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scans_dailyGiffen and DeMatteis do their usual. Finished art is by Linda Medley, who renders a mixed crowd of heroes with clarity and expressive simplicity. She also makes the Queen Bee fun to look at, walking a line between researched plausibility and vampy camp.
The Global Guardians have appeared often in JLI stories by now, but only as a memory, an abstract, nostalgia-shrouded ideal from which the devalued, brainwashed reality has fallen. “Bialya Blues” brings back a facsimile of the Guardians as they were, but said facsimile still won’t measure up to the memory.
"I'M A DISNEY TRADEMARK, DON'T YOU SEE?? IT DOESN'T *MATTER* IF I WAS CREATED YEARS BEFORE THE 1989 MOVIE! IF THEIR LAWYERS SEE ME ON THIS TEAM, I'M AS GOOD AS DEAD! 🎼DOWN IN THE DEEP, DOWN IN THE DARK, DOWN WHERE OUR DREAMS ARE SCARY AND STARK... 🎶 SUBCONSCIOUSLY, I CANNOT BE...PART OF THIS WORRRRRLD... 🎶"
Giffen and DeMatteis play with expectations here: first you think the Guardians are going to be fighting the League by page 8, then they surprise you by being informed and sensible, then it's all oh, shit, she’s screaming and Jack O'Lantern's DEAD, what's going on…?
The Queen Bee's dismissal of Major Force ties up a loose end from Captain Atom Annual #2, where MF…“joined” her in more ways than one.
You'd think she'd try a little to keep such a powerful being by her side. It's not like he's demanding to marry her or even endangering her people like the prior Jack O'Lantern. But like Jack, and Wandjina before him, MF is a pawn to be discarded the moment it suits her, and he'd clash with the Guardians' presence in Bialya like a wildcat on a chicken farm.
Getting her own popular super-team has put the Bee in a somewhat better mood than when last we saw her.
See, she's enjoying the small pleasures again!
That said, she's cold as ever when guaranteeing a smooth “project launch” for the Guardians. All parties involved are intimidated into compliance: the new Jack O'Lantern, the beaten-down Owlwoman, and minister of reprogramming Dr. Fillmore.
The Global Guardians show up at JLE headquarters, and their mere presence prompts more Parisian cheering than the JLEers have heard in their entire lives.
Cap takes a tense meeting with Doctor Mist. This Mist is a robot impostor, and it should be said, the Bialyans are way better at building robot impostors than the Cluster is. Maybe Manga Khan should have traded for our microchips. In fact, given that the real Doctor Mist was revealed to be Zatanna's obsessed groomer (Secret Origins v2 #27)...
....this version is actually an improvement.
There's a lot more Cap could say about Bialya's "benevolent queen," but the terms of the JLE-QB truce compel his silence. He's not sure how much of a tattletale Mist might be.
While the Guardians are asking after them, their comatose colleagues--what an unbelievable coincidence--revive from their comas and rush off toward Bialya.
What lets Cap off the hook instead is another unexpected guest.
If only all the Guardians got to endear themselves to the reader as much as Bushmaster and Godiva did. The other Guardians show off their superpowers, but personalitywise, they’re competent robot fighters and not much else. Except for Little Mermaid, who does a lot more reflecting on how useless she is. No one’s arguing with you, dear.
It would twist the knife if the Guardians were lots more effective than the JLE, justifying their popularity, leaving the Leaguers doubting themselves, and establishing a major threat for the next Bialya arc. If the Guardians were a lot LESS effective than the JLE, that might say something about reputation vs. reality and diplomacy vs. honesty. But everyone's about equal except LM…and Cap. While he pools his resources with the Guardians' early on...
...in the end, he can handle that clanker pretty well on his own.
Oh, NO! Could anyone POSSIBLY have survived that explo--yeah, duh, everyone's fine. Back in Bialya, the three once-comatose Guardians join their teammates, who celebrate how well things worked out. This teamup has given both teams good press. This obeys the terms of the JLE-QB truce…but leaves the Bee in a stronger position for when that truce is broken. The "Global" Guardians will act in Bialyan interests only until their last story in the Giffen era.
