Last Call: JUSTICE LEAGUE 3000, BLUE BEETLE, SCOOBY-DOO APOCALYPSE

[tcampbell1000]

107 of 108. Warning for gruesome death.

At the same time Giffen and DeMatteis were doing Larfleeze, they were putting out Justice League 3000 with JLA veteran artist Howard Porter. The series (later renamed Justice League 3001) involves an attempt to reconstruct the original Justice League, 1000-ish years in the future. But the restoration of their powers and personalities is far from perfect (3000 #1).

I wish I could give this series a heartier recommendation overall. It has a lot of fun moments, and Giffen and DeMatteis deliver some genuinely shocking twists. I won’t spoil them all, but here are a couple from the early issues (#2, #4)…

Somewhat less shockingly, they find more and more excuses to bring in old JLI characters. Beetle and Booster just turn up in a couple of stasis tubes, having somehow stumbled into them about two days after the end of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League” (#12)…

Ice and Fire appear in a complicated variation on the “Ice in Hell” plot from that same arc…

If this conflict resolution feels a bit…sudden, we’ll get back to that.

Guy Gardner gets reconstituted in a female body. After a little while, “he” starts identifying more female, which looks at first like a retrograde approach to gender issues (3001 #2)…

…but is in fact the personality of the original owner of the body reasserting herself, meaning Guy’s mind was facing a terminal diagnosis. Under those circumstances, the macho bluster of “classic Guy” starts looking more like pure courage (#5).

On paper, this sounds great: Giffen and DeMatteis finally given license to combine the classic Justice League with their classic JLI and do whatever they want. They also bring in Supergirl, future-Firestorm, future-Harley Quinn…even Larfleeze and a wiser, sadder G’Nort before all is said and done.

Yeah, it sounds great. But the series often feels disjointed, as if key scenes were missing. Some conflicts lack a proper beginning and most lack a proper ending. The Ice/Fire storyline had a lot of potential but was derailed with no buildup to restore their classic dynamic, as seen above. Some characters just vanish from the narrative altogether, which Giffen and DeMatteis acknowledge in the series’ self-owning final panel (#12).

That said, Giffen tried to tie some of it up elsewhere. A couple of JL3K characters make it into his second run on Blue Beetle. That series also includes the semi-retired Ted Kord, who’d never died in post-Flashpoint continuity but still had heart issues to worry about. DeMatteis joined Giffen for the end of that run, and they channeled some of their old energy without forgetting Jamie Reyes was the star of the book (Blue Beetle v9 #12)…

When last seen, the remaining members of the JL3K are gearing up to fight the mega-powerful tyrant Lady Styx, who exists in the present day as Jamie’s enemy La Dama. (Giffen had also worked with Styx in 52, for which he provided the layouts.) Will they win? That battle has not been recorded (#13).

Giffen and DeMatteis’ last major engagement for DC had nothing to do with the DC Universe proper. Scooby Apocalypse features versions of the Scooby gang facing a world with a population transformed into man-eating monsters. As in Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated, the most subversive thing you can do with these characters is put them in a story that isn’t pure camp. From a concept by Jim Lee, but as you'd expect, G&D make the story their own pretty quickly.

This one has some of what JL3K did: bold reimaginings of established characters, a wild anything-can-happen premise, and a solid visual start with artist Howard Porter. (The closing artists…Colleen Doran for JL3K and Pat Oliffe for SA…are great, too.) It also has what JL3K lacks: straightforward storytelling with no missing pieces and a solid conclusion that ties everything together.

Sad to say, Giffen left that conclusion in DeMatteis’ hands as his health worsened: his last issue was #31 of the series’ 36. But he and DeMatteis left one hell of a legacy, far beyond even the collabs shown here. Giffen’s work on Legion and L.E.G.I.O.N. Lobo. Ambush Bug. The backbone of 52. On DeMatteis’ end, “Kraven’s Last Hunt” and “Going Sane” and so many other Batman and Spider-Man stories, including the just-completed Spider-Man ’94, and lots more besides that. He’s still with us; his online presence is here.

