![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcampbell1000 posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
scans_daily
The Global Guardians were only the third most popular “GG” in the JLI era, after Guy Gardner and General Glory. But they merited at least a little attention after all their buildup. Assistant editor Kevin Dooley slid into the writing role for these four stories with Andy Smith on pencils, though it’s hard to believe the same people wrote and drew all four of them. Even by JLI standards, they’re quite varied in tone.
With Owlwoman gone, Seraph and Tasmanian Devil abstaining, Robo-Mist wrecked, Real Doctor Mist missing, Jack O’Lantern twice dead, and Lit--and Mermaid dead, the Guardians are down to eight members. That’s almost manageable in a 12-page story. But Dooley, in “An Old Beginning,” seems hot to test the limits of what can be done. So he has them fight another eight-member super-team.
A twelve-page story with sixteen heroes and four uncostumed characters leads to page layouts George Perez might have described as “a little busy.” Still, Dooley was game to dole out endearing traits to every single character in the story, and the results have an undeniable goofy charm.
On various fronts, the battle loses steam as the heroes realize how much they have in common.
The Hero Group says Bialya annexed Lower Pluxa, not the other way around, and everyone realizes both hero groups are being used to gratify Harjavti’s and Fortesq’s territorial ambitions. And while they’d rather do battle themselves than let soldiers fight and die, they decide there’s an even simpler way to handle this conflict.
This recalls a classic Siegel-Shuster story, “How Superman Would End the War,” where he came to a similar conclusion…
…but unlike Superman, the Guardians and Hero Group aren’t out to lock the national leaders up, just “teach ’em a lesson.” Let’s see if that sticks!
In issue #6’s “Never Less Alone,” we catch up with Owlwoman, who’s living more like a rat than an owl, and…see what I mean about the tone jumps?
The Guardians are still chipper, but they keep losing members like they’re in a slow-moving And Then There Were None plot. By now, they’re a normal-sized super-team.
Owlwoman/Winnie finds Jack/Dan, the Jack O’Lantern “killed” in JLE #4.
As the soldiers at last seem about to overwhelm the cornered and exhausted Owlwoman, they see something behind her and scamper off like rabbits. She looks over her shoulder, and...
OWLWOMAN: But Mist, why did you leave us alone for so long? What were you DOING?
DR. MIST: Stalking Zatanna takes lots of time.
OWLWOMAN: What?
DR. MIST: I said, “Walking through the annals of space and time.”
“Time to Enjoy the Light” is set after “Breakdowns” concludes, but that’s not too important for our purposes. Rising Sun's second greatest pleasure, after battle, is pestering Doctor Light for a date. He's smitten with her because…because…because…
…because they’re both light-based Japanese heroes, I guess. And Sunburst is dead, Marvel’s Sunfire doesn’t swing that way, and Yuga Aoyama would be too young even if My Hero Academia weren’t set in the future. Unless he wants to cross over with Bionicle, Kimiyo is his only prospect!
Light wants nothing to do with Rising Sun for about eight pages, but they keep ending up dealing with the same threats, one of which tears down both their emotional walls.
She realizes his, er, “persistent” attempts at flirting have gone silent and frees him. He rewards her by being all business for a moment.
On the one hand, this story does hinge on the “annoy ’em until they give in” advice that single Nineties nerds shouldn’t have been listening to, but on the other, Isuma does deserve credit for accepting Kimiyo’s situation with such ease and grace. The ages of the kids do raise a couple of questions about Kimiyo’s personal timeline. Did she have those kids after getting her powers in the Crisis on Infinite Earths? Because she didn’t seem like the nurturing type before then (Crisis on Infinite Earths #4):
That might be a question worth exploring. Even 34 years later, DC Comics isn’t exactly drowning in Asian female representation.
In “The REAL Return of…the Global Guardians!,” the team shown in the last frame here do some Danger Room-style training against holograms, rehearsing to fight their still-Bialyan teammates. After the training, they do some bonding.
Owlwoman and Jack O’ Lantern “bond” in a more literal way…
🙄
Look, I don’t mean to be harsh, but up to now, Jack O’Lantern has been a hotheaded, immature asshole who let his dick do the thinking for him until the Queen Bee’s “conversion therapy” started doing the thinking for him. And his dick wasn’t even doing much thinking in Owlwoman’s direction!
He and Owlwoman were “close,” yes. And how he treated and tried to protect her was his best quality by far. But in terms of likely relationship stability? These two make Guy and Ice look like Lois and Clark. Once Jack finds out the Queen Bee has a sister (JLA: Incarnations #6), he’ll be GONE.
(Also, how wild is it that Rumaan Harjavti and Queen Bee both had near-identical siblings waiting in the wings to take power after their deaths? These political dynasties get more complicated every year.)
In any event, when the Guardians reunite, it seems that no force will be necessary…
…Until later that evening.
“Tuatara saved us all, thanks to his power of being a freakin’ weirdo!”
