A (JUSTICE) LEAGUE OF HIS OWN

~A (JUSTICE) LEAGUE OF HIS OWN~

February 15,2001.

Some may have problems with Superman encountering and even teaming up with other superhuman beings. One near-impossible character is hard enough to swallow, but several? Yet if we are going to use Siegel, Superman's original chronicler, as our most reliable guide, then we are faced not only with mention of the Legion of Super-Heroes...but one other super-team.

The only present-day super-team that Siegel specifically mentions in connection with Superman (in his "The Sweetheart Superman Forgot", in the picture above) was the Justice League. Siegel also recorded Superman meeting with another Justice League member, Aquaman, in the 1961 "The Adventures of Mental Man". (Aquaman was also specifically mentioned in "Sweetheart".)

In that same story, Siegel also records as Lois refers to Batman, another Justice Leaguer, as real.

The original League consisted of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman (supposedly an amazon from a hidden, mystic isle of amazons), J'Onn J'Onzz, supposedly a Martian, certainly an alien---although with many conflicting origins, Aquaman, a water-breather with at least three conflicting origins (two by his original chronicler, Mort Weisinger), the second Flash (Barry Allen) and the second Green Lantern (Hal Jordan). Other members later joined...

The League was formed in 1959....or was it? Here we have a choice of no less than four origins. There was Gardner Fox's "The Origin of the Justice League"---Fox was the original chronicler of the League as a whole (and its predecessor, the Justice Society)--Steve Engehart's "The Origin of the Justice League--Minus One"---and Keith Giffen's revamped "Secret Origin of the Justice League" in Justice League#92, 1994...and finally, the "untold tale" of how the hero Triumph united the heroes against a--surprise! alien invasion---but that somehow he got trapped in a time warp and reappeared in the present, with everyone's memory of same taken away.

The Triumph story is, I'm afraid, too incoherent and too contradictory (and Black Canary plays an integral part, which is great for retconning, but not the way it happened) to be considered.

Since Fox was the original chronicler, and Englehart's origin depends on timing that, unaccontably, depends on the cover date of Green Lantern and the Justice League's origin (even though it would take six months to produce a comic), I'm going to go with the Fox version (with a few amendations) as the real origin, although I am perfectly willing to consider that the first meeting of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman (who remembered each other from Society days) with the new Flash, J'Onn, and Hal Jordan--pre-Abin Sur--- happened a few months earlier.

(It also depends on a public panic about Martians being on the loose, and the JLA acted much more secretively than that...)

In fact, we can nail it down much better than that. Since it takes six months to produce a comic, and "The Origin of the Justice League" was published in Feb-March 1962, that means the actual birthday celebration took place, at the latest, in September, 1961. If they were celebrating the JLA's third birthday, that means that at the latest, the League was formed in September 1958. (Details of the story also back this up. When Snapper Carr, the League's honorary member, is heading towards the Secret Sanctuary, he is driving an open-top hot rod without a jacket on, and his sleeves are partially rolled up. That would be very unusual in February---but extremely common in September or earlier.)

In that story, the inhabitants of the planet Appellax were trying to pick a new Kalar (Emperor). As was the custom on their world, the claimants are sent to the nearest world that could support Appellax-level life, that had not been used before, there to battle it out---even though it would ravage that world---and the winner would return to Appellax, and be proclaimed Emperor. They would have the ability to turn the inhabitants into near-duplicates of themselves.

Lovely custom. Ravage the worlds around you, leaving yourself unharmed. Earth was the next one on the list.

One detail from Giffen's "reformatted" origin that I think is true. That the stone-giant, golden-bird, etc. forms were not the original forms of the creatures---else Appellax was host to no less than eight intelligent species---but constructs that the claimants' minds transferred into.

One thing not mentioned in any of the stories is that Appellax sent a message to other interstellar-faring cultures, that Earth would be their target. That was to keep anyone from landing there and getting caught in the destruction, and so offending mightier star-empires than their own. It also has a curious byproduct, which we'll get to later...

J'Onn J'Onzz was the first to encounter such a being, in the giant stone-giant, presumably in the same city where he maintained a facade as a human police detective. Probing the giant's mind, he had found out its origin and the falling of another such meteor in Cape Hatteras off the Carolina coast...

Aquaman encountered a glass sea-being in the Indian Ocean...and then proceeded to the Cape Hatteras meteor...