Hozzin would show up intact after this, so one assumes the Queen Bee kept playing this "F*ck, Castrate, Kill?" game with him, "changing her mind" over and over for the rest of her reign. This is how she treats people she likes.
Also, that pet monkey has made its last on-panel appearance, which raises uncomfortable questions.
A few of the old Guardians didn’t make it into this version of the team: Fire and Ice had traded up, Tasmanian Devil had joined the League’s Australian embassy, and Seraph, the Israeli, seems…unlikely to visit Bialya, even long enough to be brainwashed. Plus, his powers seem to come from GOD HIMSELF, which might not work for the Bee's purposes (Super Friends #38).
The cover for this annual seems to have completed a “rule of threes” thing someone was doing in JLE…
Back in Paris, Cap broods over the new crater on the JLE's front lawn, a crater that might as well have a sign posted on it saying, "Brought to You by Queen Bee Renovations, Further Betrayals Coming Soon."
That seems like a perfect segue into the tale of the weirdest Justice League team of all time!
Monday: Justice League Antarctica!
The Global Guardians have appeared often in JLI stories by now, but only as a memory, an abstract, nostalgia-shrouded ideal from which the devalued, brainwashed reality has fallen. “Bialya Blues” brings back a facsimile of the Guardians as they were, but said facsimile still won’t measure up to the memory.
"I'M A DISNEY TRADEMARK, DON'T YOU SEE?? IT DOESN'T *MATTER* IF I WAS CREATED YEARS BEFORE THE 1989 MOVIE! IF THEIR LAWYERS SEE ME ON THIS TEAM, I'M AS GOOD AS DEAD! 🎼DOWN IN THE DEEP, DOWN IN THE DARK, DOWN WHERE OUR DREAMS ARE SCARY AND STARK... 🎶 SUBCONSCIOUSLY, I CANNOT BE...PART OF THIS WORRRRRLD... 🎶"
Giffen and DeMatteis play with expectations here: first you think the Guardians are going to be fighting the League by page 8, then they surprise you by being informed and sensible, then it's all oh, shit, she’s screaming and Jack O'Lantern's DEAD, what's going on…?
The Queen Bee's dismissal of Major Force ties up a loose end from Captain Atom Annual #2, where MF…“joined” her in more ways than one.
You'd think she'd try a little to keep such a powerful being by her side. It's not like he's demanding to marry her or even endangering her people like the prior Jack O'Lantern. But like Jack, and Wandjina before him, MF is a pawn to be discarded the moment it suits her, and he'd clash with the Guardians' presence in Bialya like a wildcat on a chicken farm.
Getting her own popular super-team has put the Bee in a somewhat better mood than when last we saw her.
See, she's enjoying the small pleasures again!
That said, she's cold as ever when guaranteeing a smooth “project launch” for the Guardians. All parties involved are intimidated into compliance: the new Jack O'Lantern, the beaten-down Owlwoman, and minister of reprogramming Dr. Fillmore.
The Global Guardians show up at JLE headquarters, and their mere presence prompts more Parisian cheering than the JLEers have heard in their entire lives.
Cap takes a tense meeting with Doctor Mist. This Mist is a robot impostor, and it should be said, the Bialyans are way better at building robot impostors than the Cluster is. Maybe Manga Khan should have traded for our microchips. In fact, given that the real Doctor Mist was revealed to be Zatanna's obsessed groomer (Secret Origins v2 #27)...
....this version is actually an improvement.
There's a lot more Cap could say about Bialya's "benevolent queen," but the terms of the JLE-QB truce compel his silence. He's not sure how much of a tattletale Mist might be.
While the Guardians are asking after them, their comatose colleagues--what an unbelievable coincidence--revive from their comas and rush off toward Bialya.
What lets Cap off the hook instead is another unexpected guest.
If only all the Guardians got to endear themselves to the reader as much as Bushmaster and Godiva did. The other Guardians show off their superpowers, but personalitywise, they’re competent robot fighters and not much else. Except for Little Mermaid, who does a lot more reflecting on how useless she is. No one’s arguing with you, dear.
