Morrison's JLA just exploded with verve. The smallest moments are some of the best.
Green Arrow: "How about Just! One! Pointed! Arrow! Dad!"
The Atom and Green Lantern killing Darkseid.
Batman: "First time I've punched a man with motor neuron disease."
Green Lantern: "Self-doubt? You're throwing self-doubt at me? Dude, I'm from the MTV generation!"

Morrison had an issue narrated by the Red Dart; and another by Luthor. The series was wonderful.
(Except for the JLA/JSA 5th dimension arc, that was terrible.)

Interesting idea on the whole Phoenix idea, tho. But how does that explain Wolverine not picking up his scent? Did he always make sure to stay downwind of him? lol

I know that in the past Magneto was said to have some sort of "latent telepathy" which is why he was immune to Cerebro maybe that's what hid him from Cerebra. With the Phoenix thing I just assumed the Phoenix (the entity not Jean) knew Xorn was Magneto all along and just didn't care. The school needed to be destroyed, Magneto and Xavier had to see they were obsolete so that the "dream" could grow.

Nah.

On the micro-sense, the heroes beat the villains.

On the macro-sense, humanity as a whole moved from needing to be sheltered and protected to, as a collective whole, being able to accept individual power and responsibility. (And loyalty.) Morrison's JLA was always going somewhere - It's just that the main cast of hereos were kind of tangental to the big theme/plot thing.

Sorry, Shelby. I usually like Mark Waid, but I just couldn't enjoy his stories right after Morrison. Waid's JLA was just so traditional, so "back-to-business-as-usual", so "we've-seen-it-all-before". I really loved Grant Morrison's take, and not because Wizard told me so (if I liked everything Wizard praised, I'd be reading a lot of early Image comics).

But yeah, making General Glory a regular was a mistake.

(Well... moreso than usual.)

Had either character only appeared once and then never again, I would remember them far more kindly than I do. G'nort's another pure parody character who would've been twice as funny had we seen him half as much. But, well, not much to be done with that - the problem with comedy in a serial format like comics is that fan feedback can, frankly, encourage creators to drag jokes out long beyond their shelf life.

Cool arguments about how Morrison's and Giffen's Justice Leagues relate to each other.

I also must confess that, for all my mixed feelings for the JLI, I enjoyed it when the titled occasionaly veered from sitcom and entered the terrain of satire. The send-ups of Galactus and Captain America were hillarious, but it was a mistake to keep General Glory around. Satire doesn't work as well when it become part of the regular cast.

But I still remember how General Glory would never stop with his grandiose speeches, even when he was falling to his death! That was one of the times JLI really made me laugh. That, and Mr. Nebula's reaction when he saw Las Vegas. Didn't like the sitcom stuff as much as many people, but loved the satire.

In its way, I think Morrison's run actually casts a light on the Giffen-DeMattheis run and makes it even easier to enjoy in retrospect. Years of lousy stories and the Detroit fiasco had damaged the Justice League's cachet before the Giffen-DeMattheis relaunch, but Morrison's approach showed you how the "classic" League always should have seemed. It made it easier to imagine the long shadow guys like Blue Beetle were caught in, and makes their relationship to J'onn all the more touching for it.

That is a really good point.

Most of the comic properties that were crafted during the Silver Age were created with a two year audience turn-over in mind. Even the best ones had a finite number of unique stories that could emerge from their story-telling engines before they started to repeat. In that sense, comic runs past a certain point are inevitably cyclical. Reach a certain point in the story and almost forces a re-boot to a fresh take on the material unless you are willing to end the story itself. This is true of all the classic Marvels, including the X-Men.

The genius of Morrison is that he writes to that limitation. "New X-Men" takes a lot of cues from Claremont-Byrne but very few of the most frequently copied ones. Suddenly, mutants were weird again. Nobody is going to be drawing soft-core pin-ups of Beak anytime soon. Equally suddenly, Xavier's actually seemed like a school again. There were students everywhere and they behaved like, well, kids. The cast was tight and the soap opera twists were actually twists, not a rehash the Scott Summers/Jean Grey/Wolverine triangle that stopped being fresh during the Disco era.

Oh, and they dressed cool. Wolverine no longer looked like a member of the Village People.

"E is for Extinction" may be one of the five best story arcs that I have ever read. It set up all the themes that Morrison wanted to establish and made it seem like this turn of the wheel would be the last. The X-Men were going to re-visit their old cliches one last time before moving forward. They were actually going to evolve.

Sadly, the title was brutally undermined by wildly inconsistent art. Frank Quietly is, in my opinion, the best artist for Morrison. He managed to find a totally fresh look for the title that was also appropriate. Not easy for a title that has been drawn by so many big name artists, but he did it. I'd wager that this run would rank much even higher had he drawn the majority of it, but he was barely a regular fill-in artist after the second arc. The artists who followed had vastly different styles and did very little to approximate what Quitely had done. A lot of Morrison's writing got lost in the translation and the stories got harder to follow. Worse, some of the art was not just poor story-telling, but ugly as well.

It is too bad, really.

