Comic Book Resources

As Rosalie Aprile put it on The Sopranos this past season, “DUH!”

The JLI characters are, in the eyes of the folks running DC into the ground, guilty of the one truly unforgivable sin: Taking superhero comics less seriously than DiDio, Rucka, Johns, et al. Never mind the fact that there’s more realism and heart in one page of I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Justice League than in every issue of whatever overblown crossover DC’s publishing or building up to this month…

Absolutely.

Oh god, the JLI conspiracy again…
I do like how you worded it, though. Not quite as… conspiratorial… as others have put it.
I just think, that of all the artists and writers in the entire world to choose from, Keith Giffen would not be anchoring ’52′ if DC editorial really had such a grudge against his JLI.

I don’t think current DC editorial hates the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League so much as they just hate anything that’s remotely fun and rape-free.

And Giffen himself said to kill ‘em all, or so the story goes.

The whole reason those characters got thrown in the book in the first place was because they were expendable and nobody else wanted to do anything with them. I tend to agree, though, with what Didio and others have said — if they really didn’t like those characters, they’d just not do anything with them. They’ve done quite a bit with Ralph Dibny between Identity Crisis and 52, and while his life isn’t exactly happy, I can’t imagine they’d spend so much time on a character they didn’t like.

Seems to me like they would just ignore those characters if they didn’t like them, rather than involve them in a lot of big series, as Steve Pheley said. The line of thought that DiDio et al hate these characters reminds me of people saying that DC hated Hal Jordan–if they did, why did they make him the major player in several crossovers? The writers must find them interesting enough to write about; boring characters don’t have stories to tell. It’s also more fun to put characters through their paces than hand them life on a silver platter.

No, not at all. “They” are not overly fond of them and/because these characters do not fit too well into the currently prevailing understanding of the DCU. (another example might be all those gun-carrying Wildstorm/earl-Image-y folks that used to run around)
That in turn makes them expendable or open to a radical make-over.

I don’t “think”, I’m SURE of it!

A LOT of guys at DC (be them creators or editors) have
always vocalized their distaste for the “funny” version
of JL. Heck, Giffem himself has said in numerous
interviews that he got a lot of trouble with people at
DC because of it.

And lok at the latest DiDio interview at Newsarama
(talking about Booster Gold’s death). The guy is almost
frothing at the mouth when he talks about that Justice
League! No, seriously, just read it. His despise for the
book and the characters is clear.

And Steve, the characters went underused for a long time
(and when they were used, they had to go through things
like Blue Beetle’s heart condition – which did NOT come
from Giffen and co!). But in the modern-day fanboy-like
mentality of the comics industry, it’s not good enough
to ignore the characters. No, they have to be killed in
the goriest way possible!

No wonder I’m buying more and more manga and european
comics every day…

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

Yes and no. It’s true that every time this comes up, Didio and the rest swear up and down that there’s no vendetta against the Giffen/DeMatteis league, and I think there’s no animus towards that team roster per se. What there definitely seems to be, however, is a near-vitriolic loathing of any character that’s light-hearted or fun. Didio will always offer his qualified defense of the Giffen era, saying that it “started out very dark” with the Gray Man and Max Lord’s murder and so on. But it’s pretty obvious that the more light-hearted and funnier the series became, the more Didio hated it. These characters are actively being punished for not taking the tights-and-underwear genre as deathly serious as current fashion dictates.

Not that they’re the only ones. Look at what’s being done to Captain Marvel and Plastic Man. There’s nothing worse than silly people who have decided to take themselves seriously.

Yes.

I don’t think it’s any sort of vendetta or conspiracy, but it does seem like a case of needing cannon fodder and letting an oft-stated animus towards “lighter” fare influence the choice of victim.

