posted
WHO IS THIS JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA? Part Three – The Origin of the JLA by BRUCE MACINTOSH
The splash page of The Justice League of America Issue #9 posed the question succinctly: “How did the Justice League of America come into being? What was the strange menace which united them? Where did this menace come from? When did the Champions of Justice discover that the one weapon which would help them triumph over the menace was – teamwork?”
In its first 11 appearances of the Justice League of America, no thought was given to the team’s origin – what brought the seven heroes together in the first place. Starting with the team’s first appearance in The Brave and the Bold #28, they assembled whenever a major event arose where the efforts of a solitary hero would be insufficient (usually involving one or more all-powerful aliens). It wasn’t until JLA #9 (cover dated Feb. 1962) that the team’s raison d’être is examined.
In the Second installment of this series, I postulated that Editor Julius Schwartz initially thought he was only tapping into the baby-boomers’ interest in all things space-related in that post-Sputnik world. (Of course, he also figured it was a good way to give his new characters some extra exposure and sell some more comics.) But after three years from the JLA’s initial appearance, he and writer Gardner Fox realized that they had opened a Pandora’s box: They had created a new “Universe” of superheroes, and now that the characters were interacting with each other on a consistent basis, readers wanted to know how and why it happened.
Schwartz and his writers needed to explain why those individual heroes – each powerful in their own right - would feel it necessary to team up.
In retrospect, it also serves to remind readers that three years earlier many of these heroes had barely been created, and certainly none of them were aware of each other’s presence. Today, we take for granted the concept of the “DC Universe”, but back in the late 1950s each of these heroes actually existed in their solitary “universe”. With the exception of Superman and Batman’s (and Robin, the Boy Wonder’s) team-ups in World’s Finest Comics, superheroes in the 50s never interacted with each other, and their adventures occurred independently of the others.
Although Wonder Woman, and Superman and Batman were all members of the former Justice Society of America, that team ceased to exist in 1949. The other heroes’ comics, such as Hour Man, Hawkman, (Golden Age) Green Lantern, Wildcat, and so on, also ceased publication around that same time. Therefore, those heroes ceased to exist. So, although the Big Three’s solo adventures continued to limp along, the characters themselves never acknowledged the other’s existence in their own titles. In other words, there was no longer a “DC Universe”.
By the time the JLA had been adventuring for three years, the “new” DC Universe (also known as the birth of the Silver Age) was firmly established in canon. Therefore, by 1962, it was time for editorial to justify how their worlds came to merge. JLA #9 opens with the annual meeting of the team in their cozy headquarters located in a cave (of all places) somewhere near Happy Harbor, USA.
Honorary member, Snapper Carr (more about him later) drops in on the team busily cleaning their groovy grotto. (Dirt everywhere!) Wearing a frilly apron, Wonder Woman vacuums while Batman and Aquaman awkwardly hoist a desk several inches above the ground for no apparent reason. Superman and J’onn J’onzz flitter above, washing the walls of the cave (Where is all that mud coming from?), while Green Lantern aimlessly carries a captain’s chair under each arm, back and forth from one panel to the next. (With this collection of the most awesome power in the universe, it seems that no one realized that any one of them could practically wave a hand and their subterranean sanctuary could instantly be spic-and-span… But I digress.)
Eager to avoid his share of the work, plugged-in compatriot Snapper Carr queried the heroes about a display case with a pile of wood shavings. Wonder Woman started to explain that the collection of splinters was a souvenir from their very first (as-yet-untold) adventure, but taskmaster that he was, Aquaman stalled the storytelling until the crew had finally finished cleaning the cave. Later, the heroes collected at the now-shiny meeting table to enjoy a three-candled cake signifying the team’s third anniversary in existence.
J’onn J’onzz began the story of how the individual adventures of the five heroes (himself, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman and Flash) led them to the same island to defeat a multi-part menace from space. It seems that while in his civilian identity as a police detective, John Jones heard a police radio warning that people were being turned to stone. He changed to his “normal” Martian Manhunter identity to investigate, and encountered a huge stone giant with blue beams coming from his eyes solidifying everything in its path. Before defeating the craggy colossus, J’onzz used his newly-found mind-reading powers to determine what had brought him to Earth.
The stone giant was not alone, of course, and was accompanied by six other creatures of varying composition, each of whom landed in a different place on Earth. Apparently, they had not been sent to usher in the Silver Age of comics by creating a continuity among DC superheroes. Instead, it seems that the ruler of the creatures’ planet, Appellax, had died, and – according to custom – contenders to the throne had to go to another planet. The “winner” would be whichever creature succeeded in enslaving that planet’s people with its special power.
