scans_daily

Part 95b of 105.

When I started looking into this, I believed Countdown to Infinite Crisis #1 was the first story to suggest Max was a straight-up bad guy, even after his ordeal with the sentient computer. This is not true. His last appearance in JLA, in 1996, is at least ambiguous…

And two John Ostrander stories in 2000 and 2001 also tinkered with Max’s moral alignment, one much more blatantly than the other.

Ostrander had rendered a smooth-talking but basically likable Max a couple of times before this, as shown earlier in this retrospective. The first rendition, in Justice League International #13 and Suicide Squad #13, was a close collab with Giffen and DeMatteis. The second, in Hawkworld #23, ran while G&D were still on the title.

The stories sampled below are set during Giffen and DeMatteis’ run but came out in the quiet period when Max had otherwise vanished. Both are hard to place in continuity, picking and mixing details from different points in JLI history. 2001’s JLA: Incarnations #6, “Buddies,” with Val Semeiks on art, is rooted in earlier material but mixes in some later ideas.

It’s the era of Rumaan Harjavti and Guy Gardner’s “nice” phase, so Max doesn’t have his powers yet. But we have Beetle and Booster trapped in a Bialyan prison betore the other time they got trapped in a Bialyan prison, after skimming League funds before the other time they skimmed League funds. And in this telling, Booster is the chaos agent and Beetle’s the straight man.

Harjavti releases a tourism ad targeted to American supervillains, hoping some of them will stay and take advantage of Bialya’s policies. Policies like “free money laundering” and “no extradition treaties.” This would increase Bialya’s power base in the superpowered arms race. It’s not a bad plan! So it’s a little dubious that Harjavti came up with it.

Harjavti’s English isn’t even as good as it seems, according to Batman: “Intonation suggests he learned it phonetically.” Batman also has a plan for dealing with this, but…

They “borrow” some League money to pose as money-laundering villains, and Beetle pulls off a lot of tech wizardry to make the heist happen. It might have worked if not for the uncanny foresight of Harjavti’s assistant Geoffrey Ffoukes, who has a trap waiting for them. Ffoukes is almost certainly masterminding the tourism plan, too.

This is the part where Max gets a little meaner, but I can see it from him. It’s still not as mean as he got the other time League funds got stolen.

Batman agrees with Guy…let that sink in…and tailors his original plan slightly to make it a rescue mission.

Batman’s plan goes off without a hitch: soon the supervillains are rioting, and a desperate Bialya is requesting the Justice League’s assistance in quelling them. Beetle and Booster are freed as part of the bargain.

Ffoukes makes the easy mistake of just slightly underestimating Harjavti…

…leaving a power vacuum the Queen Bee will later exploit.

Ostrander also throws in a scene that might explain why Ice showed so much patience with Guy later.

One imagines that Ice, at this point, has not met many men who prefer her to the ever-peacocking Fire. It’s not the deepest compliment, no, but Guy’s trying his best! I dunno, it works for me. We’re still got Guy’s squirmiest scene ahead of us; I figured I’d share a cute one.

But we’re getting off track. Compare and contrast “Double Stuff,” 2000’s Martian Manhunter v2 #24, by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake. It revels in the pranky energy of the JLI at its wildest, but its version of Max is far nastier than ever before.

J’Onn is telling this story as a memory of his time in the League, and the last page suggests he may be making it all up…

But if he is, that would only make its portrayal of Max weirder for those of us who remembered the close friendship J’Onn and Max once enjoyed. This Max thinks of UN reps as “toads,” using his powers to silence their inquiries about his stewardship. (He might be even meaner than his later incarnation, who at least told himself he had respect for ordinary humans.)

He’s not the pressing issue in this story, though…in fact, Ostrander still manages to make him funny. The pressing issue is that Beetle and Booster have pranked J’Onn by buying up all the Oreos/“Chocos” in town, and the withdrawal has made J’Onn…hangry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s hangry.

After the immediate crisis is resolved, Max brings together an intervention. Even Batman joins in on video chat.

I love what Ostrander does with Ice’s purity of spirit here. J’Onn can dismiss everything else, but he can’t look her in the eye and act like he doesn’t care about the danger he might've posed to her. He tells the others to stand back…and shape-shifts the addiction out of himself, growing new cells to replace the addicted ones and expelling the addicted ones en masse. But in so doing, he creates a new problem. The addiction doesn’t want to go. Having already channeled the Hulk, the narrative now channels Venom.

This version of Max may be secretly evil, and boy, did his Wonder Woman obsession (Wonderlust?) foreshadow later developments. But he shares a few traits with “old Max” later versions would lack. He’s funny, he’s aggravated by Booster and Beetle’s antics…and he wants the League healthy and strong. Latter-day Max would look at a rampaging, cookie-addicted J’Onn and think, “Excellent, the strongest Leaguer is addled and discredited, all part of my plan to run this team into the ground, mmyes mmyes.”

I can only speculate what shifts in DC’s environment led to these differences in interpretation. Again, Martian Manhunter’s meaner-Max story was actually published a year before the Harjavti tale. The takeaway is that Max’s darkening proceeded in fits and starts, with no coordinated plan guiding it. Perhaps if the next stories in our retrospective had done better in the marketplace, it would’ve been forgotten altogether.

Saturday: How will the “Justice League Intraborough” of the Bush Jr. era compare to the JLI in the Reagan-Bush Sr. era? Well, the art’ll be a lot more consistent!