Yada Yada Yada: JUSTICE LEAGUE QUARTERLY #10-11 (JLI 78)

[tcampbell1000]

Bu-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dooWAAAA-WAAA, bu-doo DADADADADADUM, DA-DUM! Okay, we'll get to the Seinfeldian part a bit later.



Booster started this quarterly series wondering if he was shallow.



Last issue, he rose above the past (of his future) to save a teenage girl.



This time around, he struggles to rise above that past again when events trigger his own buried pain, and risks the integrity of the timeline for much less defensible reasons. With this contradiction, he proves he’s not shallow. But not all his depths contain parts of himself that he likes.

In Mark Waid’s and Rod Whigham’s “Time and Chance!,” Booster confronts the ancestor of the crime family that helped wreck his career and his most treasured relationship. This leads to some choice Beetle-and-Booster scenes, affirming their bond against the backdrop of a more traditional plot than the ones Giffen and DeMatteis would try:









William Messner-Loebs and Scott Benefiel contribute “Contested Friendship,” a Fire and Ice romp that obliges them to participate in a weird beauty contest:



Ice wins, of course.

Turns out the reason this contest is so weird is that a Lovecraftian horror is sponsoring it.




“Half an Inch” is a great Flash yarn from Waid and Patrick Zircher: Wally is stuck in an outdoor elevator and witnesses an assassination in progress. His super-speed vision spots the bullet in the moment before it reaches its intended target. At this point in his development, Wally’s speed is still more limited than it would soon become, so to save the life in front of him, he needs to innovate under pressure. Literally.




This eight-page story thrums with the kind of energy Waid was bringing to Wally West’s other solo adventures. It would appear in a later Flash trade paperback, slipped between Flash v2 #70 and #71.

But the best story for JLI fans is “When Titans Date,” by Ty Templeton (channeling Dave Gibbons) and Waid (channeling Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld). I’ve sampled lightly from the rest of the issue so we can show this one in its entirety. It’s that much fun.

Having contributed two other stories this issue that showed Booster as a scarred hero and Wally as a cheer-worthy one, Waid here shows them at their pettiest and most ridiculous. The ending might show a touch more sentiment than Seinfeld would’ve allowed itself, but that’s not a bad thing.

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

This story came out in 1993, a year after Giffen and DeMatteis had left and well after Seinfeld had established itself as the center of TV comedy. It’s a very self-conscious imitation. When Giffen and DeMatteis returned to JLI characters in the 2000s, their writing would include influences from Seinfeld and similar shows, but in more organic, somewhat subtler ways.

The “Giffen tradition” started to disappear from JLQ after this, but there’s one last story worth savoring: “Beautiful, Wonderful, Perfect” from #11, by Bill Loebs, Mike Wieringo, and Lee Moder. Max asks an all-female gathering of heroes to work with a distasteful client:




Diana, still a bit unsure of herself around the women of Man’s World, hopes that a slumber party will encourage intrateam bonding. (Loebs let Wonder Woman be quirky and occasionally clumsy in a way we haven’t seen much since.) The “most embarrassing moment” question is raised…



An early encounter with Ice establishes the Chimaera’s M.O.: targeted shape-shifting that matches the target’s greatest wish, and maybe a little mind control to suppress the “wait, this is too good to be true” reflex…



Ice gets away from the creature, barely, as the others discover the emir’s wife is not who they expected.



At all.






“Janus is the god of deception!” shouts Diana, and the group tracks Power Girl to find the Chimaera.

Doctor Light’s been researching genetic anomalies and uncovers a story about Professor Timothy Miller, who got “caught in a gene-cracking chamber” and…yeah, you can work it out from there. I knew a guy with that name in college, wonder what happened to him? Hopefully not this.

(I appreciate the double twist that "Johnny" is much more enlightened and devoted to his wife than his public persona would indicate...but he's still got a little deciding-their-lives-without-consulting-her problem. And she's far from perfect either. I kinda hope they'll work it out--assuming Johnny didn't approve the murder of his own guards.)





And thus, with some reluctance, we prepare to say our goodbyes to the original run of Giffen’s JLI. His final plot-and-breakdowns work for it was coming…a plot itself named “Breakdowns.”

Monday: The day it all slipped away…or would have, if not for the assassination.

Comments

[thanekos]

Chimaera and the mimic's lament.

(There's a Valiant-published story, from a recent Harbinger run, where a psiot character thinks she's found a relationship with a guy where her automatic mimic abilities don't seem to be getting in the way - and then she learns that his shallower preferences tend to her default state.)

[mastermahan]

Ah, that weird comics period where Middle Eastern people all had gray skin.

[scorntx]

Thank goodness for comic book time, or otherwise that little girl would totally have gone after Booster for vengeance once she was old enough.
Not Booster's noblest hour by any stretch of the imagination.
He's made bad decisions, and poorly thought out decisions, but beating up a guy in front of his daughter... whoof.
That's something only Batman at his absolute worst would do.


In this day and age, I find it dubious that even a eldritch horror looking to procreate by finding a suitable candidate and rending their flesh asunder couldn't find someone actually willing to go through with it.

I'm thinking Vivian's general attitude must've played merry havoc if and when Constance ever tried to actually socialise with other heroes.
Or just try to be in the same room as them.
(It is Vivian, isn't it? Not Constance? Or is it the other way around?)

Low-level perception filter for Chimera, or just Ice being... well, Ice, and therefore thinking that maybe, maybe, this time Guy really has decided to scrub himself up just to be nice for her.