Justice League Interchronal: JUSTICE LEAGUE EUROPE ANNUAL #2, ARMAGEDDON 2001 #2 (JLI 84)

[tcampbell1000]

Warning for a homophobic throwaway line from a villain, and some...controversial character development.

The heroes of the JLA and JLE are gathered in New York after the Bialya mission. While they mingle with some of their usual irreverent chatter, it’s more subdued than usual.



J’Onn and Catherine hope to get things back to normal--“as much as they can be, without Max.” But Cap nips “normal” in the bud as the JLE starts teleporting back to London.



Superman and Waverider are waiting for the JLE in their London embassy. This annual is by Giffen, Jones, and many artists, but the framing sequence is Steve Carr, as it was in Waverider’s other JLA appearance.




In Cath’s future, the JLE still exists, now funded by Interpol. But a strange stagnation seems to have settled in: the membership roster has not changed at all in ten years, unless you count Sue and Kilowog leaving to go into business selling designer teleporters. Well, and Cap's missing, but that's probably not important. Art by Russel Braun.




Waverider flinches at the sight of the embassy vaporizing, which puts everyone in a nervous mood. And the tension only builds as the testing continues. No one else seems to be in the right time, and unlike when Waverider tested Booster Gold, there’s no explanation of how they got to different eras. Art by (deep breath) Marshall Rogers, Linda Medley, Keith Giffen himself, John Beatty, Randy Elliott, Curt Swan(!), and Ty Templeton:












“How long did you THINK I meant” is just…just perfect. But the cat’s desire to mark this newcomer with his scent is what resolves matters. Final flash-forward by Marshall Rogers, featuring two Justice League villains you never expected to see again:






The Robin and Johnny of this timeline are probably doomed. Ralph might rescue the other timelost heroes, but he wouldn’t even know to look for two manchildren in black. I’ll hold out some hope that in the timeline we’re going to get instead, Robin and Johnny have a chance to not join up with Mr. Biggers and instead grow the hell up. Also maybe hurry up and get girlfriends if they swing that way, because male pattern baldness is going to hit them fast.




The last page is just a big closeup of Cap looking expressionless as Waverider shouts, “CONTACT!”

This tonal transition takes us into Armageddon 2001 #2 (Denny O’Neil, Jurgens). The vision of Cap’s future is a depressing one. Imagine America’s gun control situation was somehow even worse. Gang territory fights are legal, and one of those fights has claimed the lives of Captain Atom’s children and grandchildren. He’s kept from powering up for years due to fears about the environmental impact. But after his family dies, he stops caring about that…and then he stops caring about anything…






Breaking contact with Atom, Waverider realizes he’s been tricked.







Monarch is off to create himself by killing Dove in front of Hawk, thereby motivating Hawk to kill him and then become him.

…

What do you mean that doesn’t make sense?

Look, the editors decided it wasn’t going to be Captain Atom at the last minute, and this was the best they could do for a substitution, okay? I mean, it’s not like anybody really cared about Hawk and--



Yeah, okay, I deserved that one. In fairness to O’Neil, I think he does about as well as he can with the virtually impossible task of justifying this plot. He stirs in lots of personal details that demonstrate he at least read the series, playing up Hawk's rage issues and psychological vulnerabilities. If you're feeling generous, you can almost convince yourself it works. Sampled: the page before Dove and Old Monarch’s deaths…



...and the page after. This one anticipates the evolution of conservative thought in some uncomfortable ways.



Likewise, O’Neil tries to explain away some of Waverider’s more nonsensical actions as the work of a flawed human who had no training for his role or true understanding of how others could manipulate him. Usually, “ascended fans” like Waverider become more heroic and effective through their fandom, if that fandom is sincere. Not this time.




I mean…Matthew…you might’ve allowed Armageddon to happen because you got addicted to reading porn at work. You can be a LITTLE hard on yourself if you want. You're not gonna be harder on yourself than Captain Atom is for crimes he didn't commit.



The JLI stays active through the rest of this issue, but let’s skip to the climax of the big fight.








Cap would remain presumed dead for years, our time. He’d come back to JLA with #80, with little fanfare and not much emotional connection to the Leaguers who'd been his friends. Even though he’d go back to a leadership position in the League, it wouldn’t feel the same: post-Giffen, his personality was less neurotic and considerate, more Nineties-ish. Oh, let’s just call it what it is: he was kind of an asshole.