Another one landed on Wonder Woman's home island, and turned her "sisters" to mercury-beings. Once Wonder Woman subdued it, she also proceeded to the Cape Hatteras meteor.

The new Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, fought a golden bird-being in Southern Rhodesia in Africa, and then proceeded to the Cape Hatteras meteor...

The new Flash, Barry Allen, has been in Paris for an Interpol meeting, when he heard about a fire-being on the Lombardy Plain in northern Italy, near Lake Como.

They all met and were momentarily overcome by a wood-creature from the Cape Hatteras meteor. Only teamwork enabled them to escape...

Then they heard about another one in Iceland.

They arrived just as Superman and Batman stopped the diamond-being who emerged from the meteor---a kryptonite meteor, as it turned out. (Possibly indicating that Appellax was closer to Krypton than Earth was---?)

What was not revealed was J'Onn's mind-probe of the diamond creature, even as Superman overcame it. That Earth was doomed, anyway.

You see, some interstellar cultures act as---scavengers. Appellax contests-for-the-throne left a world decimated, and easy pickings for other cultures. J'Onn found, to his horror, that after each of the previous contests, other interstellar beings soon followed, to destroy what was left of the culture, and take all the loot they could...

True, they had won against the Appellax claimants. Yet others, assuming that Earth would be near-decimated and easy prey, were on their way. From dozens of worlds, no one could stop them all in time before they reached Earth....

They wouldn't be the wise, star-faring, beneficient races we were hoping for, but predators, scavengers of the spaceways. They would be the strip-miners of the universe.

Now, the individual heroes got together. Their activities had ranged from the Indian Ocean to Italy to Southern Rhodesia to Greenland. Many of them were astounded to find out the existence of the others'---Flash especially had questions about Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and what their existence meant about the existence of the rest of the Justice Society, especially his own especial hero, his predecessor, the Justice Society Flash.

In fact, when Batman said,"We ought to form a club, or society..."

He may have been hinting at a reformation of the Justice Society.

However, since their adventures crossed so many international boundaries, Superman mentioned how he had special status as the UN's "secret weapon", and Flash realized a new team was needed, with a more international sphere of operations,

"A league against evil! Our purpose will be to uphold justice against whatever danger threatens it."

So Superman escorted them to the UN building, to meet with the Secretary-General of the time, Dag Hammerskjold. He would need to do so anyway, because the others' activities in Rhodesia, Italy, and other places had gotten some attention from the local authorties, who had relayed it to their government, who asked for an explanation. As the UN's "secret weapon" Hammerskjold knew about Superman, but was astounded to find out these others---some of whom were famous as fictional characters even in his country---were real. He listened with understandable aghast concern about the threat of interstellar "scavengers" landing on Earth.

Yet in front of him were no less than two aliens...although one had been raised on Earth---and a third who wielded a near-omnipotent weapon given to him by aliens.

Although he would spread the word secretely to the governments of the world, he knew that release of the news to the public of the world would panic them, and escalate tensions in a world with the Cold War, that were tense enough...

Yet---these seven extraordinary beings, had foiled just such an invasion as they were warning of. Perhaps they could do the same again?

He went into high-level conferences with the other world leaders on this. Even though the USSR gave their tacit approval to such a force to help repel invaders, they objected to such patriotic figures as Wonder Woman being given a UN name, as if they really represented all the world. So instead, the code-name for the group would reflect the country that would be its UN sponsor, even though it was answerable to the Secretary-General, rather than the US President...

So they named it the Justice League of...America.

(The USSR may have regretted their decision a few years later. The knowledge that many of the League were loyal Americans, no matter what their origin, may have been a factor in them backing down from Kennedy in the Cuban Missle Crisis. If Green Lantern or the Flash had disabled the missiles, the Russian/Cuban soldiers wouldn't have been able to stop them. There's no indication that any of the JLA did make a move against the Russians, but the Russian high command must have considered the possibility.)

According to JUSTICE LEAGUE: YEAR ONE, the young League had numerous adventures in their first year, and truthfully, there would be time to fit a year of adventures in there, since the latest their first published adventure, "Starro the Conqueror" could have happened was in September 1959.

Yet numerous details were changed to fit retroactive continuity. They met and fought beside the Doom Patrol, despite the fact that the Patrol's own adventures and the references to the culture around them makes it clear they happened in the sixties, meaning that the Patrol was not in existence in 1958-59. (Perhaps the League and the Patrol met later and Waid recast it into this story.) Wonder Woman didn't join in the adventures but Black Canary did. There were other differences.

