2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-153: Magnificent Seven

Illustration by Ariel Olivetti.

I've brought up how my parents and uncle read comic books to varying degrees, and that there was no stigma surrounding them in my household growing up. As a result, I've been around comic books for longer than I have memories of being introduced to many aspects of them. Further, by the 1970s, you had a decent pool of varied super-hero and adjacent media adaptations, including radio dramas, movie serials, motion pictures, live action television, animation, coloring/activity books, and read along (or not) audio presentations (mostly 45RPM or LP vinyl records, but cassettes were incoming.) As a result, a lot of specific properties are what I refer to as personally "primordial," present and exerting influence over me before my conscious awareness of their existence. Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Aquaman-- all primordial, or near enough to it. Martian Manhunter was not that. Neither was the Justice League. Those five DC properties starred on the Hanna-Barbera Saturday Morning cartoon series Super Friends, running in ABC Television from 1973. There was preexisting media for each member of the quintet, so I can't say whether or which egg preceded what chicken, just that I knew who they were before I could write my own name.

Whether you consider it an over or understatement, this is also why The Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, and Plastic Man will always be at least one tier lower, because they were less prominent and later arriving Super Friends than Wendy, Marvin and Wonder Dog. This is more or less the same tier shared by The Atom, Hawkman, the concept of Superboy, and the Teen Titans. You see, the Filmation cartoon package The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure that ran on CBS-TV in 1967 had been chopped up and syndicated on local UHF, which I dimly recall as adjunct to the ongoing concern of Super Friends on broadcast television. Specifically, I was introduced to the concept of a "Justice League of America" through their measly 3 six-minute shorts on that program (though all of the solo hero shorts were associated with each other as a team via bumpers that ran around commercial breaks. I definitely was puzzled for some time about how the Super Friends and Justice League related to one another. I rarely if ever saw a Super Friends comic on the stands, and would have disregarded it as "kid's stuff." I did see JLofA comics on occasions, and was drawn to some iconic George Perez covers, until I looked at the bland pap under those covers. It seemed to me that the Super Friends had a lot more members, and of diverse ethnotype, but there were a few unfamiliar (always white) faces in the Justice League. Not-Plastic Man. Blond in Fishnets. Girl with Bug in Hair. Fire Head. Red Tornado. Dude was red with a "T" on his chest who made a tornado out of his lower body. What else would he be called?

Martian Manhunter wasn't even on that tier. Probably not even the tier below that tier. Black Vulcan was a Super Friend. Space Ghost had his own cartoon. Martian Manhunter needed Martian Vision to look up to the likes of Mighty Mightor, Dynomutt, Birdman, and the Galaxy Trio. He was grandfathered from before the time of anyone I knew, serving on only the least powerful, respected, or read brand extensions. Until Justice League: A Midsummer's Nightmare #2. Prior to that, I was collecting the post-Zero Hour Jones/Wojtkiewicz J.L.A. run, which started off terrible, but had worked its way up the defensible. It was one of three Justice League titles that were limping along, including the aforementioned Justice League Task Force and Extreme Justice, which were simultaneously cancelled to make room for a Silver Age revivalist take by cult favorite Grant Morrison and "that guy from The Ray who followed Joe Quesada." To give the new team prep time to hopefully knock it out of the park, and because Morrison didn't want to waste time from his launch actually gathering his proposed line-up, a stopgap 3-issue mini-series was thrown together. With two writers and two dissimilar pencillers, plus covers by the funny JLI guy, it looked a bit shaggy, and was only a modest success.

I had dinner with fellow podcaster Mike Atchison of Mike's Comic Shop Roadshow and Campus Comics Cast the other night, and he asked me how I became a Martian Manhunter fan. I told him that it was like the 1995 teenybopper romcom/stealth Jane Austen adaptation Clueless, when Cher finally puts the pieces together to realize that she was actually in love with her "annoying" ex-stepbrother Josh (not in an incognito browser way.) There was that one moment in "Midsummer's Nightmare" when, even after having questioned the illusion of his resurrected family, prefers to hold to it as tight as he could, because he didn't want to consider the possibility that the tragedy he knew in his bones (but not his active consciousness) had occurred. His family was dead, and he'd mourned them for untold years, but he had them back, even if it was a fantasy. Until some twits ruined that fantasy-- killed his wife and daughter all over again, bringing that rage and loss back in a crushing wave. It was like that line from Dark Knight Returns where The Batman confesses he sometimes likes to share that pain with those deserving, except without the implied sadism and narcissism. J'Onn J'Onzz had just relived the worst moment in his life, and that would have consequences for those responsible. Top tier heroes like Wonder Woman and Green Lantern looked on in sympathy, awe, and terror as a simple "Gumby" family man reverted to the Manhunter from Mars. That moment... that splash page by Jeff Johnson that somehow captured it all, gave me chills and sent my heart instantaneously backward to "Goodbye" and that first Oreos joke and one of my favorite action figures that my brother had lost at juvie camp. All the times the Alien Atlas could have been a favorite, each time thwarted in some manner, finally overcome. I asked Mark Waid about it, and he told me that was Fabian Nicieza's touch. I still mean to thank him when I get the chance.

For good and ill, that moment came thirty years ago, as I mark the 19th year of the continued (if far from routinely continuous) life of this blog, and the WebTV site was around years before that. All hinged on that moment, but not sustained solely by it. Because two months later, JLA #1 by Morrison and Howard Porter blew me away all over again. Conventional wisdom was that the time of super-teams filled with marquee players had passed-- that they were detrimental to the autonomy and steerage of the book's creative team. You couldn't "do" anything with icons, so readers get bored. JLA proved the appeal of incomparable icons was inherent, if you just did them up right, which is to say BIG. Widescreen BIG. Thwarting global invasions BIG. Wrestling with angels and demon BIG. Inserting everyone's distinctive logos into dialogue balloons when their names were spoken BIG. For the first time, the Justice League was the same thing as the Super Friends, but even better, and much, much BIGGER. And even as the seventh of seven, it was a Magnificent Seven, and when his name was in their mouth, it was the Martian Manhunter logo. Just the same as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman. Yet, unlike that pantheon, I still barely knew the Sleuth from Outer Space. But I now, perhaps ironically, had a burning desire to change that.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-068: Justice League Task Force - Team-Up

Illustration by Phil Noto.