When Giffen and DeMatteis reunited with the character, over a decade later, he’d been through so much that in some ways, he’d come full circle. Once again he seemed a bit lost and out of phase with his surroundings, and thus he was in no hurry to take command over his fellow Leaguers.

But that’s another story for further down the line. For the sake of the next set of updates, Captain Atom is dead.

Monday: Hey, remember how in Armageddon 2001 #2, Captain Atom turned out to be Monarch? Wait, you DON’T remember it that way? They CHANGED who was going to end up being Monarch? But Darick Robertson’s already drawn these pages that…oh. Oh. That’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

Yeah, I love the future stories where the roster stays exactly the same as in the present, even though the reality of comics means most teams have massive and frequent turnover every few months. And of course future stories can't exactly predict characters who will be created later...

Which is why Days of Future Past entirely featured mutants who existed at the time, and revisiting DoFP later had to explain what happened to the thousands of characters introduced afterwards.

A Justice League with no turnover? Unthinkable.

Having Armageddon 2001 played up for the comedy of this era? Disconcerting. Especially since Captain Atom's story was SO GODDAMNED DARK compared to "lol Rocket Red in Camelot."

As for the Monarch thing? I think we've heard my opinions a few times... ugh.

[scorntx]

Armageddon 2001.
Damn... just... just damn.
Derailing two characters for the price of one.
You can practically hear the brakes squealing as the rewrite hits.

So stupid. All to preserve a twist for... the sake of having a twist?

What was that quote? "Hawk & Dove was a love story. And then one day Hawk went mad and killed Dove."
And from that we got Extent and Zero Hour and Hank being kind of radioactive for the next decade or so.

And of course Geoff Johns would helpfully reveal that it was all Mordru turning Hank evil and insane for... some reason?
Because of course he did.

Some of those expressions in the 2001 bits... PG looks way too chipper about the thought of Captain Atom having sacrificed himself.
I know the JLE tend to be fractious, but still! Yeesh!
(and here I thought Karen and Nate liked each other...)


Camelot, World War 2, the Wild West, Victorian London (with actually real Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper), somewhere in the Mesozoic Era...
Guess that time machine was set to "cliché".
Thank goodness no-one ended up in Roman Italy or Ancient Egypt.

So, Ralph's shining moment, borrowing H.G. Wells' time machine to search through time and regather the lost JLE, is rendered meaningless by the observation effect (and I'm guessing also entirely off-screen).
Yup, that tracks for this era's Ralph.
"Sorry, Ralph, you could've been useful for once. But now you won't."
*cue sad trombone noise*

Silver Sorceress is lucky this was 1992. Just a year or two later and rather than Inexplicably Honking Sauropods, she'd have probably wound up facing a velociraptor.

[metadronos]

Why, in that potential future, did General Glory (presumably) make PG get a Guy haircut? I don't recall Ernie having had one. And why has PG visibly aged so much; don't Kryptonians have much longer life spans than humans and therefore an ageing process that scales accordingly?


Wells: "Tell me, what do you think of Kipling?"
Ralph: "I wouldn't know.. I never Kippled! Ha ha!"
Wells: "I wish I'd said that, Ralph."
Ralph: "You will, H.G. You will."

[tcampbell1000]

Ernie had a Moe Howard bowl cut in most of his appearances--although, confusingly, not all of them: Ty Templeton doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. It is heavily implied that Guy patterned his haircut after Ernie's even when he believed the General and Ernie were just comic-book characters.

In another bit I had to cut from JLA ANNUAL #5, the Justice League International of ten years in the future has to cope with the General's weird sartorial requirements:

AQUAMAN: General--We're all happy to serve in the new League--but don't you think these Ernie haircuts are taking things a bit too far--?
GUY: Ernie haircuts? I thought they were Guy Gardner haircuts!
VAPOR: Don't flatter yourself, Guy.

As for Kara's aging, at the time this story was written, she was allegedly Atlantean, not Kryptonian. In Giffen stories from the 2000s, where characters like Blue Beetle and Guy actually have aged a little, she looked pretty much the same.

