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JLE #30 (Giffen-Jones-Robertson) begins with a dream sequence that’d disorient you whether you’d read Armageddon 2001 or not. In “Breakdowns Part 5,” Captain Atom was alive and well and being reinstated to the League, so you’d expect that to still be the case at the start of “Breakdowns Part 6.”

But if you had read A2001, you would’ve seen Captain Atom “dying” a hero and future Captain Atom as a mournful, crazed victim.

You would not have seen Captain Atom become a crazed villain who slaughtered all his friends to seize power. But that was the original plan for Armageddon 2001, and knowing that gives Catherine’s dream here some context. Without it, this is a weird interlude best explained as “grief churns up some unexpected emotions.”

Catherine and Cap, at this point, had acknowledged the sexual tension between them but agreed not to act on it. She’d wanted to go to “friends with benefits” and he couldn’t really handle that (Captain Atom #41)…

After an intervening adventure, they got things settled between them...ish... in Captain Atom #44…

But there were still charged feelings in the air, so it’s no surprise that this loss hit Catherine hard. Even if you can’t reciprocate right then, if someone seems like they could love you and then dies…well.

The others express their own stunned reactions in a page that, unlike the Cath dream sequence, was fixable with rewritten dialogue:

The original was probably Rex saying something about being glad the Monarch version of Captain Atom had kicked it too. At any rate, that’s all the time the JLE gets to discuss Cap before they respond to a new crisis. “Never ends, do it, West?” says Metamorpho to Flash. “I mean, we don’t get time ta grieve. Nuthin’.”

That new crisis is the War of the Gods, now in full swing. Even by superhero-comic standards, this is an insane pileup of crossover stuff. The League was in their own 15-part crossover…before Armageddon 2001 disrupted it…and now War of the Gods is here to disrupt the disruption. A2001 “killed off” one of the central characters in “Breakdowns” 1-5, whereas War of the Gods will just put the others on a hamster wheel for a bit. It’s sure a good thing that disruption is the whole theme of “Breakdowns” to begin with, huh?

Power Girl is missing from this issue because a voice in her head called her away from the embassy in War of the Gods #1 (George Perez, Russel Braun, and Cynthia Martin):

And now, in #2 (same creators), she finds herself fighting alongside Aquaman, her flight powers restored due to somebody not telling Perez that--sorry, due to the level of divine magic charging the atmosphere and resonating with her Atlantean heritage. Sure.

Meanwhile, Ice has suffered a family reunion more painful than Thanksgiving 2016:

Ah, yes, because if you really want a physical battle won, you don’t turn to Thor, you turn to Loki. I remember that from the first Avengers flim. Or maybe it was Sandman. Anyway, this is where the JLE #31 narrative slots in.

The battle annoys the Norse gods enough that Loki pulls out a cheat code.

Yep, J’Onn is referencing this part of the original Justice League of America’s origin story:

Another homage to that scene would hit this very title, half a year later:

The Norse gods’ disappearance (and the sudden fadeout of their magic) fits into the larger tapestry of War of the Gods. Short version: Circe’s manipulating various pantheons (panthea?) to reboot the universe in her image, because no one’s told her this is DC Comics and that if she just waits a few more years, a reboot will break out on its own. Perez, Braun, and Martin take a little time in War of the Gods #2 to give Ice some closure:

Back home at the embassy, the JLE grumbles about how incomprehensible that adventure was to them, and, fair. Discussion shifts to who will be field leader in place of Cap. But Catherine walks up, as if in a trance, to tell them that question is no longer a pressing one.

Darick Robertson deserves credit here: that expression is just right for a newly unemployed person who was already sleep-deprived from nightmares when the bosses called her in. Don’t ask how I know that.

Too bad the cover kind of gives away the surprise...

P.S.: Catherine would not get much focus after the Giffen-DeMatteis era, but she would last long enough to see the Captain come back from the presumed dead. However, later stories either misrepresented their relationship (as in Extreme Justice #7-8, 1995, her last and worst on-panel appearance) or ignored it (as in Justice League International v2 #67, 1994, below).