As I mentioned yesterday, I started buying the "Breakdowns" arc of the Justice League books, but realized that I only had interest in JLI as a comedy ensemble, and dropped the books again. I came back for the two closing chapters, or really, epilogues that cleared the way for the next creative direction. The Europe one was dreadful, but America was a bittersweet re-teaming of Giffen, DeMatteis, & Maguire. I liked the part where J'Onn J'Onzz flew off to parts unknown, intent on a period of meditation and self-discovery, saying simply "Goodbye." I was in no way concerned about what happened to him after that. I'd given Martian Manhunter his shot as the only comic I bought at the only shop I visited while living outside Las Vegas, the first issue of a mini-series with an inflated cover price that I hated very much. With that, J'Onn was just a straight man for the JLI to me. The Justice League Spectacular that invited all those stick in the mud older fans to come back to a "serious" League that they'd been howling for, except the two teams were still staffed with badly mischaracterized and abused JLI members those veteran fans had no interest in. Also, the revised books were terrible and boring. It was no one's golden age of the team. Yes, I was aware that the Sleuth from Outer Space had placed in a fan poll for who deserved a mini-series, but if I was aggrieved about a $1.25 price point in the 75￠ days, a $4.95 prestige format book in the $1.25 was heretical.

Worse than not missing Martian Manhunter, but I didn't even really clock his absence. I'd dabbled with DC, picked up some new stuff here and there, but I was still primarily a Titans guy. I bought the first three issues of Justice League Task Force because Nightwing was on the first situational team. I didn't know why Gypsy was. If anything, I though the Alien Atlas looked like a dork as drawn by Sal Velluto. I wasn't much happier with his rendition of Dick, and I really disliked how he was written, so I left as soon as he did. But I only skipped one issue before picking up only the first half of a "Knightquest: The Search" tie-in before getting wise that DC was bleeding a stone there. But then I got really into Wonder Woman really fast, so I bought her two-part "all female" team story. Right after, there was a story with the New Bloods, and I'd just finished collecting all the "Bloodlines" annuals. I managed to skip an arc, but it was the '90s, and Wonder Woman was involved in a crossover, so I bought all the chapters of "Judgment Day." That had a coda in JLTF #15, I got a month off, and then I bought all the "Zero Month" offerings. That was finally it, though. I found the new permanent line-up in Justice League Task Force #0 laughable, they were set on an island of continuity where none of my interests made stunt appearances, and the book languished unto cancellation. Weirdly, there was another Justice League crossover at one point, but it was only the America team linking to Hawkman and Guy Gardner: Warrior, two of which I was already following. Sans the Task Force, Martian Manhunter appeared in that arc, but I was only buying Justice League America for Wonder Woman.

In the very late '90s, I did go back to read the Detroit era Justice League of America, as well as the Adam Hughes gap years of Justice League America with the return of Despero and Gypsy becoming J'Onn's surrogate daughter. Heck, I got the 1988 Martian Manhunter mini-series and made the acquaintance of his tragic biological daughter. But I did this only after I'd become enamored with the Martian Marvel, and that context made me much more receptive than I would have been otherwise. All of that reading helped me appreciate Justice League Task Force a lot more. Still not so much the Mission: Impossible version with rotating casts and creatives. Actually, the "laughable" final incarnation, and it truly was. After a brief stint by Mark Waid, the writing was taken over by Christopher Priest, one of the few people in mainstream comics who could write humor. A much different, more sardonic and irony-poisoned humor than JLI, but funny nonetheless. Priest's JLTF were losers, and they mostly knew it, so they played into being the worst JL team of the time with a Gen-X slacker ethos. "We didn't want you to allow us access to any good characters for super-hero spectacle anyway! We'll just have droll misadventures involving parodies of Coppala's Dracula while dunking on each other!" It turned out to be the best League book of its time, and probably the best run that everybody continues to sleep on. Even Velluto leveled-up on art with the help of new inker Bob Almond, and if you didn't like that, the still-unknown Ramon Bernado offered a fun John Buscema pastiche toward the end. I'd still rather read that material than all the corny Satellite era yarns the olds couldn't move past in the JLI days.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-177: Funeral For a Friend

Illustration by Billy Dallas Patton & Kris Justice.

Shortly before I moved out of Houston in 1987, I bought a dinged discount copy of Superman #12. I'd seen John Byrne's Man of Steel mini-series packed together as a set at the Circus World toy store, and thumbed through the early issues of the relaunch at mall bookstores, but it hadn't quite convinced me. I really enjoyed "Lost Love", and convenience stores in Vegas were much more likely to stock DC than back home. Not only did I managed to pick the book back up an issue or two later, but I also bought all the Millennium tie-ins that I could afford to broadly sample the Post-Crisis DC Universe. For a good half year or so, Superman was my favorite comics character, rekindling the love I had for the Last Son of Krypton from my earliest years, before reading actual period Superman comics put me off. For some reason, I hit a wall with Superman #19. Maybe it was the throwback Jerry Ordway cover, or the corny mad scientist in a mech, or the John Beatty inks? I've never found Byrne to be a substantial writer, and I was getting a lot of him in a short period of time. By whatever cause, I just couldn't take that issue off the rack and take it to the register, and I specifically remember seeing it on that spinner racks for multiple weeks. The overloaded but lightweight Action Comics #600 didn't help, nor did the Mike Mignola fill-in, or the abandonment of the team-up format in favor of the pricey proposition of the extra-length anthology Action Comics Weekly ("weakly.")

