or so years ago. It's fun to find things to use."

Jones adds, however, that he doesn't want to re-create Fox's sto­ries; he would rather explore the ter­ritory suggested by modern comics writers, including DC's own more es­oteric titles like Doom Patrol, Sandman and Hellblazer.

"JLE will have a conventional comics structure, but in content, it has a lot of stuff that mainstream comics haven't dealt with yet," Jones says. "I want to do the kinds of things Grant Morrison brought into DC's comics, but pull them down into a classic American structure. Justice League has a pretty broad range in its reader­ship, more than Doom Patrol, and people turn to this kind of book for classic superhero conflict. I won't be doing things with the same difficulty and plot situations that Grant does; the audience would probably get turned off fast if I did. I like to think of my style as the Gardner Fox approach brought into the '90s."

Jones is getting help from Ron Randall , the new artist on JLE. "Ron and I have a great melding of minds on this book. In terms of characteriza­tion and plotting, he has given me more than I could ask for, and he has executed the oddest things after awhile. For the Deconstructo story, he combined human beings with pieces of modern art to get these really weird hybrids. He has Greek friezes coming to life, gods and heroes in marble form moving around. There's a great quality of surrealism to his work, maybe because he's so realistic in his approach to depicting it. "

Ultimately, Jones wants his group to become "Justice League Earth," handling missions outside the strict limits of Europe. "America needs one really powerful group to itself be­cause there are so many super-vil­lains living there," Jones explains, "but my group could run around the rest of the world. I have story ideas I can't do ill Europe; I would have to take them to Africa, Southeast Asia and many other places."

Having just begun on these titles, both writers want to establish their teams before the inevitable crossovers.

"There'll be no character swapping initially," Jurgens says. "We'll get into doing crossovers eventually. JLl Spectacular is a crossover, it involves both teams, but there's nothing else planned at the moment."

"My first eight issues will be just the JLE, completely separate from what Dan's doing," Gerard Jones says. "Maybe later on, we can hook into each other's stuff. Actually, doing some 'remember when' stories would be good after we establish these guys in their present, but I want to give the first set of stories to moving forward."

"It'll be solid storytelling," Dan Jurgens says. "For the first few issues, there'll be a conscious effort to keep them in costume and pointed in one direction. "

Let justice be done.