It’s more outside writing and lack of creativity than anything else.

i think that they see the JLI as a metaphor for the vocal internet fanbase, the ones that think they have an ownership in character development and company wide editorial decisions.

over the past few years, booster and ted seemed to be all about getting respect from the heroes at large – read dc editorial. they were dismissed at every turn. ted even died after asking for help, which he never got.

i do not see a hatred for the JLI, i just see that a specific, very vocal, fan base has entrenched them into a corner with hoe they want them portrayed. they want more JLI stories, which obviously does not fly in the new ‘DC nation’.

i have seen/heard many fans saying that any writer other than griffen does not get/understand/wtfever them. so pretty much most of the JLI’s fanbase – at least the vocal faction – want them to stay one way when as DC is obviously growing and shifting the JLIers are no longer necessary to tell stories – some good, some very bad.

i would love to see more of the JLI in JLA classified arcs. this way they could tell lost stories of the entire team of just blue and gold team ups.

so no, i do not think the editorial dictate is destroy the JLI ‘because i hated them’, but more we need to bring all the lines together and weed out what is no longer relevant.

and just because ted and booster are dead does not mean that we have seen the last of them — i mean they have to publish them in some ways or lose their rights to them.

Yes and no. I think 52 had the best and true-to-the-spirit-of-the-original treatment of Booster Gold in quite some time, so in some ways I don’t think it’s a full-on hate toward the old JLI. But I do agree that there’s a general tonal shift at DC toward the fun characters. (I’m absolutely dreading Trials of Shazam…) And yet, that said, Morrison’s Batman is the most fun I’ve seen with the character in about 15 years and it’s glorious, so maybe it’s not all bad.

Nah.

If there’s a “conspiracy” at all, it’s a plan to kill off minor characters as part of big events.

The JLI characters have been used because a.) they’re minor enough to be killed off, but b.) well-loved enough to have an emotional impact on the reader.

If you look at DC’s recent output, many of the non A/B list characters have gotten the shaft. The difference is that readers care more about the JLI characters than they do about say, Jade or Pantha.

I’ve nothing but contempt for Didio and what he’s currently doing with regards the JLI, but the below random line I saw on a forum says it best:

“However, even if Booster does come back, I fully expect him to die again later. Killing a Super Buddy twice would be just too tempting for the current DC to pass up!”

Yeah, what everybody said.

Comics apparently aren’t allowed to be fun anymore. Instead, they must be “realistic.” And apparently “realism” = “dark/cynical/gritty/rapey” or whatever.

I hate seeing good concepts and characters go to waste needlessly.

Then again, the JLI was “my” Justice League, much like the Satellite era was Meltzer and Co.’s, so there you go.

The Giffen/DeMatteis period is the only period of all the Justice League incarnations I really like.

Beyond those I mostly have some of the JLA/JSA crossovers.

Why can’t comics be both fun & serious?
Silly and srious?
Griity & light?

etc.

I love the 60′s Batman show–and the movie they did of it is a part of my DVD collection.

But I also love Batman Begins and the gritty comics done of Batman–

Why is there this false dichotomy that we can only enjoy one or the other?

First I thought yes, than no- I thought “Well, maybe the JLI is being targetted as a metaphor for the encroaching darkness of Infinite Crisis”, or it was just coincidence- but they’ve just been piling it on. Actions speak louder than words. So, yeah.

That said, I will qualify it by agreeing that it seems to be more about making all the “funny book” characters more serious, hence Young Justice and the Teen Titans get pulled in too, and Plastic Man and G’nort are set to be seriousified, etc. The JLI’s just the focal point.

Which isn’t any less stupid- if anything, it’s more so, because it means DC doesn’t want a variety of tones in its main universe books. Everything has to be “serious yet heroic”, comedy limited to the occasional interlude. Didio tries to justify this by pointing at sales figures for the Kyle Baker PLASTIC MAN, spinning the sales for YOUNG JUSTICE, etc.

Oh man, I forgot about Gnort getting “serious”. They might as well rename him Contradiction Dog and be done with it.

Animosity towards characters? No. Animosity towards tone? No.

And it’s not over yet. Apparently, Marvel feels “Damage Control” needs to be brought in line with the new “superheroes is serious business” mode of thinking.

I agree with those who argue that it’s less about hating the JLI specifically and more about burning down whatever smacks of “lightness” or even ‘reconstructionist” comics. It’s the same thing you’re seeing at Marvel with Millar and Jenkins turning Speedball into some kind of dark and serious character, Bendis unreforming the Gladiator and Jester in Daredevil, and Spider-Man’s eye getting eaten on-panel while the Black Cat gets a rape-tastic new origin.