Eventually, we moved back to Texas, so accessibility became an issue again, but interest even more so. I still sought out Justice League International, but my other DC books fell away. Invasion! was not a draw. Toward the end of '89, I dropped JLI. A year later, Marvel was giving me Art Adams' new Fantastic Four, Tex's Ghost Rider, Peter David & Dale Keown on Hulk, Liefeld New Mutants, Starlin & Lim Silver Surfer with a resurrected Thanos, McFarlane Spider-Man, and Lee X-Men. DC wasn't even a consideration against that heat. But things started to change in 1991. The X-Men relaunch didn't hit right, with Claremont forced out, and neither did X-Force. Infinity Gauntlet got repetitive fast, especially once Perez wasn't there to dazzle. McFarlane was never that big a deal to me, but his leaving Spidey to Erik Larsen took my slim consideration with him. Barry Windsor Smith's Weapon-X serial looked gorgeous, but I was contended to read my brother's copies, befuddled. That also fed into boredom with Hama and Silvestri trying to undermine it in Wolverine's solo title. At least Portacio was moving onto Uncanny X-Men, and X-Factor stayed interesting for a different reason under David & Stroman. DC finally had some cracks to fill, including a return to JLI for what ended up being a fairly tedious "Breakdowns."

Ahh, but Tom Grummett and Al Vey blew my hair back on the (swiftly, brutally, sun bleached) New Titans #78 I'd picked up at B. Dalton. It was actually a refractory issue, but since I'd missed the first seven parts of "Titans Hunt," I needed that breather to figure out what all I'd missed. I was swiftly swept up into what would become the Team Titans, which helped fuel my interest in the Armageddon 2001 annuals, which were mostly quite good proto-Elseworlds/What If...? I'd been checking out little bro's !mpact purchases, and getting into The Sandman, which leveled-up my reading interests overall. In 1992, Marvel couldn't keep any hot artists on their books, and their editorial-dominated approach drove off the good writers. Image made exciting looking product, when they could be bothered to publish it, but they read dumb as rocks. I was sampling every publisher under the sun, but it was the DC stuff that was satisfying me the most.

I stood in a line out the door at an unfamiliar comic shop the woman I was living with had driven us to because we both wanted a copy of Superman #75 the day of release. I didn't believe that they would permanently do Superman in, but it became a cultural moment that broke out among the general public. I even wore the black armband to my actual regular comic source to get my pre-ordered copy, and little else, because he refused to sell me any comics before I bought the Sandman t-shirt that had also come in that week. Thinking of that makes me less sorry about whatever stock he got stuck with after we moved to Colorado, because I was not an unreliable customer who deserved to be treated like that. He'd have gotten his stupid $15 the next week. Anyway, beyond the spectacle, the actual comic was stupid punch-face, so I skipped the cheap emotional manipulation of "Funeral for a Friend."

I was never sorry that I committed to "Reign of the Superman," because it was a cool story overall, and I fell hard for John Henry Irons. I did regret "Knightfall," mostly jumping off with Batman #500, yet failing to learn my lesson by returning for "Knightsend." I did another big DC sampling with the Bloodlines annuals, and kept up with Ennis/McCrea The Demon because of it. Got sucked into Wonder Woman in a big way around this time. The Titans books were really starting to falter though, and I was completely disinterested in Justice League stuff after the departure of Giffen & DeMatteis. I maybe stuck with the returned Superman for a couple months, as the weekly triangle era forced you into buying four (soon five) titles, none of which were interesting to me with the restored, staid status quo.

Despite that general respite, I became a bigger DC fan throughout the rest of the nineties, which compelled me to pick up individual Superman comics over those years. I rarely enjoyed them, and came to resent the tyranny of those triangle numbers. Things picked up in the early aughts, mostly on the art front, but I've never been able to invest in the Man of Tomorrow in the same way again. After years of a super-duper, super-dull Superman Pre-Crisis, I welcomed the more grounded "Marvelized" Byrne take. But I also found that it had it's day, and the hero was made too mundane within the confines of a shared universe and comics by committee. He hasn't been super enough for me in going on forty years now. A lot of what made him super to me was his tragedy-- his ironic fragility, which he divested and Martian Manhunter inherited. That's why J'Onn's the subject of my 19 year old blog, instead.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-185: Midnight Cravings

Illustration by Kilian Plunkett.

On the down side, I completely forgot to do a Saturday post, and this was after I barely got Thursday's post in on time. I was working on something late Friday night until I felt the need to tap out, and then was out of the house all day with my closest hu-mans. On the plus side, I feel I've generated some pretty decent commentary to go with these dozens of card posts, to the point where you're maybe backlogged, and who's reading this blog over their weekend anyway? Can you believe I did this more or less daily for years? At this point, I sure can't. So yes, I'll just backdate this one (a term no one under 40 can comprehend today. We used to sign pieces of special paper from a little booklet promising that we had money in the bank to buy things. With a ballpoint pen. By hand. While people waited impatiently in a line for us to write and tear out said note.)

Something you might not know about J'Onn J'Onzz? He likes vanilla cream filled chocolate sandwich cookies of the type invented by Hydrox and monopolized by Oreo. Last week, I read an article on the history Hydrox that took some very conspiratorial turns, particularly regarding a faltering revival attempt in recent years. I'm not absolutely certain that I've eaten an original Hydrox, but the fact that I was familiar with them when referenced in books like American Secrets makes me figure that I have. I'm sure that there were particular differences, like the way every other diet cola paled to me against Pepsi Max/Zero when it had the ginseng in the receipe, but was ruined when that was replaced by just another saccharine chemical sludge.* But at the end of the day, every major grocery chain has their own cheap knock-off of the basic model, and I don't recall any Hydrox riots in my time upon this Earth.

