The Justice League of America comic book has never once been done right

I was watching the ‘History of the Justice League of America’ bonus feature from The New Frontier DVD when it struck me that with few exceptions, the JLA comic has always been something of a letdown.  Even at its best, it’s rarely delivered on the promise it’s been dangling in front of the readers’ noses since even before there was a JLA book: “Just imagine all your favorite heroes in one book.”  Even when all the characters are technically there, they’re not usually at their best, or the heroes are there stripped of the context of their own books — which reduces them to little more than a symbol of drama occurring elsewhere.

1. The book needs to be published more often than monthly.  At minimum, biweekly publication of JLA is a must.  The unspoken truth is that JLA is basically ‘DC Universe Monthly;’ at heart it’s really less a book about the League than the milieu these characters all share.   A large cast is necessary for the JLA book, but 22 pages a month is just not enough to have interesting character moments AND big action, to spotlight interesting second-tier characters AND deliver the DCU’s big guns in full flight.  And while everyone loved the old JLA/JSA team-ups, when they came every year it never seemed like enough in-book time had passed for it be time again for them to meet up, especially as they were usually tied to a holiday theme.  While JLA doesn’t have to tie in to every book, it’s one of the books that ALWAYS gets sucked into crossover events out of necessity, and a more frequent publishing schedule would help fit those promotional crossover issues in without regular readers feeling like the book was constantly being derailed (I’m still waiting for Dwayne MacDuffie’s JLA run to really get rolling, something like a year after he started writing the book.)   JLA doesn’t have to be constantly tied in continuity-wise with what’s being contemporaneously published, but it is the spine of the DCU and must reflect the status quos of the characters’ home books eventually — just not in the middle of a story.

2.  Snapper Carr is the JLA HQ caretaker.  Look, the JLA needs someone holding down the fort 24-7, and no one really believes Batman is taking his proper turns at monitor duty.  Snapper can live in the Hall of Justice and call people to solve problems as necessary.  He’s got nothing else going on, and he’s part of the book.  Deal with it.  He’s also a magnificently flawed, human character with many layers of depth if one takes into account all the different ways he’s been used, from annoying teleporting superhero in Invasion to annoying overly-familiar secret agent guy in Four Horsemen.   Just picture him as written by Ed Brubaker: he’s a guy who wants nothing more than to do what’s right and constantly fucks up by trying too hard to do just that.  The book has always suffered from a lack of strong supporting characters, so the few that the series has managed to establish should be made full use of, including Snapper, Catherine Colbert, and whoever else hasn’t gone the way of Maxwell Lord and Sue Dibny at this point.

3. It’s not all just big action.  The interaction of the characters can be humorous (Giffen & DeMatteis) or more soap opera (Gerry Conway) or both but there needs to be room for it.  Romance is far more interesting against the backdrop of war, and humor more cutting.

4. It’s not really a book for hardcore comic fans.  Oddly enough.  JLA should not be steeped in continuity and references to out-of-print, obscure stories.  It should always be as accessible as possible to the average reader, because let’s face it, juggling 14 characters is difficult enough without trying to make jokes only 5% of the audience is going to get.  JLA should be a gateway drug to the rest of the DCU — the references should be the character’ current books.

5. Bold, accessible, detailed art is a must.  Obviously George Perez cannot draw every issue of JLA ever published as would be ideal, but no weak art on JLA is at all acceptable at any time.  It doesn’t have to have an A-list marquee artist — in fact the ideal JLA artist is a dependable, consistent, professional workhorse.  Dick Dillin was the JLA artist. (Ed Benes is not.)  The artist is not — can not — be bigger than the JLA, but the art must be at least B+ quality at all times and the book can not be late.  Fill-ins are fine, and almost a given on a book like JLA, but on this book on-time regular publication frankly trumps artistic posturing.

6. Most of the traditional JLA enemies suck.  Kanjar Ro?  Despero?  Hyathis? Quit trying to revamp the interchangeable alien dictator types, because they don’t work anymore.  Yeah, you gotta have a fight against an Injustice League/Legion of Doom/Secret Society fairly regularly, but outside of that, JLA foes tend not to work so well in repeat performances.   New, unknown threats are always more threatening to the established structure of the JLA because they don’t know what coming, and that puts them in more of an underdog position, if such a thing is even possible.  They’re the redcoats, their foes are the terrorists, or possibly representatives of an enemy culture; take it from there.

7. It’s not the Equal Opportunity League for Bolstering Beloved Characters.   Look, Brad Meltzer, I loved the Barr/Aparo Batman and the Outsiders too, but Geo-Force didn’t belong on the League roster.   Vixen doesn’t belong on anything but a B-team, and Red Arrow…oh man.  No.  Come on.  Black Lightning was a good addition, and could potentially be an anchor character for the JLA book…but it hasn’t happened yet.  Regardless, yes, the book is a great place for second-tier characters to shine, but some characters need to join the team to find out they don’t really fit the team — like the Huntress, who was summarily fired by Batman.  Not every story about a second-tier character has to be about them coming into their own and taking their place among the A-listers, because 1. it doesn’t work that way and 2. no one believes 95% of those stories will stick at this point.

8. We get it, the Red Tornado is a robot with a soul who is conflicted about his humanity.  MOVE ON.

9. No spin-off books.   You want to publish more JLA books?  Great.  Put out JLA more often (see #1).  There can’t be more than one JLA, and having more than one JLA book with a different set of characters can never feel like anything more than the B-team — Justice League Europe, or Justice League Task Force, or Justice League Elite, it all says “Just imagine, a few characters you give a shit about with a bunch you don’t!”  Similarly, ‘casebook’ stories of the JLA a la JLA Classified are rarely interesting — it’s all about what’s next, and not one ‘untold story from the JLA casebook’ has ever read like anything but an unscheduled fill-in inventory story.

10. The JLA is not the X-Men.  But the book could be written a lot more like that.  A lot more. It would have a lot more successful for, oh, the last 20 years.

11. The JLA is the A-team.  Every time they try to do a JLA book without most of the big guns, people complain, “This isn’t the real JLA!”  Guess what?  That’s because it isn’t.  I like Nuklon and Ice and Obsidian and all those other characters no one’s ever heard of, but if you have to explain to someone who a character is in more than two sentences they probably don’t belong on the JLA.

12. The JLA isn’t just the A-team.  However, since the big names all have their own books, there’s the sense nothing really important can happen to those characters outside of their own books — which is something the JLA creative team and the creators of those individual characters’ titles whould work to overcome, incidentally — and there’s the sense that serious shit can happen in JLA to, say, Zatanna that can’t happen to Batman.  And serious shit can happen to those second tier characters…as long as the writer hasn’t stocked the team with his beloved favorites that he can’t bear anything bad happening to (see #7).  This is where publishing more-than-monthly comes in handy, because it allows for the occasional spotlight issue (not a solo issue — NEVER a solo issue within JLA, that’s simply false advertising, no matter how much you love Red Arrow and Vixen, Brad Meltzer) that highlight’s an individual character’s strengths without derailing an entire quarter’s output.

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