French Hiss: JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE #1-2 (JLI 37)

[tcampbell1000]

From here to issue #27, series art is by Bart Sears over Keith Giffen layouts until otherwise noted. All plots and layouts by Giffen, though DeMatteis will only script through #8.

The idea of a “Justice League Europe” was a natural extension of the “Justice League International” concept, but it has an intrinsic problem: almost any high-profile or mid-profile characters it could use were always going to be Americans. Giffen and DeMatteis leaned into that as an inherent source of conflict from the get-go.



The spinoff League begins by introducing its key players. Here’s Ralph and Sue Dibny, AKA the Elongated Man and…Sue Dibny.



They seem pretty trauma-free, don’t they? Don’t know why I bring that up.

Next come Power Girl and the Flash, neither of whom are quite the characters you probably remember. PG was going through her first major rebrand: for a hot minute, she was the granddaughter of an Atlantean sorcerer and super into fighting the Lords of Chaos. And during his pre-Linda days as the Flash, Wally West was kind of…uh…problematic?



Okay, he wasn't quite so bad in his own book, but there was more immaturity and acting out under the pressure of living up to Barry's legacy than most fans remember. And Giffen and DeMatteis were happy to lean into that.

Next, Animal Man and Rocket Red. Points if you get the last panel’s double literary reference.




And here’s Captain Atom and Catherine Cobert. Cobert first appeared in Justice League #8 and, up to this point, hadn’t been developed much past “competent professional” and “stunningly beautiful.” She says she’s nervous about this transition but doesn’t really look it. She might be just saying that to ease the pressure on the flop-sweating Captain Atom.

Atom is one of the few Leaguers with leadership experience. As JLE will mention about 73 times, he’s the hero who led Earth’s super-beings against the alien coalition in Invasion #2 a few months back. But planning a single paramilitary op and heading up a super-team are very different jobs, and his impostor syndrome is flaring up.



After all, he sort of is an impostor, in that his backstory isn’t quite what the U.S. Army claims it to be (Secret Origins #34):



And the last time he was involved with a JLI embassy going active, this happened (JLI #8):



This time, he stutters and stammers through the opening meeting, and the troubles ramp up from there. The transport tubes aren’t working like they should:



Animal-Man is furious about his incinerated luggage, as expected. Then an elderly ex-Nazi staggers into the embassy, says the word “Braces,” and dies, bleeding out a bucket’s worth of blood into the carpet. Then Wonder Woman shows up, sans lasso, and manages to say two or three sentences before a screaming mob breaks in.





The mob collapses, and it turns out it was mind-controlled. But the French gendarmes are scarcely more polite than the rioters. Faced with tangible emergencies, Cap starts to sound like a real leader after all:



He doesn’t even seem to realize he’s doing it, which is good and bad--good because his self-consciousness doesn’t get in the way of “Command Cap,” bad because his insecurities will return as if he never proved himself.

As issue #2 begins, Wonder Woman abandons the group to get high with Dionysus in a French McDonald’s. Just kidding, but seriously, she vanishes from the narrative without a word of explanation and never returns during the Giffen-DeMatteis era. (In JLE #21, Catherine would say only, “She never even bothered to tell us she was no longer interested in participating.”)

If you want to hear my speculations about this matter, read on; if not, scroll down to “BUT I DIGRESS.”

Perez took the blame for this bait-and-switch in interviews, claiming he didn’t know the character of this League when he agreed to have Wonder Woman join and pulled out when he learned what it was like. With all respect to everyone involved, that seems a bit fishy. Or simplified, at least.

Perez would’ve had to know the JLI pretty well to write Guy and Rocket Red's appearances in Wonder Woman #25. Even if Giffen and DeMatteis drafted the scene below…



...he still wrote the scenes that followed from it, so he would've had to read it. And in the following issue, Diana still seems to be very pro-JLI, which doesn’t gibe with the idea that Perez expected the Super Friends, walked into a food fight, and recoiled in horror.



What seems more likely is that both books’ creators believed they could make this work until they realized they couldn’t. JLE was incorporating plot points from the solo Captain Atom and Animal Man series as they came up…



…and it did the same for Wonder Woman. The art in #1 seems to be changed at the last minute from a version where WW had her lasso, to sync up with issues of Wonder Woman where she was hunting for it (starting in #27)…



Like, why even bother syncing things up so much if you’re expecting to drop her from the book, right?

But there’s another sense in which Perez’s story rings true: the JLE and his Wonder Woman were indeed poor fits for each other. A long-running conflict of the series is that Europe hates this League full of ugly Americans. But Wonder Woman in this era is both mega-popular and closer to Greek than American. As soon as she shows up, the French should be falling all over themselves to help her, at least.