Likewise, when the premise was introduced, J'Onn explicitly favored Oreos to a maximalist, man-sized shipping crate excess, but some lawyers eventually made him switch to Chocos. Maybe Chocos are just that much better, or maybe Oreo changed their formula in some infinitesimal manner only perceptible to Martian Taste Buds. Regardless of the fact that the Oreo bit was one of the finest in a comic so funny and humanizing that it turned me on to all the rest of my Alien Atlas and JLI reading, I only sign or groan at their mention today. Every Martian Manhunter thing has to reference it, and then everybody points at the screen becaise he did the thing! It's like those guys who made their entire personality "bacon." There's a half-dozen flavors of Oreos taking up serious shelf space in every grocery store in America. And? Trust that other people like sandwich cookies. Have you tried the limited edition banana cream ones? The chicken and waffle "test" run is better than you'd expect, mostly because they're just pancake syrup flavored. Not like those disgusting Coca-Cola ones from last year, that were the worst version of exactly that "promise"...

*I will point out that non-U.S. markets didn't seem to ever get the ginseng version, but I also think those countries had better consumer protections against the saccharine chemical sludge. I find foreign Pepsi Max to be more palatable than pretty much any other diet soda that I've been exposed to, but it's still methadone to the heroin that was the domestic ginseng version that I drank almost exclusively for a decades. I see you, Hydrox people, even if I don't feel you.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-152: Justice League Signal Device

Illustration by Arthur Suydam.

Following up on a comment, considering how iconic and oft-replicated the cover to 1987's Justice League #1 was, how transitory it all was. For instance, the mini-series that preceded it, Legends, clearly set up Changeling being on the team. Considering how I was never wild for Gar Logan as a Teen Titan, he would have maybe been my least favorite press gang into even the JLI. Could you imagine how insufferable the Blue and the Green would have been? I could always half-ignore Booster Gold as a marginally powered also-ran, but ol' Beast Boy would have been prioritized to capitalize on the (already waning) New Teen Titans heat. Plus, I figure he'd have been a bizarro Year One Black Canary, constantly comparing the JLI disparagingly to the Junior JLA. I'm not sure the creative team were in a position to refuse him, either, so I bet Marv clawed him back. Near miss.

Dr. Light is a big "ew," because you figure that was an editorial mandate to take advantage of Kimiyo Hoshi's visibility from Crisis on Infinite Earths. Her whole point was to take a hero's journey from ill-tempered narcissist to noble self-sacrifice, as exemplified for her by Supergirl. It would have been an interesting reset to have her reject that template-- to decide "I didn't spend my entire life earning a doctorate to become a world-class scientist so that I could die on a mudball in the Anti-Matter Universe, just because I stumbled into metahumanity. That's a role for one of these other super-goofs that punch first and think never." Given the intention for Crisis to erase itself, there was never a Kara Zor-El to offer that lesson. Dr. Light could have been a magnificent foil for Guy Gardner, whose self-importance and insubordinance could have also rankled Batman and J'Onn J'Onzz. Plus, the JLI desperately needed women, as evidenced by the later inclusion of Green Flame and Ice Maiden from the Global Guardians. But Fire and Ice were "hey-- sexxxy laaaadies" who could play traditional female types and a typical extrovert/introvert dynamic. Dr. Light demanded more nuance, but Giffen couldn't be bothered, and she was totally reject-able even by a book as desperate for leads as JLI. Her later, limp rotation through a problematic weak sister spin-off book in it's lesser days was no great victory for either female or Asian representation. Nobody has ever seen enough value in Dr. Light to do anything worthwhile with her.

Given that there was no longer an Earth-2, the Justice Society was in (literal) limbo, and that we had moved on to a new incarnation (if not outward presentation) of Dr. Fate for the eighties, it's a shame he was a one-arc chump. I guess Nabu and Linda Strauss dipped in a few times, but they moved Dr. Fate into a solo role at a time when team association could have given the concept a firmer standing. That said, Fate was never really a draw, and you've got a Spectre situation of constantly having to explain why he even needs a team to back such a powerful figure. This was an exit that I agreed with, because Dr. Fate had too much going on in their lives, and I don't think the humor that works for that property is the same flavor the JLI traded in.

Given the five minutes Captain Marvel was in the group, it's disheartening how much damage that small exposure did to the character. As a Wonder Woman fan, I've long decried the tendency for characters with a smaller but devoted fandom to be defined by their usage in higher visibility team over their solo vehicle. It's a form of Flanderization, where a character is warped by the needs and biases of the creative force behind an ensemble into a caricature that sticks for those with no broader awareness of the hero. And boy, did Captain Marvel get walloped with the goober stick. Roy Thomas was wise to pull the Big Red Cheese out as quickly as he did, and a fool for not immediately placing him elsewhere to manifest a counter-narrative. Legends had traded heavily on the boyish innocence of Billy Batson, but when DC's surprise hit of the year turned him into a simpleton, that stuck with him in perpetuity. That's the buffoon a loathsome Zachary Levi played in those wretched feature films, so now that's what Shazam is to a modern global audience. Given that the JSA had been 86'd, I always felt like Roy blew it with Infinity Incorporated, which had already dismally failed to ride the coattails of X-Men and New Teen Titans to such a degree that I think even the Detroit League bettered them. If only Roy had the vision to rework the property more fully into a contemporary Justice Society, he could have brought Captain Marvel and Dr. Fate into that team, preempting that approach on the more successful 2000s JSA revival. And it would have spared us all that Silver Scarab melodrama.

I still have affection for the Justice League that we got, but it's interesting to consider how we didn't really get the one that we were promised.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-197: Wheel of Misfortune

Illustration by Jorge Lucas.

Last night, I watched a little TV, left a lengthy comment on the blog of a podcast I enjoyed, and did some work planning my own podcasts. I went to bed mostly content, but with a slight nagging feeling that I had forgotten something. Tonight, we finished watching a classic Star Trek episode, then a little Last Week Tonight. I also watched Strange Brain Parts new vlog on Astro City, plus some political stuff. My eyes were bothering me, and I was a bit icky from sweating at work, so I hopped into the shower. While I was rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, it occurred to me that I wasn't sure if that JLI card post went up this morning or yesterday? But hey, it's not midnight anywhere in America, so I still have time to sneak one in.

