JLA #43-50

JLA #43-50

Originally released in 2000

Written by Mark Waid

Art by Howard Porter (#43-45), Steve Scott (#46), Bryan Hitch (#47-50), J.H. Williams III (#48)

I saw that Mark Waid had written a run of Justice League, and he seems like a reliable writer, so I decided to look into that.  I also intended to read the Tower Of Babel storyline at some point.  Fortunately, Mark Waid's first JLA story was the Tower Of Babel, so that worked out nicely.

Tower Of Babel involves Ra's al Ghul, semi-immortal Batman villain and basically a James Bond antagonist, setting out with another plan to wipe out most of humanity in order to save nature.  Given the scale of this plan, he intends to use a series of meticulous plans to kill or incapacitate the Justice League - plans which were made by one of the League's own members, modified to be more lethal.

Given how much of a meme it's become for this Justice League to have a plan for how to beat just about anything, it shouldn't be a surprise to discover where Ra's got the plans. (he stole them from Batman)  This kicks off an arc of mistrust among the Justice League - most of the team agrees that Batman was reasonable to plan for how to defeat them, given how often they get brainwashed or face evil counterparts of themselves.  However, most of the team has issues with how Batman handled it - even telling them that he had plans would have been enough, yet Batman didn't have the common courtesy to do that.

Carrying on from Grant Morrison's run on the team, these issues use a slightly modified version of the seven founding members - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter are present, though as Barry Allen and Hal Jordan are dead at this time, the roles of Flash and Green Lantern are taken up by Wally West and Kyle Rayner, respectively.  Rounding out the team is Plastic Man, who makes for a fun eighth member, balancing out the more serious personalities of most of the team with his silly personality and goofy powers.

Ra's manages to carry out the first part of his master plan, scrambling the world's languages (hence the name of the storyline), but the bigger problem for the Justice League is the loss of trust between them, a problem that carries over into the next few storylines. (once they find a way out of their respective situations, Martian Manhunter links the team telepathically to get around their inability to communicate in verbal or written form, and they dismantle Ra's's plan pretty quickly, even if Ra's himself manages to escape)

Waid does a good job with giving each character their own voice, like Batman's habit of distancing himself from the team, Wonder Woman's competitive nature, and Plastic Man being goofy most of the time but revealing a serious side when the situation calls for it.

The next storyline is a three-parter that introduces the Queen of Fables, an amalgamation of various evil queens from fairy tales (though primarily drawing on the evil queen from Snow White).  She seems to be thrown off by the turn of events that brought her to DC's Earth, believing that Wonder Woman is her ungrateful stepdaughter and the rest of the Justice League are knights who are protecting her.

There are elements of fairy tales in this story, both from Earth (such as Hansel and Gretel) and Kryptonian, Martian, and Atlantean stories which serve a similar purpose to teach and/or scare kids.  As time goes on, the Queen of Fables gains the ability to summon beings from other forms of fiction, leading to some lawyer-friendly cameos.

Issue 50 seemingly resolves Batman's divide with the Justice League, with him feeling forced to take drastic action in order to regain their trust: he reveals his identity to the team.  I'm surprised that it took this long (almost forty years since the Justice League founded, by our time) for them to learn the identities of the other members, though in some cases (like with Batman and Superman), they knew who each other was already, and in others (like with Wally West), their identity is public knowledge. (then again, there was at least one reboot between then and now, and possibly more - for all I know, the other Justice League members knew that Bruce Wayne was Batman before Crisis On Infinite Earths happened)

These issues were a lot of fun to read through - while the Tower Of Babel plot was a highlight, the Queen of Fables introduction was also an interesting one.  Issue 50 also had the team dealing with Doctor Destiny, a villain that I'm not too familiar with - he started out as a minor crook who impersonated Green Lantern, and somewhere between then and now, he became a Freddy Krueger-style nightmare being.  I'm not sure how he got from point A to point B.

While I'm not sure if this will dethrone Justice League International as my favourite Justice League run so far, Mark Waid's run is my favourite "serious" Justice League run so far. (JLI isn't exactly a traditional Justice League series)  Mark Waid continues his great track record, in my eyes, and he's doing a great job with balancing action, comedy, and drama here.