Diana sought peaceful resolutions more than the average superhero, which made her a challenge for others to write in general. (Animal Man would develop a similar hang-up, a year or so later.) Her fish-out-of-water nature made it difficult to write comedy around her--at least comedy that wasn’t kinda "ha-ha, isn't that cute, she thinks she's assimilated!" And Rocket Red already had that niche locked down.



So when having her interact with other heroes, Giffen and DeMatteis fell back on casual workplace harassment…and it was starting to look like they didn’t have any other ideas:



While Diana’s enthusiasm is cooling fast in JLE #1, her unexplained departure doesn’t feel like a storyteller’s decision. I’d guess it was editors Karen Berger and/or Andy Helfer who pulled the plug, after it became apparent that Perez, Giffen, and DeMatteis’ ideas weren’t gelling. Given what the DC offices of the Eighties were like, Berger may’ve felt that Wonder Woman getting hit on every four minutes was a little too close to home.

BUT I DIGRESS.

The remaining team splits into groups of two and three to investigate locations their computer system points to as possible Nazi fringe groups with metahuman activity. Each subgroup runs into an ex-member of the Global Guardians. First, it’s Cap and Animal Man vs. the Wild Huntsman.



Hope you like that trick with Cap's eyes throwing out little flames right before he's about to assert himself, because Sears likes it A LOT.

Next comes Power Girl and Rocket Red vs. Rising Sun. Rising Sun’s easily the most powerful of the issue’s opponents, but Power Girl has “power” right there in her name, so…it’s like going up against the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. You’re defeated by branding before you start.



Flash, Metamorpho, and the Elongated Man go up against the water-breathing Tuatara. Seems like that’d be the most lopsided of the fights, but Tuatara really earns his paycheck here. I’m focusing on this one, as it has the most interesting interpersonal dynamics. Try to ignore Wally’s blond “dye job,” it’ll be gone in a couple more issues.








As we’ll see, Ralph’s taunting is informed by grief. One constant about Ralph over the decades: he’s much better at joking around than dealing with the darker emotions.

The Huntsman and Rising Sun also lapse into comas after the Leaguers beat them. But who could possibly be behind these attacks from mind-controlled Global Guardians? Who would have a connection to both mind control that causes comas…and the Global Guardians… and want to subvert the JLI? That one’s a real stumper if you haven’t read the last year’s worth of JLI comics, but if you have…



…then you’re a lot smarter than the JLE is.

Thursday: Seriously, Jack O’Lantern practically has to hit them over the head with his lantern and shout “IT’S ME AND THE QUEEN BEE, YOU IDIOTS” before they get it.

Comments

[iamrman]

I keep forgetting how much of an ass Wally was in the early days. Also, he won’t shut up about living up to Barry's legacy. What legacy, fucking up continuity because he missed his mother?

[skjam]

At the time, both of Barry's parents survived him, and he was known for his careful and non-problematic use of time travel. The Flashpoint people have a lot to answer for.

[tcampbell1000]

Let's not get our OWN continuity garbled! The Barry that Wally was missing was the Barry of the Silver Age. Silver Age Barry's mother, while rarely mentioned, was alive. And even if she had been murdered, Silver Age Barry was far too much of a hero to have risked the fate of billions.

Silver Age Barry had the opposite problem: he was so free of flaws of any kind that he felt like he was more archetype than character. This was a problem for other DC heroes too, and especially the Silver Age Justice League as a unit, but "Borey Allen" got the worst of it. He had colorful villains, decent plots, and all kinds of crazy superpower science, but all of it barely distracted from the cipher at the center of it all. If you were reading back then and needed your characters to have any actual character, you'd probably already switched to Marvel.

Making Wally idealize Barry was a brilliant way to turn this old problem into an advantage. Now that he was dead and gone, his flawlessness could be a source of conflict--an ideal to which no one could measure up--and Wally had to struggle with that, then accept it, to come into his own.

But of course, that wasn't the end of the story. The resurrected 2000s Barry's mom focus was mostly due to Geoff Johns' belief that DC's core heroes needed tragedy in their histories. (And it was so central to the TV show of the 2010s that I suspect that show's early development may have been a factor in the change.) But one could hardly blame Wally for not seeing that coming.

[mastermahan]

It's pretty odd to have a European team that's almost exclusively Americans. They have a higher percentage of Americans than either the original Justice League of America or the JLA.of this same era.* Original Excalibur started two years earlier, and it was 60% Europeans.**

This European team should really add a European hero. I just hope whoever they add isn't something like, I dunno, a horny French person with sex powers.