Since I came to the Justice League via Super Friends, Super Powers, and the funny JLI, the latter close to a decade into my comics reading, I'm not terribly precious about their "classic" foes. I'm not sure who is. The Avengers had Loki, the Masters of Evil, Kang, and Immortus in their first dozen issues. The Hulk had a swift heel turn, and teamed up with Sub-Mariner. Wonder Man was introduced. Now, the book was initially bi-monthly, and debuted nearly four years after the JLofA, so they had a blueprint. But still, the League started out battling a giant starfish that was beaten with lime by Snapper Carr. I think Xotar the Weapons Master had potential, but he was left on the shelf far too long, and never developed. I recently defended Kanjar Ro, but had the same problem as Dr. Light of immediately downgrading to fighting indivual heroes instead of a team, and not even one of the more impressive soloists. I don't think anyone ever slept on Amazo, and Despero is obviously a personal favorite with bona fides. But Pete Ricketts? Felix Faust? The Demons Three? That ad hoc team with a plainclothes Dr. Destiny? What a bunch of never-weres.

The one I haste the most is Amos Fortune. Nothing about this guy impresses, and his power is super-gambling? My gal once bought me a wooden plaque reproducing a JLA cover, but that cover was #6, so it's never going to hang anywhere in my house. I'll acknowledge that Fortune is still better than Pete Ricketts, but I never had to groan over a Pete Ricketts revival appearance. Amos Fortune makes Space Phantom look like Thanos.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-075: UN Recognition

Illustration by Gus Vazquez.

I tried to cover Justice League International in earlier days of the internet, with much slimmer wiki availability, so I cross/sub-referenced my interest to death and tapped out. The book was definitely the second leg of my outsized interest in Martian Manhunter, following my much favored Super Powers figure. I do recall flipping through the first issue at a mall bookstore, and being put off by the Guy Gardner of it all. Some weird off-brand Green Lantern was plotting to lord over his leadership credentials to a Justice League lacking a Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman, Atom, or Hawkman? I don't think I knew the bird-lady in the black and blue costume with a headband. I definitely had the barest exposure to Mister Miracle, in that garish red, yellow, and green get-up with the giant collar. Shazam was all over old Treasury Edition ads, and I caught his cartoon on the rare occasions I was up early enough on Saturday mornings, but he was still an off-brand Superman. Blue Beetle I saw in Chartlton Action Hero house ads when I'd catch a cheap Thunderbolt or Judomaster back issue at the flea market. I had the Manhunter and Dr. Fate action figures, but that alone wouldn't cinch a sale, or else I'd have picked up one of those Detroit issues I'd also tossed through at the mall. Batman was the only draw, but I knew him from The Brave and the Bold, so he was a team-up slut. His joining a group was no sign of quality, or else I'd have bothered with The Outsiders.

I got JLI #8, "Moving Day," at a dinged copy discount at a comic shop shortly after release. It was one of the rare funny books that was legitimately funny, especially J'Onn J'Onzz's endorsement of Oreo cookies by the caseload. He was a standout in one of my favorite single issues to that date. Shortly thereafter, I moved to Nevada, where the convenience store comic rack was way more open to DC Comics than Houston's. Heck, they even had spinner racks, which were scarce here, and that expanded the selection in general from what would fit from a small shelving area near the register. I still picked up JLI irregularly, as I was much less interested in any issues without Kevin Maguire artwork, or that seemed to be telling a serious story. I was there for the comedy. That was not what I got in Martian Manhunter #1, the only book I got at my only trip to a comic shop anywhere near Vegas. I hated everything about it, especially the wasted opportunity and elevated cover price. Put me off Martian Manhunter as a soloist for years afterward. Instead, I gravitated toward that Guy Gardner guy as the best part of that ensemble, because he was never played straight.

Outside of annuals, I lost interest in JLI around the time Ty Templeton left, and Adam Hughes was coming on. I hadn't been into the book for a while, so it wasn't te fault of the art change, but rather the tonal shift. They kept insisting that I needed to take these b/c-listers seriously, and I just couldn't. It was like when Moonlighting got mired in all that soapy relationship stuff when I just wanted snappy mysteries with wry, knowing humor.

2006 Upper Deck DC Infinite Crisis VS System CCG Card DCR-145: 3...2...1...

Illustration by Gus Vazquez.

Appropriately enough, I'm running late and short on time...

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS. System CCG Card DJL-032: Reform the League

Illustration by Ariel Olivetti.

As I've mentioned a number of times over the years, I had no exposure to J'Onn J'Onzz in the '70s or early '80s. There were house ads for the War of the Worlds arc from Justice League of America #228-230, and I especially recall Chuck Patton & Dick Giordano's cover to the last issue featuring Martian Manhunter battling The Marshal, which was glorious. However, I was not reading any DC Comics in real time during this period, and probably saw that ad in a copy of Blue Devil that I bought at a flea market months after release, if even in the 1984 calendar year. I was definetely hip to the Alien Atlas through a figure and mini-comic from the 1985 second series of Kenner's Super Powers Collection, but I probably bought that at a deep discount some time after initial release. A 1986 DC Comics Subscription Ad stands out in my memory, but by then I'd already read Crisis on Infinite Earths #7, the first proper comic that I received new and have a firm recollection of the Sleuth from Outer Space playing a role. Though I didn't buyt any, I did toss through some late run issues of Justice League of America in '86.

All this is to say that even though I didn't read any material from the period of the Detroit Justice League, this blog wouldn't exist without it. Even if Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had done their proposed Martian Manhunter mini-series in the early '80s, that alone wouldn't have gotten us an action figure in 1985. Most probably, we would have gotten J'Emm, Son of Mars, and maybe that guy would have landed on some lesser team like The Outsiders, making J'Onn J'Onzz a redundancy. More likely, J'Onn or J'Emm would have been killed off during the Crisis, since we didn't need two Martian heroes in the streamlined new continuity. Regardless, I might never have made J'Onn's acquaintence, or made it later, and in a different form.