Having defeated the stone giant with a two-fisted knock on the noggin, the Martian Manhunter set out to investigate a report of another meteor off the Carolina coast near Cape Hatteras. Curiously, rather than seeking to similarly defeat the other five menaces from space that had already emerged from their respective meteor-craft, J’onzz chose to check out the only meteor which did not pose an immediate threat. Anyway, upon landing on the island, the Martian gumshoe found himself being transformed into a tree.
Meanwhile, Aquaman found himself face-to-face underwater with his own alien invader, whose plan to take over the Earth started with turning the fish to glass. With a lot of help from his finny friends, the undersea adventurer defeated the glass alien and headed off to Cape Hatteras to investigate the mysterious meteor.
Wonder Woman had her hands full with an alien who emerged on Paradise Island, turning its female inhabitants to liquid Mercury. Princess Diana defeated her alien by lassoing it and spinning it over her head until it vaporized. Like most Julius Schwartz-edited titles, JLA was frequently sprinkled with scientific trivia, and thanks to Wonder Woman we learned that the boiling point of Mercury is 356.9 Centigrade. After apparently reaching this temperature through the friction of her spinning lasso and vaporizing the mercurial menace, Wonder Woman coincidentally sped off to the same island that held the immobile Martian Manhunter and Aquaman, and herself started sprouting branches.
Green Lantern battled a bird alien that and just before he was completely covered with feathers, he managed to freeze the avian alien in a power-ring-frozen waterfall. Flash meanwhile defeated a flame alien by racing around it and creating a vacuum that knocked it out. Independently, the two headed off to the island to unwittingly join the other three heroes in their sticky situation.
Apparently now having enough heroes to make a quorum, the wood alien finally emerged from the meteor and compelled the quintet to follow in its wake. Lumbering along (get it?) under the thrall of the oaken enemy, none of the heroes could resist… until “Aquaman – straining every muscle – managed to lurch against Green Lantern, swinging a limb against that of the green gladiator….” Aquaman freed a portion of GL’s ring, which was able to restore Martian Manhunter’s head to normal so that he could use his “powerful breath” to knock the Flash into Wonder Woman. This change in trajectory sent WW into the path of Green Lantern’s beam, freeing the Amazon Princess’s left side, (the one with the lasso.)
The wooden invader finally noticed the ruckus, but not until Wonder Woman summoned the will to use her unpetrified part to swing her magic lasso around it. Rather than merely disabling her opponent, she went “Fargo” on it and shredded it into a pile of so many wood chips. (Am I the only one who noticed that Wonder Woman was the only one to kill her two opponents, while the rest were able to disable them and later send them packing back to Appellax? It should be no surprise that the Amazon Princess has always had a mean streak. But that’s an argument for another time.)
Through the power of cooperation, the five heroes triumphed over the sixth alien. A team was born… But wait, wasn’t there a seventh alien meteor? And what of Superman and Batman? The five heroes decided to go together to the location of the final meteor. Coincidentally, as the quintet arrived in Greenland, so did Superman and Batman and together they encountered the final invader – a creature made of diamond.
Wouldn’t you know it, the meteor was made of Kryptonite, and Superman was out of commission. That is, until Batman dropped the Bat-grappling hook and whisked away the K-meteor. Again, teamwork saves the day. Superman was then able to defeat the alien by using his super-hands to turn the diamond into coal. (Sharp cookie that he was Snapper Carr sensed this to be a physical impossibility, and queried Supes on his dubious achievement. Kidder that he was, the Man of Steel revealed that he had a knack with Carbon, as well: “I simply rubbed the diamond being – the wrong way!”)
The finale of the origin issue of the Justice League is priceless, and deserves to be quoted: “Afterward, we held an impromptu get-together and decided that since teamwork alone had enabled us to defeat the meteor beings, it might be wise for us to unite.” Batman observed, “We ought to form a club or society…” and Flash continued, “A league against evil! Our purpose will be to uphold justice against whatever danger threatens it!”
In our next installment, we’ll examine another early JLA adventure, and how the teammates typically “paired off” in each story. We’ll also recount how the team padded the treasury with some extra membership dues by adding a few new members in the early years.
You can read more of this series of articles here:
Printer-friendly view of this topic