[huntleyhaverstock]

Yeah, I'm still mad about this. Barbara and Karl Kesel's HAWK & DOVE was just flat-out great superhero comics: long-simmering subplots, a terrific (and vast!) supporting cast, and a great pair of heroes who were allowed to evolve beyond their bare-bones concept. Trashing them both, and all of the Kesels' hard work, for the sake of a last-minute rethink in a dumb crossover? No thank you.

[beyondthefringe]

Right there with you. I’ll die mad about this one.

[remial]

you and me both

[the_engineer]

Me three.

[thanekos]

Giffen doing broad-strokes parody in JLI is expected, and Sherlock Holmes is certainly as fair a target for it as anyone else, but the egotism still rings hollow when you remember bits like The Yellow Face, the frank self-criticism from the ends of ..The Crooked Man/.. the Lion's Mane, or .. the Greek Interpreter's " Yes, my brother's more perceptive than me. "

(..the Retired Colourman even involves a professional rival - Holmes calls him " hated ", but clearly not seriously.)

[mazway_75]

I'll never understand why DC didn't just go on with Cap as Monarch. It was 1991, the Internet wasn't a thing, not many would have even known about the leak.

[scorntx]

Mixed feelings.
On the one hand, with hindsight it does feel a little like they should've just stuck with the original decision. Publish and be damned.
Might've saved a bit of bother, at least.
But the decision to try and turn Captain Atom into cut-price 90s Doctor Doom itself is still terrible.

(and with Captain Atom, even if they had stayed with it, it probably wouldn't have stuck for long anyway before the next writer came along and just do their own take with him, and everyone could've just pretended it never happened.)

[llordllama]

Ah Armageddon 2001, the first big crisis-crossover-thingy I collected and read in real-time rather than buying up years later. I'll always have a soft spot for it, but yeah, even as a fan of Captain Atom at the time I'd have been happy enough for him to become Monarch. Made more narrative sense than a second-stinger like Hawk.

I will also confess to loving Giffen's super shadowy art style in this period, so nice to see it making an appearance in the annual. Probably a large reason why I loved the Legion 5YL period too.

[zylly]

Not to mention Hawk and Dove had previously been shown in their own annual as the only heroes Monarch definitely couldn’t be.

Cap is an extremely logical choice. He’s got enough of authoritarian impulses that it adds up nicely with the right push.

I recall hearing the twist got leaked, but it’s not so much a leak as a logical conclusion, especially once you start eliminating the possibilities who have their own book or who otherwise don’t make sense. This is a twist for a twist’s sake.

[tcampbell1000]

I'm not here to tell anyone how to feel about this, but I think many of us would agree, if grudgingly, that Hank Hall had villain potential. Best I could tell, that was the point of his character; that he was more of a rageaholic than the average Hulk--or at least could become one--without the countervailing influence of a Dove to tamp him down. The Hulk has villain potential for the same reason!

So while Dove is an especially egregious fridging, I see the logic up to Monarch thinking "kill Dove, then let Hawk kill me and it will unlock the villain within." That much tracks.

It's the notion that Hank would become Monarch specifically that falls apart when you look at it for more than a minute. Monarch is a fascistic, controlling master planner. I don't care how much Hank wants to "show Dove" what he's capable of: he's not gonna be able to become one of those. He's gonna try his "common sense" approach to ruling the world, it's not gonna work, and he's gonna fly off the handle three times a week and kill and kill until the only people left are terrified sycophants, and not too many of them, either.

I mean, never mind that we've moved up the timetable on Monarch taking over from 2001 to 1992, so the whole "time's a circle" aspect of the story wouldn't work even if Hank could spontaneously grow some patience. Never mind that this all hinges on technology Hank has shown no ability to understand! Bottom line, this was such a mismatch for his character that by the end of the issue, he was spouting dialogue indistinguishable from any other generic villain DC's ever published, because giving him any lines that reflected who he was would've just made the forced nature of the plot even more obvious.

[wizardru]

This is even worse than I remembered. One thing that is missing here is the final issue of Hawk and Dove where they shoehorned this into like a page and a half to accomdate this travesty and it was painfully transparent that no thought had gone into it. It was a 'uuuhhhh....quick, end the comic NOW!' And this was only done so they could rob Dove of any agency and then make Hank the Big Bad...which was incredibly dumb. Captain Atom made sense - if he loses his ethical perspective, he becomes a Superman level threat. If Hank flys off the handle....well, is Blue Beetle or Booster Gold busy this afternoon?