I don't think of the Detroit team as a true standard-bearing Justice League. They were failed X-Men bandwagon jumpers. But because they were short-lived, before my time, and novel, and came to embrace them. I love Gypsy as an expansion of the Martian family, and a surrogate daughter. I love Vixen as a compelling and trailblazing heroine. I still don't care much for Steel, but I see value in his lore, and I'm a big Dale Gunn booster. Vibe... well... an icon I put together for the blog served as the basis for the title sequence of a DC Nation short. It may be my personal largest (if mostly forgettable) contribution to popular culture. Plus I grew quite fond of Zatanna and Aquaman and Sue... not so much Elongated Man. I see the Detroit League as more J'Onn's team than the Magnificent Seven ever were. Martian Manhunter is a misfit, and he's more vital with his own kind.

2007 Upper Deck DC World's Finest VS System CCG Card DWF-101: Technocrat - Geoffrey Barron

Illustration by Cat Staggs

Not gonna lie-- I cursed out loud at the sight of this card. I was not expecting to have to look closer at a card of a forgotten '90s Outsiders member to find a Martian Manhunter cameo next to Green Lantern Hal Jordan. At least it's a nice looking piece or art-- better than the subject deserves, surely.

2007 Upper Deck DC World's Finest VS System CCG Card DWF-157: Pick a Card

Illustration by Ed Benes

As I progress through an inventory of the VS. System gaming cards for my own purposes, I'm finding that the 2007 sets are the biggest pains in the butt to get a good look at, and World's Finest is the most tedious set. Not the most work though, since so many of the cards are immediately ruled useless and uninteresting to me. The artist selection is fine, and I have no basis to judge the gaming dynamics. My issue is that the vast majority of the cards are Batman and/or Superman and/or their familiar extended casts going through the motions. Of course, that's expected of any DC Universe project, but also, it's the default mode of the DC VS. System from the very first Gothamcentric set on to the second Metropolitan set and so forth. As with Overpower before it, DC VS. entered a gaming space already well established through a breadth of Marvel Universe properties by drilling down deep in Batman and Superman lore across hundreds of cards. Unlike Overpower, VS. System then went back for yet another combination Batman/Superman set to absolutely scrape the bottom of the barrel. I mean, Lex Luthor and The Joker are among the most famous super-villains around, but do I need that "literally" illustrated across combined dozens of gaming cards? Part of the reason why, despite recent Absolute-fueled consistent dominance of monthly comics sales charts, DC has otherwise remained in Marvel's shadow for my entire (and increasingly advanced) lifetime. Because Marvel will build out an entire cosmic sub-universe that keeps incredibly negligible characters like Nova marketable to audiences, but DC will always retreat to their half-dozen or so core franchise, with Batman and Superman making up about a third each, and everything else squeezed into that final third (mostly Green Lantern, Flash, and the Justice League brand.)

All this is to say, here's a friggin' Joker card where he's seemingly pitted against the JLA, as represented by card-in-a-card representations of the DC Trinity and the League itself, as represented through the Manhunter from Mars. I'd be more pleased if I didn't figure it was just a way to avoid slighting either the Flash or Green Lantern fandoms by only featuring one of them in the available space (or pitting them against the fans of Aquaman, Green Arrow, and so on.) I've been doing this blog for 19 years, and general Sleuth-stanning for longer, and there's still Martian Manhunter fandom to speak of. If we were in U.S. politics, we wouldn't even be the Green Party, as thematically appropriate as that might be (though clearly less so than the GL Corps.) We're more like that one guy in New York whose whole platform is "The Rent Is Too Damn High!" Anyway, it remains to be seen if I find any more cards in this set relevant to Martian interests, and whether I can find a scan that's bigger the 220px if I do.

2007 Upper Deck DC Comics Legends VS System CCG Card DCL-052: Intangible

Art by Dustin Nguyen

Here's another one of those tough-to-find DC Comics Legends card scans. It's a shame too, because they afforded much more image space with this set. It's also a good thing, because I had to blow this sucker up from 220px, so a tiny picture would have made it that much worse.

Particularly in my message board/versus board days, I heard cries of "overpowered" a lot, and I gave plenty of consideration to paring down the Manhunter's power set to make him more palatable. But what powers to cut? I had some ideas, but I never wanted to give up intangibility. It's one of if not the most strikingly dissimilar powers to Superman, who also gets called "OP" plenty, so it's not easy to find uncommon ground from Kryptonian to Martian. Typically, it's supernatural characters who become immaterial, like ghosts and mythical deities. Much less associated with aliens, which helps distinguish J'Onn J'Onzz from every other prominent character. That said, the Barry Allen Flash vibrated through objects often, so it wasn't even unprecedented among the founding five members of the Justice League of America. I'd argue that Kitty Pryde's "phasing" and the Vision's density control are more broadly known among fandom than Manhunter's own brand. Christopher Priest really leaned hard into Manhunter's own density control if his stint on Justice League Task Force in the '90s. I was never comfortable with that, just like I don't care for Vision being assigned proper flight after years of more accurately "floating" in a manner similar to zero gravity in outer space. You know I loathe homogenization of characters and universes in comics, so that everyone has a potential duplicate of everything in any given story. But also, I really like intangibility, and like Hal Jordan, I thought I liked the Vision until I got to know his stories better.

Ultimately, I'm down with "OP." Why should super-heroes be made smaller to suit the lack of imagination in creators and fans? Craft stories big enough to take advantage of those abilities, instead.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-154: World's Greatest Heroes - Team-Up

Illustration by Joe Phillips.