*Though a lower percentage of American than the human Green Lanterns.
** And 40% queer-coded.

[cainofdreaming]

I think there was a point in time when they had higher percentage of Australians than Europeans too. Or at least equal one.

[beyondthefringe]

Could be worse. There's always the Beefeater.

It's a shame the JLE didn't, I dunno, just recruit some more ex-Global Guardians.

[icon_uk]

Or do what Paul Cornell's "Knight and Squire" did and just introduce some of Britain's plentiful existing metahuman population who just hadn't registered in the US consciousness (mostly because he'd just made them up).

[mastermahan]

It's odd that none of the other Global Guardians said "hey, Bea and Tora had a good idea" and tried to follow them. The JLI admitted Bea when her only power was breathing fire. The current JLA has Max Lord resorting to mind control to get Huntress to join up, and I love Helena Bertinelli, but her powers are crossbow ownership and anger issues.

They could have gotten in, is what I'm saying.

[tcampbell1000]

The story Helfer and Giffen liked to tell is that since they couldn't get Superman and other top-level draft picks, they designed Justice League International to work "no matter who was in the book." But it's clear that they hedged their bets, too: Beetle, Booster, and uh, Batman had their own books when they were inducted; Guy Gardner and the Rocket Reds were familiar from Green Lantern Corps; and even Mister Miracle, Black Canary, Doctor Fate, and Shazam/Captain Marvel weren't exactly obscure. The Japanese Doctor Light's getting obscure now, but that was when her star turn in Crisis on Infinite Earths was still just a couple years back.

Same energy for this new League: four of the members on the cover of issue #1 had their own title at the time of publication, and the others, save Rocket Red, all had decades of high-profile publishing history behind them. Membership requirements relaxed after each title's launch (hi, G'Nort), but to be a debut Leaguer, it seems, you needed to be a "name."

[super_fly]

Seems pretty reminiscent of how much America has indulged in swinging its dick around post-war Europe.

[scorntx]

The Justice League Europe being comprised almost entirely of Americans. Not just pointing out the elephant in the room but jabbing it with a pointy stick.
(still, as far as pachyderm-tormenting goes, it's not quite at Doomsday Clock's level...)

And of course the first villains are... shifty foreigners!
... wait, hold up...

"Only America could be trusted with something like this."
"Naturally. All the other countries were foreign(!)"
"Quite."


Feels (with thirty-odd years of hindsight) like they could've done something on that front. Like, made up a new character or something beforehand?
Ah, well.


... reading this, starting to get an idea of where Young Justice got some of its characterisation for Wally in season 1.

[icon_uk]

A "Robot" reference... Nice!

[thanekos]

" Robot ", or - you look at the Scientific Reform Society, you look at modern techno-fascism, and you go " Well, that's not new. "

(See also the Brotherhood of Logicians from Tomb of the Cybermen.)

[mazway_75]

I never liked Sears drawing of Power Girl, just not capturing her right.

[metadronos]

Sears also makes Buddy look much older than he was meant to. This especially stands out when one of the repeatedly-emphasized plot points in Morrison's concurrent Animal Man run is that post-Crisis Buddy is notably younger than the pre-Crisis one he replaced.

I think the problem is Sears's overuse of rendering lines, especially on faces. (Elongated Man gets hit with this too. He looks like he's in his late 50s in at least a few panels.) Granted, it's not nearly as bad in that respect as Liefeld and those who emulated him, but that's a rather low bar to clear.

[thanekos]

Wally's characterization around this time is a bit " thinks he's the protagonist of reality, and that everyone else is supporting cast. "

(Which is human, but maybe a little more immediately " Ugh. " these days.)

[mastermahan]

So what's up with Captain Atom's blue boots? I know just two colors makes for a dull costume, but they don't match anything else. It looks like he dressed in the dark and grabbed the wrong footwear.

You also can't convince me that a career military man who's also 20 years out of time would have a mullet.

[cainofdreaming]

Well, it wouldn't be red, white and blue without the blue.

[mastermahan]

But it's not white. It's silver. Calling that white is like, I dunno, having a character called the Silver Sorceress wearing yellow. Or a character named Crimson Fox wearing tan.

[beyondthefringe]

Not to be too picky, but that's Rising Sun. Sunfire is the grumpy -Marvel- Japanese hero. :)

[tcampbell1000]

Fixed!

[zylly]

Yeah, the yanking of Wonder Woman has always felt incredibly awkward. Especially since she was explicitly said to be a part time member, I find it hard to believe they couldn’t have made it work.

Especially since JLE would evolve to be slightly more serious than JLA. Not much, but slightly.