Oracle's Tenure with the JLA, Part 5: War

[glprime]

It's the end of the world and Oracle ain't happy 'bout that.




So, the League has been warned about the coming of Mageddon, an Old Gods weapon that basically makes everyone go insane with paranoid rage and then obliterates things on a cosmic scale. (Hey, wait a minute...)



Oh yeah, while Barda and Diana go looking for help with Metron, Prometheus somehow went and snatched his helmet back. What's happening there?



A whole bunch of things seem to be going wrong for the League at once, on top of universal destruction.



"Boo."



Yeah, so Luthor tries forming another Injustice Gang. This one is notably more badass (getting back the General from deep space and recruiting the Queen Bee and her whole armada), but they are of course just cogs in a giant Morrison clockworks.



With that twisted art, you can almost see her considering it. But no. Barbara's played headgames with Joker; this guy is weaksauce.



While probably a pithy one-liner, one wonders what Prometheus might have been hinting at there...?

Ah, well, Oracle's bat-like reflexes save her from falling to her death, but her systems get trashed. The other heroes divide and conquer to deal with the Injustice Gang including Batman giving Prometheus Motor Neuron Disease, Orion setting his dog on the General (into the Phantom Zone, no less) and Plastic Man of all people outsmarting the Queen Bee.

But with the League's Watchtower ambushed by the Injustice Gang and taken out of commission, the heroes need a Machine from the Gods. WAI HALO THAR MUTHERBOXX.





Yep, Oracle 2.0, now with digital telep- wait, what? Oh, right, Morrison Crack(TM).



While Oracle tries to get all the reserves organized and help Animal Man's plan to "counter" the Haterade signal being broadcast by Mageddon, the world leaders are about to "FIRE ZE MISSILES!" when Zauriel comes in after recruiting most of Heaven to get up off their ethereal asses and help, y'know, save humanity from itself.



Flash zooms in with a visitor from Wonderworld, the destroyed home of the guardians against stuff like Mageddon. The Glimmer can apparently "run perpendicular to time" and generate mass amounts of energy. Sorry, "energy-plus," as Flash states.

So using his godly powers, the Glimmer juices up every single person on Earth with Superman (Post-Crisis) level powers.



Evolution doesn't work that way... Yep, EVERYONE.



So, while Superman is trapped inside the "Anti-Sun," the Armies of Man make a last ditch attack on Mageddon's satellite drones, while J'onn and Bruce try and psychically impress upon Clark the need to stop being an emo bitch and do some Superman shit.

Clark reaches out and "absorbs pure anti-sunlight" from the heart of the Annihilator (the back cover of the trade actually features this page). The weapon is disarmed and, well... they never really explain just where they dumped that gigantic thing. Huh.



While only a toss away line, this would actually be one of the last times we'd see Oracle working with the Justice League. She probably realized, "I just recruited the whole damn Earth for war, kicked an alien doomsday weapon's ass, and now they want me to route crazy villain hotline calls? Screw this, me and the girls are headin' to Vegas for the week."

Tune in tomorrow for the last of my posts featuring Oracle in JLA.



15 pages; 4 from JLA #36, 3 from JLA #37, 1 from JLA #38, 1 from JLA #39, 1 from JLA #40, 5 from JLA #41.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

tags: char: batgirl/oracle/barbara gordon, creator: grant morrison, creator: howard porter, publisher: dc comics, title: jla

Comments

[bluefall]

AUGH DAMNIT MORRISON LEARN TO WRITE ACCURATE CHARACTER VOICE. Diana has not called on "Minerva" since the Crisis, and Zatanna does not speak sentences backwards, just the words!

Jeff is pretty badass there, though, props for that little moment.

[zordboy]

"So, the League has been warned about the coming of Mageddon, an Old Gods weapon that basically makes everyone go insane with paranoid rage and then obliterates things on a cosmic scale. (Hey, wait a minute...)"

Yeah, the Solaris virus fit that MO as well. What I think happened was, Waid introduced Knowman (back in "Midsummer's Nightmare") who foretold the coming of ultimate war (or something). Which Morrison then ran with. The build-up to Mageddon begins all the way in "Rock of Ages" (which was about 30 issues before Mageddon actually showed up).

But it's comics and shit happens. So just in case something happens, Morrison used the Solaris virus -- so that, if the Mageddon storyline didn't pan out, the prophecy (regarding humanity going crazy) still winds up being fulfilled. Just by a different story than he'd originally intended.

Which is what I loved. The guy had that much foresight.

But no, I adore the WWIII storyline. Issue 41 was one of my first comics ever. I had no idea what was going on, I just knew it was awesome. I did like the Oracle/Prometheus scene. "When you're done trying to insult me to death..." Hah!

And that double-page spread with Wonder Woman leading humanity into battle against Mageddon. It took my breath away when I first read it, and you know, it still does. I just love the originality of it all -- usually it's the heroes who gather en masse to take on the Big Ol' Space God From Beyond. Here, it's *everyone*. I liked that. It was awesome.

Oracle has a couple of appearances during Waid's run, but really doesn't show up much in the JLA from that point on. Given the current status of the book, we should probably be grateful. Oy.

But no, mad props for WW3. And the fun thing was, during the Burning Martian story in Kelly's JLA run, Atom makes a reference to WW4. Which was a nice reference to this storyline, I felt.

[jarodrussell]

She probably realized, "I just recruited the whole damn Earth for war, kicked an alien doomsday weapon's ass, and now they want me to route crazy villain hotline calls?"

And blew her cover completely. Everyone in THE WORLD knew the name Oracle now, and she couldn't even be arsed to change her handle. Digital shadows do not have brand recognition! Geez, even W1nst0n M1k3y knows what.

Maybe her new handle could be Id10t.

[silverzeo]

Is this story about Meggdon is in trabeback?

[glprime]

JLA: World War III

(though a lot of the plot was set up back at the beginning of Morrison's run).

[shadowpsykie]

we Need a Gail-Oracle series in preparation for her return to the series! :)

[shadowpsykie]

ummm what i mean is some one should post like the significant Oracle Moments from BoP in preparation for gail's return to the series :)

[jarodrussell]

Here are two of my favorites:

[shadowpsykie]

yeah these are good character moments.

[lamashtar]

Incidentally, if anyone's curious and isn't a technocrat like jarodrussell, here is a series of 5 minutes youtube snippets of a lecture by a private investigator to a seminar on ordinary things the internet can do to to completely Oracle you. He's an entertaining speaker, though it goes for about two hours of material. I was particularly amused by the news of Domino's Pizza selling their database to various police organizations, because I work for them and just had to attend a seminar in which the bosses were delighted to be just behind Ebay and Amazon for online purchases.

[jarodrussell]

Actually, it goes on for three hours:

Part 1: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3079242748023143842#

Part 2: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2219573359400519690#

[lamashtar]

Thanks for the better link. I suppose you've seen this long ago..

[jarodrussell]

I have the DVD's ^_^