Forward Into The Past: Justice League 3000 #1 Review

People who know me know that I loves me some 80s-era Justice League International. In a lot of ways, it was the true breakout revelation coming out of Crisis On Infinite Earths: the premier super team of the DC Universe packed with 90 percent B-listers who often didn’t like each other, spent as much time bantering as they did fighting crime, and who seemed to spend about half their time wondering what they hell they were doing there (when they weren’t wondering how to turn a buck from being on the team).

It was groundbreaking, even though it shouldn’t have been – Keith Giffen’s, J. M. DeMatteis’s and Kevin Maguire’s Justice League came right after the horror and debacle of Justice League Detroit, which was also packed with B-listers, wanna-bes and spastics , but was missing little things like entertainment value, or characters you might give a shit about. Seriously: the only person who remotely cares about Vibe is Geoff Johns, and I am still reasonably convinced that he only brought the character back to settle a bar bet with Dan DiDio.

But eventually, all good things must pass. By the mid to late 90s, people began to tire of the humor of the Justice League International books (and to be honest, the balance between humor and action did seem to tilt firmly toward the Bwah-hah-ha-ha side of the scale), and DC rebooted the Justice League with JLA and Grant Morrison’s and Howard Porter’s vision of DC’s Big Five (plus Aquaman, who is only considered a DC A-lister when DiDio asks Johns, “Double or nothing?”).

And it has been with the Big Boys we have stayed for lo, these more than fifteen years. After all, DC launched their New 52 with a Justice League lineup that could have come straight from 1965 but for the inclusion of Cyborg and about 10,000 Jim Lee seams and fine detail lines. And a lineup like that leaves little room for Giffen’s and DeMatteis’s humor and infighting; after all, having Earth’s (Original) Mightiest Heroes sniping at each other as pussies and jackasses would be unseemly to those legendary character and to their owner’s parent company, who is struggling desperately to get a Justice League movie off the ground.

However, you should never count Giffen and DeMatteis out. Because with Justice League 3000, they have found a way to get some conflict and humor out of the Big Five by cloning them, dumping them 987 years into the future, and ripping all the history you think you know about the characters away… kinda like right after Crisis On Infinite Earths.

So the question is: can these guys catch lightning in a bottle twice? Particularly considering they’ve got Howard Porter, who helped revitalized the JLA after they left Justice League International, doing the art?

Well, kinda.

This is where I normally summarize a comic’s plot, but I’m already a lot of words into the review, so I’ll cut it short: all you really need to know is that it is the 31st Century, there is a threat called The Convert assimilating people Borg-style, and two members of Cadmus have cloned Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and Flash to deal with the threat. These clones, however, are not perfect; they don’t have the originals’ complete powers, their complete memories, or any of their backgrounds or upbringings. All of which means that you can throw a spandex unitard with an “S” on someone with superpowers, but without the Kent’s or Lois Lane, you’re just as likely to wind up with Rowdy Roddy Piper as you are Superman.

So the positives here are the characterizations of the team itself, which is cleverly done to extrapolate on what Superman, Wonder Woman, et al would be like without the defining moments that made those characters the ones we know and love. It’s interesting to see what you get when you have the strongest man in the world without the influence of Ma and Pa Kent and solid midwestern values… what you get is that musclehead who used to flush your head in the toilet in the junior high locker room.

Some of the physical differences have an interesting effect on the characterizations, too. We’re told that Flash doesn’t have his natural speed force aura and Green Lantern doesn’t have a proper ring. And in the former case it seems to have fucked Flash’s self confidence, and in the latter it has driven him to frustration. So the combined effect of the psychological and the physical means that we get new and interesting views of these familiar characters that is kinda cool to see… up to a point.

Because Giffen and DeMatteis use the differences in characterization to introduce some of the bantering and interpersonal sniping that we remember from Justice League International… but it feels a little bit weird here. And it feels weird because, at face value, we are dealing with the same old Big Five that we do know. It’s easy to picture Batman taking shots at Superman because we’ve seen it before and because it’s punching up at an overwhelming power who will react to it, well… like Superman. It’s another thing entirely to see Superman threatening to tear Batman’s head off. It’s bullying (although Batman would never think so), and while the dialogue adds some humor to the proceedings, it causes a little cognitive dissonance to see Superman being such a dick.

But I think part of the weirdness just comes from storytelling real estate. The writers need to spend a bunch of pages and panels setting up the world and Cadmus and The Convert and The Wonder Twins (not those Wonder Twins, but it’s still kinda fun to see that that moniker is still an insult in 1000 years) that it somewhat limits out time with the League itself. And we get enough time and information to intellectually understand that these are different characters than the ones we know from the standard DCU, but not so much that it stops feeling weird to see Wonder Woman say that she can fuck the mouthiness out of Batman.

It winds up being a stark difference from the first issue of the 80s Justice League, where all we are told is that there is a guy named Maxwell Lord who is assembling the team for an unknown purpose, and we spend the rest of our time watching these characters be suddenly introduced to, and try to deal with, each other. That issue gave us enough time to be introduced to everyone and get a sense of who they were and how they interacted (and being right after Crisis, we didn’t really know)… and we got to see it escalate over time. That “One Punch!” between Batman and Guy Gardner happened in Justice League #7, if you remember, where in Justice League 3000 #1, we have Superman trying to tear Batman’s head off by the last page. So the differences and conflicts here seemed more abrupt and less organic than I would have hoped.

Porter’s artwork is different than I would have expected, based on his work on Morrison’s JLA, when he did big iconic versions of the characters… and that is generally a good thing. His work here, which is self-inked, is a bit sketchier and angular than what I remember from JLA, with a lot of fine detail lines, particularly on the faces. It makes everyone look older and a little more beat-up than you’d expect from the World’s Greatest Superheroes, but frankly, that’s what I’d want from a book about cloned, alternate and combative members of the Justice League. It’s particularly evident in his depiction of Wonder Woman, who looks like she’s a color wash and a jump to Image Comics away from eating Rick Grimes’s other hand. The art overall has an interesting effect; it is in no way what I expected based on what Porter’s done on JLA, but it is a good look for a somewhat dystopian view of the Justice League.

There is some interesting stuff in Justice League 3000, but you shouldn’t come into it expecting to see the second coming of Justice League International. It has some of the elements of conflict and backbiting and some of the humor, but the ancillary world building takes away from time to fully establish these character as different from their standard DCU counterparts, which means that there is still a strange sensation of seeing familiar characters acting in an unfamiliar way. But with that said, these new characterizations and interactions are kinda cool, and there is more than enough interesting stuff going on to make me want to stick with the book for the immediate future.

After all, there is more than enough groundwork laid for Batman to eventually knock out Dick Superman’s punk ass… and it has been around a quarter century since I’ve seen Batman take out a mouthy punk with one punch.