And I’m sure some editor also nixed Mark Millar’s idea to end Civil War with a bunch of Hulk babies invading the Earth.

Damn, that would have been better than the endings to both Civil War AND World War Hulk!

FunkyGreen Jerusalem — Robinson is a Hollywood screenwriter who wrote the screenplay for a famous (infamous?) movie.

So?

That doesn’t make on a celebrity – outside of making of doco’s, I’d be surprised by pretty much anyone not really into film knowing who wrote what movie.
Even more so when that film was a monumental flop like LXG was.

By the way, I am COMPLETELY in disagreement that “the thing this book needs is to get back to A-list characters/” I’m not saying that CAN’T work- it obviously has in the past under Morrison (I wasn’t especially impressed with his work, but I’m clearly in the minority, so I’ll concede)- I just don’t think it has a thing to do with whether the book is good or not. As I recall, there were several years worth of “JLA” post-Morrison that used the same “A-listers,” and nobody is reminiscing fondly over them. MEanwhile, people still love the Gidden/DeMatteis run. What the book NEEDS is for an editorial/writer/artist team to stay on for a solid run, and for them to have a vision for the book beyond “I like these characters, let’s put them together.” People forget that Giffen and DeMatteis didn’t get to choose THEIR lineup, either- but they had a solid concept for their book and made it a huge success. That kind of thinking is needed now. (It’s also interesting to note that some of the people who praise what Bendis has done with the Avengers are still insistent that the JLA be about the “big guns,” when the Avengers has almost NEVER been about “big guns” and still isn’t.)

On a sidenote, this is my latest fear:
For a few months now there have been these rumours that Justice League might be broken into two books. I think this got started when one of hte on-line gossip columns suggested Morrison might be returning to the title with Jim Lee as artist, and then that morphed into Geoff Johns and Lee.
Now, here’s where I get a bit concerned.
From the standpoint that Marvel has turned The Avengers into this big franchise (which, as a long time Avengers fan, I don’t care for, but that’s another issue) it would not be a completely bizarre move for the higher-ups at DC to say “Yes, let’s have TWO Justice Leagues.”
The other thing that gives me pause is that this is exactly what DC has decided to do with the Justice Society.
Is the two-book JSA model a try-out for a JLA franchise?
As much as I love the first year or so of the 1990s Giffen/DeMatties/McGuire Justice League, the popularity of the book lead to the horrible late-1990s Justice League era filled with all sorts of spin-off titles of average to poor quality.
So DC REALLY needs to just get the current JLA right. But again, I have this little fear in the back of my mind that the wheels are already in motion to create yet another “franchise”…
I really wish one of the news sites would ask Didio to talk about this during an interview. Try and pin the guy down.

This was because Morrison, as was originally pointed out by a commenter above, didn’t write the cvrossover issues. Those were made fill-ins, with Day of Judgement being by J.M DeMatteis (#35), the No Man’s Land stuff being written by Waid (in issues #32-33), and Genesis being relegated to a last-page teaser in JLA #10 with JLA #11 picking up after the whole crossover had ended.

Ah, that explains it. I didn’t really read the fill-ins.

The whole reason the issue came up is that McDuffie was made to build his arcs around crossovers where Morrison was allowed to ignore them entirely. Jeff argued that Morrison was writing in a less crossover-heavy period, but the evidence shows plenty of crossovers and even some tie-in issues during Morrison’s tenure as “main” writer on JLA.

Where Morrison might have been allowed to just ignore Salvation Run, the aborted Tangent revival, Countdown to FC, and so forth, MacDuffie seems to have been asked to write multi-issue arcs just to set up or tie into those same miniseries “events” and crossovers.

Keeping time with what’s going on in their solo books is the price for using the Big 7 JLA. I’m talking about losing access to characters that ought to ‘belong’ to the JLA, having no permanent home due to a line-wide crossover event. And line-wide crossover events were in decline during that era. The Final Night, just before Morrison started, was the last one that really impacted multiple books up through Identity Crisis. Between those, you get your occasional unholy mess like Genesis or Bloodline or whatnot, but apart from advancing the Hal Jordan through-line in Day of Judgement, crossovers were skippable and inconsequential when they happened. (Even 1,000,000, which didn’t really do anything other than kill Resurrection Man. [And Vandal Savage, but it's not like anyone ever thought that would take.])

No, it came at a time when there were yearly megacrossovers that got their own miniseries: Genesis was part of JLA #10, One Million (which was Morrison’s) happened between #23 and #24, and Day of Judgement was part of #35, plus the No Man’s Land stuff. That’s five crossover issues in three years of stories.

I read all of Morrison’s run when it first came out, and it was the only book at DC I read at the time. I didn’t even browse the covers of DC books, I would just go into the DC section of the store only to pick up JLA on the days it came out and no other time. And I will honestly say, until now I had no idea any of those crossovers were being touched upon in Morrison’s run outside of the DC One Million stuff. I never even heard of the Genesis crossover until I just googled it to see what you were talking about. I don’t remember a crossover called Day of Judgment and although I know what No Man’s Land is I can’t recall a single tie-in to it in Morrison’s JLA.

But my point sort of stands, in that neither Genesis nor Day of Judgement killed or made unavailable any of Morrison’s cast, or really did anything that couldn’t be utterly ignored for that matter.

Both Wonder Woman AND Flash were made unavailable to Morrison during his run (Wonder Woman was “killed” while Flash was replaced by an alternate reality Flash).

But my point sort of stands, in that neither Genesis nor Day of Judgement killed or made unavailable any of Morrison’s cast, or really did anything that couldn’t be utterly ignored for that matter. The stories that did make Morrison work around them were the sub-line-level ones like NML and Electric Blue Superman. He didn’t have to deal with the Atom going missing after his ex killed someone or J’onn getting killed like a chump, and for all of the sillyness of Electric Blue, he was still Clark and not Donna Troy or something…

Morrison’s run came during a time without any really major crossovers to work around.

No, it came at a time when there were yearly megacrossovers that got their own miniseries: Genesis was part of JLA #10, One Million (which was Morrison’s) happened between #23 and #24, and Day of Judgement was part of #35, plus the No Man’s Land stuff. That’s five crossover issues in three years of stories.

Not sure if that all makes sense, but it’s late and I’m tired. Hope it tracks.

Have a good day.
John Cage

Still, I have high hopes for this – in a book full of characters I don’t care about, written by a writer who doesn’t care about most of them, I was entertained. What happens when characters I DO like (Mon El, Hal Jordan, The Guardian) and characters the writer WANTS come onto the book?

Good things, I hope.