The Legends period was such an important time for J'Onn J'Onzz. I was not very interested in DC Comics Pre-Crisis, and that only started to change when Marvel's top artist took over Superman. I had some exposure to George Perez, and in fact New Teen Titans was one of the few DC titles I occasionally sampled, but John Byrne was a staple. Not only had I loved his X-Men work, but I was always up to toss through one of his (very DCish) Fantastic Four issues, and I bought reprints of his Spider-Man work in Marvel Tales (though I barely gave Alpha Flight a Titans-level sniff.) Where I only bought a single issue of Who's Who, I got a late start on the first volume of Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, I continued to buy it routinely in the second, "Deluxe Edition." Byrne art was on most covers and a great many entries. He wasn't just Marvel to me-- he was "comics," and with Legends he was at DC Comics. I did buy an issue of Perez's Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I would soon enough sample his Wonder Woman, but I got there through the door Byrne was holding open.

I didn't actually buy a single issue of Legends new, as I had ten consecutive issues of Secret Wars, but I did catch a bunch of tie-ins in first run or through recent-ish three packs. As with Secret Wars, I could feel the events in Legends reverberate through other titles. It felt fresh, and important, even without the context that the public being turned against their super-heroes by a demagogue was echoing the anti-comics crusade of the 1950s. But I could feel that tension, from creators who lived through it, reflecting on it through their work. I finally got to read some of the core mini-series through a friend's copies in 1988, by which point I'd graduated from only knowing the Alien Atlas through the Super Powers Collection into proper monthly comics. But seeing that Post-Crisis DC coming together here, with the Manhunter from Mars near the fore, it felt like a coronation. Suddenly, DC Comics mattered to me, and more shockingly, J'Onn J'Onzz finally meant something to DC Comics.

That having been said, I don't remember Captain Atom being involved with Legends at all. DC largely recreated that character after purchasing him from Charlton Comics, and getting in somewhat on the ground floor with a character I had only the slightest prior awareness of was, at the time, even more intriguing to me than some Jolly Green Giant in a cape. I bought a number of issues of Captain Atom's solo titles in the period before I reached Legends. Seeing the Charlton Action Heroes fully and effectively integrated into the New(er) DC was exciting, and I've long associated J'Onn J'Onzz with their "welcome wagon." It reminds me of how I waxed rhapsodic over that same possibility being afforded the Wildstorm integration early into the New 52. I loved seeing the Sleuth from Outer Space making a new welcome wagon out of Stormwatch. So less than a year in, he quit that team and mindwiped everyone to never remember that he'd ever been a member. A bitter disappointment, but an excellent metaphor for the New 52 and that abortive Wildstorm integration. What integration? What Wildstorm? Who are you people?!?

2004 Upper Deck VS. System Superman: Man of Steel CCG Card DSM-095: Toy Soldiers

Illustration: Adam Archer

2007 Upper Deck VS System DC Legends CCG Card DCL-118: Felix Faust - Soulless Mystic

Illustration by Wellington Alves

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-055: Maxwell Lord - Financier

Illustration by Cully Hamner.

This is just a cameo appearance by J'Onn, so I thought twice about featuring it, but hey-- I got dates to fill. Max was still a good(ish) guy around 2005, but this was the same year as Countdown to Infinite Crisis, so the heel may already have been turning. My main cause for pause to reconsider this was that it seems like Cully Hamner may have drawn influence from the likeness of another wealthy New York elite that turned into a global super-villain, and that semblance is more repugnant to me than a bullet to Ted Kord's brain.

2007 Upper Deck DC Comics Legends VS System CCG Card DCL-054 : Mightiest Heroes

Art by Kalman Andrasofszky.

Another certified rare card from this set that I can't buy or find a normal sized scan for. The artist is probably best known for spearheading the modern era relaunch of Captain Canuck.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS. System CCG Card DJL-180: H'ronmeer's Curse

Art by Joe Bennett.

As of this writing, I still haven't pulled the trigger on buying a single Vs. System card. I actually played Overpower, and I have enough high quality base/chase cards packed out of boxes direct into 9-pocket sleeves to make it worthwhile for me to eventually plug in the holes. Collecting a CCG from scratch with only online resources twenty years after release is probably too big an ask for me. I have no great desire to put together any more Batman/Superman heavy card sets (see, again, Overpower,) and the more diverse sets like Justice League of America go hundreds of cards deep at various levels of availability. There are some really choice artists working on the set, but going back to granddaddy Magic: The Gathering, all these paintings are done dirty by postage stamp presentations in favor of game mechanic text.

All this is to say that I'm just prettying up scans swiped from eBay listings, and despite not being a valuable card, there are no good English language scans of this particular card handy. For presentation purposes, I doctored up an Italian-language card, but figure someone might be curious about a translation. The card is of the "Plot Twist" type, which I believe translates into an Event card in Overpower speak (which I stopped playing well before this card came out long enough ago to drink legally.) In layman's terms, it's a card that's played to change a gaming dynamic.

In this instance, "Ongoing: At the start of your attack step, if you control a non-stunned character, each player stuns a non-stunned character he controls with cost 2 or less." Hey Upper Deck-- your pronouns are out of date. Admittedly, I don't recall a single solitary girl ever playing Overpower in my vicinity. I think I knew a trans-femme in the broader super-hero trading card sphere though, and certainly women played more popular CCGs, even in my day. So, shouting out from Woke.0?

The flavor text quote reads, "For the weaker Martians, the curse is deadly."

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-109: Power Siphon

Illustration by Keron Grant.

I forgot to mention yesterday that even though my card scans are often squared rectangles, gaming cards almost always have rounded corners like poker cards, because the rigors of gameplay would swiftly wear down pointed corners. The points would poke your hands (as was still the case if you played with plastic sleeves,) and it would create a point of vulnerability for the card to be permanently bent (or "marked,") and the sides could begin to separate from each other. Another thing that I forgot as I started looking into the VS. System is that I have old man brain, and it would wear me down.