All’s well that ends well for the Global Guardians, assuming they don’t hire Amanda Waller to handle the deprogramming! Also assuming you stop reading their stories right here, a course of action that I would recommend. You can just skip to the comments. We don’t need to go into…
…Fine, fine. After trial-ballooning a few GG solo adventures, JLQ ended its run with #17, in which Guardians were arbitrarily killed and depowered, and four new Guardians arbitrarily rolled out. Remember that bit in Batman v. Superman where four Justice Leaguers were “introduced” by Diana finding footage of them in Windows folders?
Remember how thrilling and cinematic that was? Just imagine how much more exciting it’d be if they were four characters no one had ever seen before, standing like they were rehearsing for their coffin fittings:
The last three of these appeared in Wonder Woman #174-175, but only because Phil Jiminez wanted a story with every extant DC superheroine in it and his maximalist art style could make that happen. That was it for them.
Kevin Dooley had a few other writing credits but did most of his best work in editorial, including the early development of Kyle Rayner, before leaving DC in 1999. He gave a recent online interview, embedded below.
The Global Guardians have appeared a few times since, but without much continuity in their lineups or development as individual characters. Outside of Fire and Ice, the luckiest ex-Guardian was Godiva, who got rebooted as a member of the “New 52” JLI and a love interest for Booster Gold. That makes her 21st-century career sound a lot more noteworthy than it was.
(Narrator voice: “There was not.”)
Also, the next Bialya story would see the Queen Bee’s sister in charge of Bialya and Sumaan presumably dead, which puts me in mind of this Waiting for the Trade strip and its concluding observation.
Not that getting rid of fascists is EASY, but it’s sure a worthwhile activity.
(cough)
Saturday: Yet another pair of issues where the continuity doesn’t quite make sense. But in one of them, it’s on purpose.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-16 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-16 05:59 pm (UTC)"Particle Man," huh? Was this before or after the release of They Might Be Giants' song by that name?
That Golden Age "how Superman would end the war" story... am I right in assuming that came out while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were still allies? Otherwise I could see Superman having to explain to FDR why he'd apprehended a key Allied leader along with Hitler.
"My people, my religion. It's my duty to bring peace." Amen! Preach it, Brother Chaim! If only we could have you pay Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich a little visit. ("Look, chevrei, it's bad enough so many people hate us for no reason. Must you give them one?")
"Centrix," eh? (Yes, I deliberately used "eh" here.) That is such a Canadian superhero name and as a Canadian I love it! We need more centrists in today's world of extreme everything.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-16 06:18 pm (UTC)A far too common affliction for many superhero teams.
And Geoff Johns trying to relaunch them three times, saying that this time, they really were going to kick that ball!
Also apparently they got another attempt go-around in the middle of that Absolute Power hoo-ha, but let's face it, in this day and age very few teams come to anything being the focus of an event tie-in.
(And Dr. Mist had a role in one of the Justice League Darks, apparently.)
Seems like the Conglomerate almost got the better end of the deal, just suddenly popping into obscurity one day.
(I'd say "fade", but that'd imply a gradual process. They just disappeared like something arbitrarily removed off a screening service.)
Thinking maybe one of the reasons Bea and Tora have lasted as long as they have - Tora's brief burst of sustained deadness aside - is writers forgetting they were ever with the GGs at all.
Particle Man? Bugrit, millennium hand and shrimp!
I'm going to assume Owlwoman's story does not in fact elucidate much on... well, any of her part in the proceedings that were "Breakdowns".
Speaking of...
"Dominator... Rumaan... faked death... use me later"
... how? Why?
Or is this another of those cases where what little answers there are will lead to ever-more baffling questions?
So Rumaan's killed by Queen Bee, who's killed by Sumaan, who's killed by Queen Bee II...
Presumably if Flashpoint hadn't happened, she'd have been bumped off by the next brother, who would then have, I dunno, been killed by their niece or something?
"What comes around goes around, and if you squint, can be mistaken for justice."
With J'onn's occasional record, I'd be a bit sus that at least one of those "new" heroes is just him in disguise.
(ooh, Jiminez splash page. Nice.)
no subject
Date: 2026-04-16 06:20 pm (UTC)That last GG story was such a bummer in how it dismantled such a great team of C-list regional/cultural/nationalistic stereotypes. I mean, poor... *checks notes* Impala! Poor Tuatara! Poor South American Gadget Guy! Never shall we see the likes of them again unless they're replaced by a junior legacy version or rebooted by someone punching time!
(Nah, seriously, I always did have a fondness for these goobers and they got such a raw deal.)
Fun fact: we learned more about those last four... Cascade, Centrix, etc, in the hardcover DC Comics Encyclopedia than we ever did in the actual comics. Chrysalis? Secretly an evil robot full of killer butterflies created by a xenophobic, anti-Semitic French scientist to infect "undesirable" communities. Only he died and the robot... just kept on existing. I shit you not. Imagine creating THAT as the backstory.
The other three newbies? Cascade got her powers from a science accident or something, Centrix was a rich guy who fought crime, and Tundra... *shrug*
Imagine being such bland characters that no later writer ever went "Hey, we can work with this." Not even as cannon fodder for a crisis.