JLA launched just before the giant Silver Age reprint lovefest currently ongoing, so unless you were an older reader or back issue lover, you had never seen that approach to the Justice League before. Where you once had down-to-earth, "blue collar" heroes, there was suddenly a pantheon of Earth-bound gods dealing with threats that could've driven an entire summer crossover in each issue. The approach didn't last, and it's one of the few comics that I will literally just get too tired to read, but it was still amazing and a much-needed palate-cleanser.

In its way, I think Morrison's run actually casts a light on the Giffen-DeMattheis run and makes it even easier to enjoy in retrospect. Years of lousy stories and the Detroit fiasco had damaged the Justice League's cachet before the Giffen-DeMattheis relaunch, but Morrison's approach showed you how the "classic" League always should have seemed. It made it easier to imagine the long shadow guys like Blue Beetle were caught in, and makes their relationship to J'onn all the more touching for it.

Giffen realized that for a threat to be worthy of the Justice League, it needed scale.

A lot of good writers had choked on this over the years. Giffen broke up is big threats (i.e. Despero, the Village of Vampires) with a lot of comedy and character development. By contrast, Morrison treated the JLA like a V12 BMW on the Autobahn and opened the throttle all the way.

Morrison's "JLA" did not let up for 40 issues. There were more awesome super-hero action moments in one issue than in a year of most titles. It honored the Silver-Age tradition of the title by throwing brain bending threats at the characters, instead of problems that could be solved with force. It was constantly, utterly cool.

Howard Porter solid work on nearly every issue. His Image-y style is out-of-date now, but it suited the tone of the title. Porter meets my minimum standard for a Morrison artist in that I understood what was going on most of the time. It also made me happy that his figure work owed something to Mike Sekowsky.

Sadly, my interest in the title flagged as it wore along. The full throttle approach left very little room for characterization. Morrison can do more with a panel here and there than a lot writers can do with a full issue, but it has its limits. This became apparent once he expanded his cast to include lesser known characters. I don't even remember half the characters that got added during the "Strength in Numbers" story. It was still amazing, but I wound up wishing that Morrison would give things some room to breathe.

Instead you had people who were acutely aware of how the mantle handed them was much too big. Much of the humor and character-building that defined that era grew out of the characters trying to cope both with each other and how far below expectations they really were as a Justice League. (And there certainly was character-building-- more than a few of the Giffen-DeMattheis mainstays had little to no personality before their League appearances.)

I do think this is why the extremely silly arcs involving the likes of Manga Khan and Kooey Kooey Kooey damaged the book - once things got too silly, then you lost the uncomfortable tension created by a bunch of self-aware C-listers struggling to be something you could legitimately call a Justice League. The characters began to lose their humanity and felt more two-dimensional.

That said, if they'd simply been the Very Silly Superteam from the start, then I don't think the run would have the same appeal - there wouldn't be that sense of underdog nobodies trying to make themselves a Justice League out of pure pluck and effort, while demonstrating the weaknesses, vices, and frailties that are quite common in day-to-day life. LIkewise, I don't think you would have gotten any of the character-building fans loved with the likes of J'onn, Ted, or Ice. That could only happen because there was a context in which some characters had reason to feel duty-bound and try hard.

Prior to Wolfman and Perez, the "Teen Titans" were not exactly the hottest comic property around. Wolfman realized that being a former kid side-kick made someone a misfit in exactly the same sense as many Marvel characters. Taking in other misfits and turning their friends into a sort of family was sort of the trend of the late-80s and early 90s, so this was all a bit ahead of its time. Watching TV shows from "Friends" to "The Real World" always called to mind TNTT for me.

Perez, of course, brought a big stick with the super-hero action, which certainly helped. Together, they created a bunch of memorable enemies. Trigon, Deathstroke and Brother Blood were all creepy and fun in their own way. Dick Grayson becoming Nightwing has to be the most successful change from one identity to another ever.

Sadly, Wolfman over-stayed on the title and it went into decline in the years after Perez left. There were some good issues during the Tom Grummett years, but never had the magic again.

Howard Porter's JLA art had many, many flaws, but it did capture the "big moments." That splash page of Superman wrestling an angel? I don't care if the anatomy is off or if the faces aren't great. It still blew me away. Again, he's never going to be one of my favorite artists, but he wasn't the worst guy for the job.

As folks have mentioned, reading about these runs have gotten folks interested in purchasing the TPBs of the runs, so Andy Khouri mentioned to me that it probably made more sense to show them a book they actually COULD buy, and I think he’s right, so from here on in, I’m going to post the first TPB collecting these runs.

Even if I accept this logic-- which I don't, I think what's good for the gander it's good for the goose-- why pick a hardback that retails at something like $75 when there are at least two or three trades?

Hey, at least I'm not moaning about how this list is inflated by current fads and people who love the '80s. I'm at least offering some variety...

Beyond that, most of what I think of when I think Rude is miniseries. Like that excellent World's Finest one. Or Thor Godstorm etc.

Seriously, JLG should be doing an A-list team book like Avengers or JLA...he should have been doing Countdown.