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.

2007 Upper Deck VS System DC Legends CCG Card DCL-266: The Multiverse - Team-Up

Illustration by Simone Bianchi.

I'm an odd person to advocate for the DC Multiverse, because I hate multiverses, and my golden period as a DC reader was the fairly rigid Post-Crisis... "monoverse"? "Multiverse" is just bad English, beacuse a "universe" is definitially all-inclusive. And let's be honest, there are no fully realized alternatives to the DC Universe within itself. They're all tangents of the DCU. There isn't an entire universe of "Batman, but make it vampire." And I do like "imaginary stories." What If...? was a favorite one-off read as a kid, because it would take a key moment in Marvel continuity and pivot in a different direction to play out the consequences of a resolution that deviated from accepted history. Again, "X-Men, but make it vampire" is a fascinating notion to explore for the length of a single comic book. As things like back-up features and anthology titles faded away in the '80s, those kind of specultive stories were among the only forms of robust short subject narratives to survive in mainstream comics. Plus, the only way for a Marvel character to ever stay dead is if the entire reality in which the death occured also terminates. Some of the greatest DC stories of all time were retroactively "Elseworlds," and every single time they were not left as such, it diminished the original work. Was your life enriched by The Dark Knight Strikes Again or Before Watchmen? Did Doomsday Clock add anything but a qualifying asterick upon a once purer experience?

And yet, the DC Universe itself is an arbitrary construct. A handful of talent crafted the Marvel Universe to be interconnected from the earliest days, which allowed it fundamental structure for co-existence. The DC Universe happened because the different publishing houses that would eventually merge into DC Comics found it financially beneficial to mingle a selection of their properties, like various All-American characters forming the Justice Society of America. Would it even have been "...of America" without the synergistic branding? And within the JSA, Spectre and Dr. Fate were on the team for about five minutes before they had to be shipped off or have their powers dimminished to function on a super-team. Captain Marvel can't be the World's Mightiest Mortal if he's a vassal from a defeated and disbanded publisher sued out of existence by the Superman comics house, then licensed and purchased by them decades past his prime. For that character to fully shine, you need an Earth-S upon which The Marvel Family can be their best selves, and in a place considerably more fanciful than DC Earth. Heck, Superman has to make himself small to fit in a shared continuity where he can't push planets out of orbit or fly fast enough to break the time barrier.

For the first time in my life, DC Comics is the sustained and undisputed industry leader in market share, overall sales, and in audience reception. That's almost entirely on the back of the Absolute line, a parallel "universe" to the core DCU. I honestly think part of the problem is that Marvel finally ruined their "illusion of change" by insisting on having 19 simultanous versions of Spider-Man, Wolverine, Ghost Rider and so on to while also fostering an ersatz multiverse. Marvel was built to be intertwined and grounded. There's a world of difference between having a "Red Band" subsection for extra gory super-hero adjacent horror, and having to find a place where Captain Carrot, Angel Love, Morpheus the Dream King, and Batman's exposed penis have to find common ground. Pre-Crisis DC titles didn't have enough internal tension to sustain attention, because too much of that material was just wash-rince-repeat formula with no true stakes. Krypton was always going to blow up, and Superman was never going to stay married to anyone, because all the basics had to be reset for the next issue. With something like Absolute, their versions of the characters and continuity can reighn for an extended period, "matter" in the way DKR mattered, but also end and allow the readership to embrace a radical contemporary vision of the next DC continuity. That's just DC playing to its strengths, which is not in pretending that you can and should have everything in perfect alignment within a singular expensive framework. Thanks to the Multiverse, DC is finally cooking, even if I personally don't want a seat on the bench at this barbecue. I'll just stick to my niche buys, like how they've been picking up from the Donner and Burton movie canon. I'm at an age where I don't want to keep up with an entire "univers" anymore, but I do wish for those who do to have the best version of such a thing possible.

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