Reconstruction was the last big fad in comics, so the new “Big Names” are trying to distinguish themselves by burning reconstruction and its superficial return to lightness right to the ground while keeping its curious obsession with superhero minutiae.

If reconstruction was the last major comic trend, does that mean we’re now seeing the rise of “Redeconstruction?”

My feeling is yes, not because of any personal knowledge or pesky fact-based information (hey, I’m admitting it right off the bat, at least) but just from my familiarity with the fan community. Because, while we don’t like to think of it this way, the guys writing comics right now are comic book fans, which means they share some of the same irrational likes and dislikes that we do–only they actually have the power to make their irrational likes and dislikes into “fact”, a power that all too easily goes to people’s heads.

I’ve seen this in ‘Doctor Who’ in the 1990s, when it was run as a book line with an open submissions policy–there were a lot of amazing writers who got their first crack at writing novels for the series (several of them are now writing for the new TV series), but there was also a lot of fan agendas being pushed using the books as their medium. (The most notorious was ‘War of the Daleks’, a book that was written solely to ‘undo’ an episode of the TV series.) The fact of the matter is, while we want to think of the writers as being somehow above all that, they’re fans too, just like us…and don’t we all have a character or two we’d bring back just because we thought their death was stupid, or a character we’d kill off if we could, just because they’re so irritating?

So yes, I do think that somebody doesn’t like the Giffen-era JLI (which isn’t the same as not liking Giffen, by the by.) And yes, I think that after the publication of ‘Formerly Known as the Justice League’, they probably did push an agenda to bump off those characters so we wouldn’t see another series like that. Obviously, it’s my belief against their sworn word, but it just feels too in keeping with fan psychology, and over the last thirty years, fan psychology and pro psychology have become pretty much the same.

If dislike did play a part, is that really anything to be ashamed of? Just because it upsets the fanboys doesn’t mean it’s a bad story, by any means. What was being done with Max Lord, Blue Beetle, Ralph Dibney or any of them before this started? Terrible miniseries? Wow, what a loss.

Why is there this idea that some characters must be allowed to remain a joke, when the jokes aren’t funny any more? Look at She-Hulk, for instance: in her case, the joke is still working, so it’s still allowed to. But for so many (vocal) fanboys, the JLI crew has to be Giffen or nothing, no matter how bad the effort’s gotten, and that kills the characters just as surely as a bullet to the brainpan.

Why is it all about Giffen? He just plotted the bastards. DeMatteis wrote all the dialogue. It seems like he would be a bigger culprit than Giffen.

But that’s just me. DiDio SUX, man.

Why is it all about Giffen? He just plotted the bastards. DeMatteis wrote all the dialogue. It seems like he would be a bigger culprit than Giffen.

I’d agree with you that it was DeMatteis as much as anyone who put the bwa in the bwa-haha, but “Giffen” is shorter and easier to remember, and so “Giffen/DeMatteis league” becomes shortened to “Giffen league” in the lazy language of internet parlance.

John’s point about creator fannishness is about right, but I think it’s still broader than taking potshots at the JLI. There’s a lot of writers and editors who seem to be insisting that a character is “ruined” if they aren’t taken deathly seriously, and so of course everyone in the Giffen/DeMatteis league is doomed by that premise, as are several characters who started off as fun, light-hearted characters and have more or less kept it up since then (see, once again, the efforts to grittify Plastic Man and Captain Marvel).

Re: post #23- the two miniseries have their fans, myself among them. They were sort of plotless ramblings, but the focus on character pulled them along. From an editorial standpoint they apparently both sold okay (I’ve heard an average of 40,000 issues quoted, though that may be purely apocryphal) and the first won an Eisner.

Both “Formerly Known As The Justice League” and “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Justice League” are pretty amazing, and served as an excellent bookend to the original JLI era. It’s partly because of those series that I can’t get too upset at the grotesque horrors and pointless brutalities visited on the JLI roster: in the end they got a great send-off from the only people that mattered. What irritates me is DC’s stance towards fun and light-hearted characters in general, the notion that anyone and anything tainted by levity has to be purged or remade in the rest of the company’s dour image.

