A little nostalgia for JLA Secret Origins

Ah man, I'm so far behind on this thing for the month. I'll catch up okay, but yeah.

Noticed an odd little shift the other day. While it's certainly nothing new to feel down I actually realized that I had moved a step beyond that- that I was thinking more like "I deserve to feel down".

That's rather excessive. Rather harsh, self.

Rather.

I've got a couple of library stuff to return, so that means it's now or never if I'm going to talk about them. Well, "never" or "the next time I take out these books, if I do" whichever comes first.

There's the first two volumes of "Justice" by Jim Krueger, Alex Ross, and Doug Braithwaite, notable for name dropping Robert McKee (too lazy to check the spelling, but I've talked about "Story" before, so maybe search through my previous posts if you want to fact check me. Oh, what's that? You'd have to manually search 'cause I never tag my posts? MWAHAHAHAHAH) and the concept of the villain thinking of him or herself as the hero, all things being a matter of perspective.

I say perspective, in place of "all things are relative" i.e. good and evil, because I've got a pretty good rubric for "good" and "evil" in my head. If an action does good to you and harm to all others... that's an evil act. Pretty straightforward.

I bring that up because Gorilla Grodd can think he's the hero of his own story all he wants, but it's pretty hard to argue with the fact that he'd be happy to eat the Flash's heart given the oppourtunity.

That was a gruesome example I just came up with. No heart eating is actually contained in Justice.

But that's not actually what I wanted to talk about- this other book, "Secret Origins Featuring the JLA" is a collection of single issues outlining the origins of the JLA as of the years of the Morrison League.

There are 7 stories, one for each of the members (except Martian Manhunter who ALWAYS gets forgotten. Which sucks 'cause he's awesome) and then one for the origin of how this iteration of the Justice League got together.

Of the six individual character origins, half of them are pretty terrible. Like, crazy terrible. Like, "why would anyone buy this?" terrible. That's mostly just an art issue, however Aquaman has both the worst art AND the worst, most convoluted origin story as of this time.

Maybe Erik Larsen (the writer) just hates Aquaman? That could explain it.

The three for Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman are appropriately the best. All three have art that tricked me into thinking they were done by much more famous artists (I'm looking at you Batman by Staz Johnson and James A. Hodgkins who tricked me with their skill into assuming it was Kevin Nowlan on art. What? Nowlan is great! I hope that's how his name is spelled!)

BUT!

The narration for the Batman comic is really stupid. "Predictability, here, is a complex calculation between logical occurrences and dubious motives. While destiny is the elusively simple matter of becoming who you are."

Elusively simple. Riiight.

Also, pretty sure "bestial" isn't a word. You mean "beastial"?

Whatever. The important story is the JLA origin my Morrison and Millar, with art by Howard Porter- so pretty much the actual creative team for JLA at the time. Why is it important? Because somewhere, in some comic or magazine, or maybe even someone else's collection (but seriously, probably my own) I read this story when I was little-ish. I'd have been about 12, and this was probably my first time reading a book with all these characters, my first glimpse into the wider DC comic universe outside of a couple of Batman books (a very different animal) and that ONE issue of Superboy that so informs my tastes to this day (in case I've never mentioned it before, I now own all of that Superboy series. If some one told me I had to get rid of all my comics, but got to keep my Superboy series and my first two Spider-Man comics... I'd be okay with that. And as long as we're talking hypotheticals, if I had to keep only one comic out of my collection, it'd be that second Spider-Man comic. I should really talk about that comic sometime.)

Got distracted there, didn't I?

You know this JLA comic taught me the concept of super conductivity? I think that's amazing... but, what's funny about it now that I'm older (in fact it seems crazy that this never occurred to me before) is that they just throw super conductivity into the book with no real explanation of why the temperature is dropping so much to allow super conductivity of the metals in the building.

The evil alien menace just asks Batman (who's the only one who can save the day, naturally) what he did, and Batman says he "Sabotaged the air-conditioning system."

See, it could be I'd have to wait until high school to grasp just how cold it'd have to be before we'd be talking super conductivity time, but now... couldn't they have thown in that Batman used Mr. Freeze's gun or something with the... air... conditioning. It just sounds so silly now.

Don't get me wrong, the whole thing is still awesome, and I love the fact that it did actually teach me something science related ("Drop the temperature of most metals to absolute zero and they have no electrical resistance." "Super conductivity"- though I doubt ANY metal would have ANY electrical resistance at ABSOLUTE zero. I suppose I could be wrong, though it seems a pretty intuitive fact.).

Plus this comic simply bleeds cool. Like the bit of stubble and the merciless smile on the Flash's face as he smashes the alien complex, while Batman is all cloaked in the shadows... and they don't even bother showing the pair race out of the building as it explodes in a faux bit of drama because "They don't call me the Flash for nothing."

And then there's Green Lantern's awesome dialogue- while everyone else is the established super hero, a bit on the stiff side, Kyle is almost the side kick/viewer stand in. After saving the day, but losing their powers in the process (they come back) he says "Yeah, cool deal, but what are we supposed to do now? Join the concerned mothers of america? Look at the state of us. The Flash is the only one in the team who even SMELLS like he's got super-powers anymore. You must admit, this kinda sucks."

Ah, Kyle. You'll ever be the best Green Lantern ever.

Alright, sweet, that's a post people.