I've been a little obsessive over the Vs. System, because I realized while working on the DC Secret Files Podcast that the short form periodical reference books like Who's Who were abandoned in the '90s in favor of trading cards. They returned in comic book form as Secret Files and Origins specials, but those were far from comprehensive in their coverage, so you needed trading cards to supplement them for snapshots of the full scope of the DC Universe in the '90s. But also, getting into the 21st century, the non-sports comic book trading card market was virtually extinct, and almost none of those sets featured original art. It was just reprinted, repurposed material from the comics industry. Also, the Secret Files books themselves were increasingly few and far between in the aughts. But see, collectible card games were still a thing, had a broad scope in service to gaming mechanics, and I finally realized my usual resource Trading Card Database effectively "hid" these cards in a separate gaming catalog. Suddenly, properties that I'd struggled to find resources to cover were at my virtual, digital fingertips. All these Vs. System posts are the fruit of searches for these cards on places like eBay.

The quality and resolution of these images vary wildly, and the availability of images from the later sets are thin. What I really wanted was to get my hands on the actual cards to pull my own scans. However, most eBay listings for individual cards start at a dollar each, plus shipping, and I'm looking at needing hundreds of these things. I don't want to get buried in duplicates of a card game that I'll never play by buying not-inexpensive boxes, where there are even boxes available to buy. So one day, my gal and I hit numerous comics and gaming stores, plus a gaming-specific co-op "convention" open most weekends on the other side of town. This took up much of the day. We came home empty-handed.

For starters, the only actual Vs. System product we found was at Houston's oldest comic book store. They only had Marvel cards, in packs, collecting dust in a plastic case on a back wall counter. The card I'm featuring today can almost book a rental car without any insurance hassles. Why would I even think anyone would have a decades old gaming system in stock? Even though VS. System had way more releases than the Overpower I did collect, and I saw them being sold in more shops, that was also probably during the Bush Administration. Hell, HeroClix is much more recent, and nobody has carried those in nearly a decade. The only hybrid comic/card shops that I know of to still exist are all like that one-- local institutions-- around my advanced age. Only after did it occur to me that I never see sports cards outside of department stores nowadays, or single trading cards outside of booths in antique malls.

I do see gaming cards, but guess what? That's still mostly Magic and Pokemon. Almost nobody has those bulky cardboard boxes, or even the wooden shelving anymore. It's all plastic and glass now, enough to hold active modern card packs and encase high dollar key singles. Common deck building stuff is what you buy the packs for, and then trade with your community, not the shop. I'm sure the prices come from matching online dealers, because who would bother to print a guide in 2026? At gaming specialty stores, Vs. System isn't necessarily even a memory. How many shops have opened and closed since the cooling of J-horror and the rise of K-Pop, itself an institution now, rather than an emerging scene?

At that CCG convention thing, my gal was going booth to booth with a picture of a Vs. System pack on her phone like we were working a missing persons case. We also called some shops on said device (not helped by her initially asking for "Vee's Cards,") and almost nobody even knew what we were talking about. Here, they had sports cards. There was a stray comic booth where I tried to buy a $3.50 Comics Journal, before determining it was actually a $350 wall book because of some early McFarlane art. There was a tiny representation of comic book trading cards in a few binders. There were some of those intricate cardboard boxes from back in the day. They did not contain twenty year old VS. System singles, nor should they have. Why would they? Only an old man who sees that broad expansive of time as a blip, despite my entire relationship with my previously mentioned old lady being contained within than expanse, could delude himself into thinking otherwise. What do I know about modern CCG retailing, or any hobby retailing? I haven't gotten my regular comic fix at an LCS in near on a quarter century.

And so, back to eBay, casting my net far and wide for viable scans. Probably ordering singles to fill those gaps. And torturing y'all with the product of these efforts. An old man boring you with tales of a card game that could attend college that he never even bought himself.

2005 Upper Deck Justice League of America VS System CCG Card DJL-188: Rallying Cry!

Illustration by Duncan Fegredo.

Both the sportscard and comic book markets started heating up in the 1980s, feeding off one another, so that your average comic shop carried sports cards and vice versa. A lot of this was Mom & Pop stuff, so everybody was learning how each business type worked as they went along, and you tended to value every investment. In the case of cards, you'd typically open up at least one box of a desirable set to see which chase cards you could score to display in a case, and to have common singles to sell or trade to help customers put together sets. Even when you weren't actively making money on those loose cards directly, you provided a service, and by being a resource brought people into the store. Even as the trading card market took a downturn, the rise of collectible card games heightened the value of singles. Game players needed multiple copies of the same useful cards in customizing decks for play, or even just to have enough duplicate cards to maintain multiple active decks for various strategies of gameplay. Just as your Beckett was cooling down, your Scrye was heating up, and games like Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon kept the lights on when other hobby businesses were closing down.

I myself played Overpower and Star Wars, and usually kept my decks in sleeves. Since I was a DC guy, the only box of Overpower that I ever bought for myself was the JLA expansion. Aside from starter packs (basic pre-built decks of first editions,) everything else I got from loose individual packs, or by buying/trading single cards through other players and shops. As was typical, I usually carried my cards in a prefab folded cardboard box that held a single row of cards on their side, and was about 10 inches long with a built-in lid. At the shops I ran and frequented, single cards were usually kept in a variant of these boxes, which I'd guesstimate were something like a foot & a half wide and maybe two feet long. These were more complicated to build, because they would hold multiple rows of cards with separate cardboard slats that were folded into the larger pre-cut template. Cards in these boxes were stood up, and you had a separate folding lid template that could be used to keep dust and debris out of the boxes, or to secure them for transport. That's how you could safely get them to shows/conventions, though being cardboard, you wouldn't want them to be hit with anything more than the lightest of rain sprinkles. At least here in Texas, we'd have stacks of these boxes in our shops, usually supported by wooden shelving behind the counter or in the back room. If you had the right build, you could also get comic book short boxes on those shelves, and because you valued all that stock that you'd put money into, there were often a lot of each type of box around. Of course, in the '90s, after the bottom started to fall out, everybody had overstock to liquidate. You didn't want to pay property taxes on product that wasn't moving. You had to cut your losses at some point, or drown in them.