I still say why can’t we have both–DeMatteis also wrote Kraven’s last Hunt–which was quite intense for the time it was published.

If done well you can have it both ways…

Hiss!! 2 said Giffen/DeMatteis!!

I call it the Giffen League because deMatteis
left by the middle of the run and was replaced
by Gerard Jones. At that time, the stories went
even deeper on the humor department, I dare say
that the funniest JLI stories were scripted by
Jones, not deMatteis.

So, Giffen was the only creator present througout
the whole series, hence the “Giffen League”
nickname. It’s shorter than calling it the
Giffen/deMatteis/Jones League…

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

How about just calling it The Awesome League?

DeMatteis only left Justice League Europe to be replaced by Gerry Jones.

DeMatteis stayed on Justice League America right until the last issue (#60).

DeMatteis left JLE after #8, to be replaced temporarily by Bill Loebs. Gerry Jones took the book over with JLE #15, which actually marked one of the most serious plots during Giffen’s tenure on the titles. Gerry Jones DID have some funny issues, though, in the next 21 issues, but I don’t think any of them would rank up there with the funniest Justice League stories.

Could have sworn that deMatteis left both books, I stand
corrected.

Anyway, since the “european” team is as part of that
Justice League era as the “american” team, my point still
stands: Keith Giffen was the only creator involved in all
Justice League comics of that era.

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

To agree with everyone else in the world, DC is repurposing its line to make each title “relevant” in tone – i.e. life and death situations, angst, et. al.

The old JLI is simply in the way.

(Still don’t know why they just didn’t bring Blue Beetle back to his Ditko roots – DC could use a Spider-Man and the Charlton BB probably wouldn’t have fallen into Maxwell Lord’s trap!)

There are a few exceptions, like the All-New Atom, but on the whole the DC Universe is darker than ever – even if many of their heroes are less jerky!

I don’t think the things that have happened to JLI characters are due to any animosity or general dislike of the Giffen/DeMatteis era, but, rather, that the people in charge at DC know that the JLI has (had?) established characters (without solo books) that are fairly well known by the fandom and if these characters are killed the fandom will react. If DiDio and company really had it out for the JLI, the JLI would have been punched out of existence along with Black Canary helping to found and name the first League.

It’s not that “Formerly Known As” and “I Can’t Believe” are bad books, it’s just that they lack the deep charm of the books they were trying to recall. They seemed artificial. It’s like, for want of a better analogy, a former SNL cast member coming back to host the show once they’ve moved on and done a few movies – they may resurrect some of their old characters, and we laugh and enjoy it because it’s good to see them after so long, but it’s never quite the same.

It’s not a weird cheerleader, it’s Will Ferrell trying to play a weird cheerleader. And it’s not a funny JL, it’s Giffen/DeMatteis trying to write a funny JL. If that makes sense.

Fortress keeper wrote-”DC could use a Spider-Man”

Agreed–and make no mistake–in his solo book he was–and I loved it.
They even had a former Spidey team on the book at one point.

And Spidey is a great example of a character that can have a wacky issue one month and a gritty one the next-light then intense–and they both worked in the right hands.

I never fail to be amazed at how much fans overrate characters like Booster Gold and Blue Beetle – who hadn’t been able to hold their own series for a LOOOONG time. And why? Because they participated in a good series 20 years ago, and in a couple of “revival” miniseries a while back? Should that guarantee some sort of immunity? I don’t think so. Lots of secondary characters have participated in interesting series in the past, and haven’t inspired this kind of outrage when they were killed; but not the JLI, no way no how. Because they were “funny”, it seems. I guess Ambush Bug is untouchable, then.

