S t r e t c h e d: JUSTICE LEAGUE QUARTERLY #6 (JLI 74)

[tcampbell1000]

Two of the stories in Justice League Quarterly #6 are better recapped later: one’s another Global Guardians bit, and one’s a Blue Beetle story that ends a phase in his development we’ve only seen foreshadowed so far. The other two, we can get to right now! Unfortunately, they're both mysteries with flawed premises, leading to climaxes that misfire even if there's some pleasure to be found in the buildup.



I’m happy to sing Mark Waid’s praises. He’s written nearly 2,000 comics stories, and the majority are intelligent and well-constructed, featuring strong character work, clever plots, and roots in the present with just a bit of Silver-Age sensibility to salt the meal.

But “Take My Wife, Please!,” with old pro Eduardo Barreto on pencils, is what happens when you take that “Silver Age saltshaker,” unscrew the top, and dump the whole thing all over the plate.

A lot of the parts are enjoyable until the climax, though. It starts with Ralph and Sue being charming at each other, and some mysterious actions on both their parts…



Ralph finds the glass and pitcher broken as if Sue vanished in the middle of pouring her drink.




The board game, Land Baron, is essentially the DC Comics version of Monopoly, and the mystery of Sue’s whereabouts is somehow tied to it. Ralph writes a note that he hands to the hotel staff and calls the JLI to join him on the case.



The team heads to the headquarters of Land Baron’s manufacturer, which also makes toys…and confronts a wave of robot-toy opponents in one of several fights sprinkled through the story.



However, Ralph continues to treat the whole thing like an escape room, and about a third of the way in, Wally has had it.



The “birthday mystery” was indeed a bit of a tradition for Ralph and Sue in Silver Age comics. Even Brad Meltzer mentioned it in Identity Crisis #1 (2004) as an example of their happier days. (There’s a more favorable review of this story at the link. To each their own, Brian Cronin!)




Now apparently convinced Sue’s in danger, Ralph leads the team against her kidnapper, Augustus Dearbon, who insists he should be the true heir to the considerable wealth Sue inherited. Dearbon seems to be doing all right for himself even without Sue’s millions, since he can afford rubber horseys that gas the Justice Leaguers into unconsciousness.



Ralph wakes up in Darrow Penitentiary, one of several locales in the story featured in the Land Baron board game. Plexiglass is covering the bars, but Ralph can figure his way free:




He then frees the others. When they catch up to Dearbon, he’s waiting for them with a bunch of rigged trains. Leaguers battle locomotives, and then…and then…AND THEN…



🤯


Okay. I’ll put my thoughts here, and they’ll double as a spoiler space, so if you want to try to guess Sue’s location, now’s the time.

I like the idea that this Justice League is full of actual friends who do nice things for each other. It’s kinda fun to see Ralph do some real detecting. The narrative caption asking the reader to find Sue is a fun flourish. The board-game riffs are fun too! A lot of this is fun, or could be! I am generally pro-fun!

But I can’t help but feel used by this conclusion. The early scene with Ralph and Wally sold us on thinking, “No, this is serious, Augustus may look goofy, but Sue is in real, deadly danger.” This is billed as a plays-fair mystery, and that part isn’t playing fair.

And it’s one thing for the Leaguers to arrange a meet cute for Max, or even for Beetle and Kilowog to arrange “Guy Gardner on Ice.” But are we supposed to believe that…under J’Onn’s leadership…they would design several robot armies’ worth of opponents, fight each other, and get knocked out on purpose, all to participate in this birthday tradition? Do you get the impression this global peacekeeping force has a little too much free time? And how did they get Guy to agree to this?

Ready to find out where Sue’s been? Read on…



Makes perfect sense, except for the part where Sue expected her husband to develop a case of face-blindness. I mean, how was he meant to be standing next to her for thirty seconds and not go, “Wait a minute…”? It’s just a wig! It’s not even a MASK!

I’ll give it this, though: the beginning and ending scenes are cute. Better for these two to be salted with Silver Agey schmaltz than basted with Brad Meltzer bathos.




The other story from #6 is “Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?” by Paul Kupperberg and John Calimee. It features some uncostumed odd-couple moments between Power Girl and the Crimson Fox. (Vivian seems to have dyed her hair “crimson” for this story, or as we quaint Americans call it, “brown.”)





Like the Ralph story, this tale hinges on a flawed mystery. You really don't have a hope of guessing this one unless you're deep into 1980s DC Comics lore:




Gina is Ghy, a character from the last five issues of Kupperberg’s Arion and then a single issue of his Power Girl miniseries, both from the mid-1980s.




If you hadn’t read those, tough boogers!

Ghy would never appear again, but, curiously, this plot idea would. The last issue of the latest Power Girl run also featured P.G. dealing with an entitled near-doppelganger who'd taken over neglected aspects of her life. There too, she rejected the “Karen Starr identity” said doppelganger was claiming…although this doppelganger was more malevolent than Ghy and treated accordingly:



Saturday: The fact about Dmitri Pushkin that DC would probably prefer you forget.

Comments

[metadronos]

One of my pet peeves is stories that have too many twists in them. Not because I can't follow them, but because each twist beyond the second one (maybe beyond the third if handled especially well) brings me closer to thinking what SF fan Dorothy Jones Heydt called the Eight Deadly Words: "I don't care what happens to these people."

Or, in cases like Waid's JLI story here, where I do normally care what happens to the characters, it's more "I don't care what happens in this story."

All of which is to say, you're absolutely right about that Ralph birthday mystery story not playing fair with the reader, given the repeated "Sue's in danger! She's not in danger! Whoops, she is in danger! [...] Haha, she was never in danger, and what's more, I knew it all the time!" If I can't trust that A equals A at any given point in a story, I lose interest.

[scorntx]

Hmm.
I think maybe if this was painted as a major storyline in the regular title (stretched out - no wordplay intended - over a handful of issues or something) then maybe the fake-out would be a mite more aggravating.
For a one-shot just showing off that Ralph is a pretty darn good detective, it's a little more forgivable.

Having his internal monologue when he supposedly was in on the whole thing right from the start does feel like a cheat.
Sue could've worn a mask or something to help sell the disguise, but, again. One-shot. All part of the fun.

(I also like Wally having a character and not being a one-dimensional horndog.)


Shame this thing with Ghy never came up again, because it looks like something that'd be worth a story or two.
(Especially in the mid-00s run when they were trying to do more with Karen's life.)

[beyondthefringe]

I love the Ralph/Sue dynamic. Killing her off in such a horrible fashion in Identity Crisis was one of the most inexcusable moments of that era of storytelling. (That whole storyline was fucking misery porn. Killing Sue? Killing Jack Drake and Captain Boomerang? Making Jean Loring a mentally unstable murderer? The whole Doctor Light as a rapist? The mindwipe thing? JFC, DC.)

I love that Ralph and Sue spend so much time trying to outwit one another. And that while he's clearly a comic character, he's not 100% comedy in the same way Plastic Man is. Sure, let's just allow that the League had some free time. It certainly beats the world needing saving every 10 minutes.