It would twist the knife if the Guardians were lots more effective than the JLE, justifying their popularity, leaving the Leaguers doubting themselves, and establishing a major threat for the next Bialya arc. If the Guardians were a lot LESS effective than the JLE, that might say something about reputation vs. reality and diplomacy vs. honesty. But everyone's about equal except LM…and Cap. While he pools his resources with the Guardians' early on...
...in the end, he can handle that clanker pretty well on his own.
Oh, NO! Could anyone POSSIBLY have survived that explo--yeah, duh, everyone's fine. Back in Bialya, the three once-comatose Guardians join their teammates, who celebrate how well things worked out. This teamup has given both teams good press. This obeys the terms of the JLE-QB truce…but leaves the Bee in a stronger position for when that truce is broken. The "Global" Guardians will act in Bialyan interests only until their last story in the Giffen era.
Hozzin would show up intact after this, so one assumes the Queen Bee kept playing this "F*ck, Castrate, Kill?" game with him, "changing her mind" over and over for the rest of her reign. This is how she treats people she likes.
Also, that pet monkey has made its last on-panel appearance, which raises uncomfortable questions.
A few of the old Guardians didn’t make it into this version of the team: Fire and Ice had traded up, Tasmanian Devil had joined the League’s Australian embassy, and Seraph, the Israeli, seems…unlikely to visit Bialya, even long enough to be brainwashed. Plus, his powers seem to come from GOD HIMSELF, which might not work for the Bee's purposes (Super Friends #38).
The cover for this annual seems to have completed a “rule of threes” thing someone was doing in JLE…
Back in Paris, Cap broods over the new crater on the JLE's front lawn, a crater that might as well have a sign posted on it saying, "Brought to You by Queen Bee Renovations, Further Betrayals Coming Soon."
That seems like a perfect segue into the tale of the weirdest Justice League team of all time!
Monday: Justice League Antarctica!
no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 10:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 12:43 pm (UTC)Also, I loved "Name one." "Guy Gardner." "Name two."
no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 01:25 pm (UTC)(In this issue, the Devil comes into the embassy hoping to get to work helping his old GG buddy Tuatara out of his coma, just in time for Tuatara to wake up and flee to Bialya.)
Kimiyo Hoshi, the more tolerable Doctor Light, was serving in a similar capacity at the Japanese embassy. AFAIK, nobody super-powered was hanging around to cover South America. This arrangement continued until the last days of the Giffen League, when Devil and Light were rolled into the American and European teams.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 01:25 pm (UTC)All brought back to be brainwashed patsies. Maybe being forgotten would've been kinder.
But life's full of tough choices, innit?
Captain Atom Queen Bee, willing to jump on a thuggish supervillain to stop his trashing her city.
JL Queen Bee, having minions mutilated for shiggles.
I suppose you could say that it's just her extremely capricious mood being even more capricious than usual, or being more upset about Major Force potentially breaking her stuff ("Only I can murder my people!"), but it's still a jarring contrast.
Like Dr. Doom going from "every citizen of Latverian is free and happy under Doom's protection" to "smile, you miserable lackey!"
Shame Bialya isn't going into the robot double market. Think of all the world leaders who'd pay top money to have a robot take their place while they just do whatever.
I could think of at least three countries where no-one would notice. Crap, their approval ratings would probably skyrocket...
But no, like any foolish supervillain despot, all Queen Bee thinks to use this for is cheap(ish) gaslighting.
She's probably killed the tech support team as well.
(oh, hey. Zatanna's Vampirella outfit was her mom's. Didn't know that. Though it was just an odd early outfit. Always something new to learn.
Also didn't know her mom was blonde.)
I see Lady Godiva maintains the high standards of usefulness that have made her the household name she is.
Global Guardians really were scraping the barrel when they were hiring.
Those Belle Reve guards are lucky they're dealing with early 90s Waller. She'll probably just fire them, glare one or two body parts off at most.
Modern Waller would murder their entire families.
no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 08:22 pm (UTC)Damn, their brains must be like a slip and slide...
no subject
Date: 2026-01-31 09:25 pm (UTC)I mean, if Squadron Supreme wasn't already a port from DC.