Best wishes to both you beautiful mensches. Thanks for all the great times.

Saturday: As we bring this retrospective to a dignified(?) close, we focus on a handful of 2020s stories that have carried on the JLI’s legacy, one way or another. Y’know how some movies end with “Where The Characters Are Now” stories just before the credits roll? It’s like that.

Comments

[metadronos]

Shaggy here looks so much like Green Arrow I was half-expecting him to go on a self-righteous rant while Scoobs rolled his eyes and said, "Ruh-oh." 😁

As for the JL3K dealie, I'm glad that these versions of Batman and Superman turned out ( a ) not to actually be them, but poor genetically-engineered approximations of them, and ( b ) that once they learned the truth about themselves they seem to have gotten along just fine. The whole "Bats vs. Supe" thing was fresh when Miller first did it in TDKR and Byrne, to a rather more downplayed extent, in Man of Steel around the same time. But much like "dark, brooding, treats allies like crap" Batman, it's been... "overdone" is too mild a word for it. Give me heroes who, for all their differences in outlook and approach, are at bottom decent, mature folks who always remember their true enemy is crime, not each other.

[thanekos]

JL3K's tone at least seems to be allowing for " Batman's as much of a ridiculous ass as the rest of them, he just thinks he's the sane one. "

[blues32]

I thought Superman 3000 couldn't fly and had to be reminded of this fact constantly. He seems to be flying here.

[tcampbell1000]

I think he's just leaping around.

[metadronos]

I wonder if he was limited to leaping "an eighth of a mile," as in the earliest Superman comics. 🙂 (Always wondered why it was an eighth of a mile and not simply a mile.)

[juliusceasetheorange]

One, Thank you so much for doing this. The JLI was the justice league I grew up with, and the one punch was one of the first league books I can recall reading. The entire retrospective has been a wild ride, and I love these two as creators.

Two, I just realized who it was that was posting this, and I gotta say, I'm a huge faan, love your work.

[tcampbell1000]

Ha, thanks!

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Work?

Like here? Or elsewhere?

[alan2099]

I enjoyed most of the stuff they did, but I could never get into Scooby Apocalypse. None of the characters ever really felt right to me, I hated Shaggy's redesign, and the whole things just felt too mean spirited to me.

[tcampbell1000]

Fair, but having gone through it all, I don't think it's mean-spirited. The protagonists take a long time to reach a state of grace, but they each get to a good end.

[mastermahan]

Wait, Lady Styx, the horrifying cosmic abomination with an army of space zombie cultists... turned out to be La Dama, crime lord of El Paso and his friend Brenda's aunt?

Didn't see that coming.

You're not skipping Giffen and DeMatteis's The Authority: Lost Year because I used the allowed page count for their JLI "crossover", are you? Because I'll happily go back and delete that to free it up for you.

[cainofdreaming]

Another weird thing about that? Lady Styx has also appeared in the modern era.

[tcampbell1000]

I had thought Giffen and DeMatteis' team-up on The Authority was a one-off and thus skippable. It's actually a...two-off? Most of it's billed as a Giffen-Morrison collab, it's a bit complicated. I'll probably end up mentioning it in the last installment, I'm already running long on that one so might as well!

[mastermahan]

The whole Lost Year thing is complicated, but those two issues are very much Giffen and DeMatteis riffing on their JLI work, with some self-satire thrown in.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Wow, the end is here, eh? Part of me wants to say "already?"

It's been one hell of a ride, and a wonderful one at that. I haven't always had time to read so many of these long posts in a week, but I read them anyway, and looked forward to them.

Thanks for sharing all of this. It's opened my eyes to an era and stories and characters and writers I never really gave much thought to before. Now I just want to read more of all of it. Hopefully I'll be blessed with the time and the money someday!