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…

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?

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)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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)

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.

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)

If done well you can have it both ways…

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).

But that’s just me. DiDio SUX, man.

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.

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.