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.
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