The truth is that Blue Beetle and Booster Gold were killed for the same basic reason that led them to Giffen’s JLI: they were expendable second-stringers. Just as secondary as most the original JLI, with the honourable exceptions of Batman and J’onn J’onzz, who were there to serve as “straight men” to all the funny second-stringers. Giffen and DeMatteis used second-stringers in that book because those were the only kind of characters over whom Giffen and DeMatteis would have control: so we got loads of old/forgotten “second banana” heroes joining the JLI, like Doctor Light II, IceMaiden, Green Fire and BlueJay, because with them the writers had freedom. And the series worked with that formula, but it didn’t magically transform any of those second-stringers into actual stars – Ted Kord Blue Beetle wasn’t given a solo book again (despite all the thousands of weeping fans who began announcing their undying love for Blue Beetle immediately after he died), Fire never got her own series either, not to mention General Glory and Maxima. The only JLI character who eventually ‘graduated’ to a solo book, which didn’t last long, was Guy Gardner; the rest of ‘em were second-stringers before JLI and continued to be second-stringers after it ended, but now they could add one (1) successful team book to their feeble resumés. Since then, what other successful projects have they been in? After the JLI’s cancellation, how many series were successful thanks to Blue Beetle’s apparently-vast fanbase? Uh, only the two “revival” JL miniseries. Apart from that, Blue Bettle was the same unimportant supporting-actor that he had always been, no writer wanted to use Booster Gold in anything, Fire only appeared in megacrossover group-shots, and so on.

Let’s keep it real, folks: JLI was good not because Blue Beetle was a particularly inspired character, but because it was a well-written book; and Blue Beetle was only there because he was a available property that nobody wanted to use when the team was formed, so Giffen/DeMatteis could make whatever they wanted with him: give him a pot-belly, then put him in a diet, or have him start some goofy get-rich-quick scheme with Booster Gold, another unwanted secondary character the writers ‘picked up’. If Booster and Beetle hadn’t been available when the JLI was formed, Giffen would simply have used OTHER forgotten/secondary DC heroes who were available at the time, like Judomaster and Black Lightning. Blue Beetle was never a star or a real fan-favorite, no matter what his legion of post-mortem fans say – and his books’ sales prove it. Blue Beetle was killed because A) he WAS expendable, like it or not, and B) his death would create a lot of buzz among the fans and consequently help sales, which it undeniably did.

Mind you, I LOVED the JLI series, and I’ve enjoyed both ‘revival’ series. But I can see that the series’ magic came not from the characters, but from the writers, who temporarily turned pointless/generic secondary characters into interesting ones. But Fire was never that interesting outside JLI, Beetle was never a really successful character anywhere but in JLI, and Maxwell Lord wasn’t such a great character either. Let’s not allow nostalgia to color our perceptions.

That’s not to say that I liked seeing these characters die. But it’s not such a big deal either, no memorable characters were lost or anything. The Beetle I like reading about is still on the pages of my JLI collection, just as I can still find Simonson’s armored/bearded Thor (my all-time favorite version of the Thunder God) in all those brilliant comics Walt Simonson gave us.

If DC wasn’t targeting former JLI members, why did Max
Lord and even friggin’ Rocket Red got targeted? I mean,
instead of Rocket Red it could have been ANY character,
but it was him!

And, as you said, you can read them on the pages of your
JLI collection. Yeah, the ONLY one (except for the modern
day revivals). Back on the day, before the current TPB
mania, there were TWO collections. If DC didn’t have
anything against the run, why aren’t them reprinting it?
It was their best selling book for a few years!

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

All I know is, I’m looking at my collection of JLI comics and my collection of more recent JLA comics. Lemme see, which one is more interesting to read…yep, its gotta be the dour, miserable, “WE ARE TEH HEROES and even our craps are noble” comics.

I am, of course, lying through my teeth.

I also love how it says in one of the recent comics somewhere that this latest incarnation will be “the greatest league ever assembled” and all that garbage.

I hate when comic writers insist on inserting stuff like that because it makes no sense. Am I to assume that when the current league inevitably disbands there’s no point buying the next gen comics, because the next team will be suckier than this one?

Well Hammerheart–Beetle was big part of the reason I checked out the JLI run by Giffen & DeMatteis–the early issues had hints of what was to follow but they were more straight forward and the zaniness creot in slowly–this may have always been the plan.

But Beetle was a big part of the reason I started reading and a big part of why I kept reading them.

other than the Giffen/DeMatteis era I don’t have a lot of Justice League books–mostly the old JLA/JSA crossovers as I loved those–I really enjoyed Earth 2.

SO while I may be an exception to your theory–rest assured an eception exists…