The Appellax judge of the various warlords supposedly also journeyed to Earth and tried to bring vengeance on the League and enslave the Earth, including its other superhumans. If there is truth in that story, it seems to be very little.

The next threat wasted no time in coming. The alien known as Starro, in shape like a giant starfish, tried to conquer Earth with its atom-bomb absorbing, mind-stealing and mind-control powers. (Superman couldn't take part in that adventure, since he was stopping a particularly large and dangerous meteor shower, some large enough to have a large mass left over after the friction got to it. If it landed on some city, it would be decimanted. Superman of course, can only leap huge distances, not actually fly, so instead he used his Legion flight ring---a relic of the first super-team he belonged to---to take him to the edge of space. His strength did the rest. Superman did come back down to witness the inducting of Snapper Carr as an honorary member.)

Starro had been lured by the beacon from Appellax naming its target---but truth to tell, Starro had been here once before, sizing up the planet for possible conquest, as a stepping-stone to greater worlds---but had decided to wait a few decades, to see if we would develop even more fearsome weapons. Then the Appellax warning had prompted it to move...

We know Starro had been here once before, because of our records of its foray into Australia.

Go to Frederick Valentich UFO Encounter or Frederick Valentich about the disappearance of a 20-year-old pilot in 1948. Read insances of what else happened that night, like,

"when they saw a star-shaped object appear at a low altitude over their heads. It was moving slightly faster than an aircraft as if oh an approach runs to an airport."

Or:

"As the smaller object approached the beach, the nine people observed that the object was shaped like a starfish with red lights at each tip."

It seems to be an early pass by Starro or one of Starro's race. Evidently he had wanted us to grow in our arsenal of nuclear weapons, and when he heard the Appellax broadcast, decided to be the first to reap the benefits. Imagine his surprise when our civilization wasn't decimated, and the League rose to stop him...

Of course, I'm not arguing all UFOs are real extraterrestrials, by any means. Project Blue Book was able to identify the vast majority of such sightings. Those few that couldn't be identified evidently had an all-too-terrestrial origin...

As readers of Sax Rohmer's "The Eyes of Fu Manchu" are aware, many of the UFOs of the forties' and fifties' and sixties' were advanced anti-gravity craft used by the Si-Fan under the direction of Fu Manchu, and developed by the enslaved minds of scientists who had been influenced by the drug, "the Blessing of the Celestial Vision". A minority was a rival anti-gravity "saucer" craft developed by Bruce Garfield in the same story. (I fear, from the lack of information reaching the scientific community of this information since Rohmer's publication in the late fifties', that Garfield was later "collected" by the Si-Fan and all the notes of this developement was destroyed by their minions.)

Still, out of the JLA's first thirty recorded adventures, no less than twelve involved real extraterrestrials, and other super-teams also encountered cosmic conquerors---for instance, the Skrulls from the Andromeda Galaxy---attacked the fledgling Fantastic Four in the early sixties.

Still, of all super-teams, the JLA encountered aliens much more often than any of the others. It seemed to be their "specialty". That's not even counting encounters by the individual JLAers in their solo adventures.

In contrast, the Justice Society, its predecessor, only twice encountered aliens who came to Earth, in over a decade of fighting for justice.(If you don't count Superman...)

It's as if all of the sudden Earth became the center of the universe for those who might want to destroy us ---out there.

This sudden influx of malevolent extraterrestrials in the late fifties and early sixties is best explained by their coming in the wake of what they believed was the Appellax "decimation" of Earth---and may explain why we have not been contacted by benevolent civilizations out there. Bad news travels faster than good news, and many of them might be under the impression that we were still decimated...

Thus Carthan of the planet Dryanna was exiled by the dictator Xandor to Earth, in "Doom of the Star Diamond". Or the Thanagarian refugee Byth, from a planet circling the star Polaris, just "happened" to pick Earth out of all the worlds in the galaxy to flee to. Suuuure.

Even when they heard of the Justice League's repelling of the Appellax-warlords, it still attracted the interstellar civilizations' attention to Earth in general and the JLA in particular. Thus, Kanjor Ro, a dictator of the planet Dhor that circled the star Antares, decided to use the JLA as a weapon against his enemies. Zazzalla of Korrll decided to use them as a way to uncover a hidden elixar of immortality hidden in her star-system.

The League justified Hammerskjold's faith in it magnificently, keeping the alien "predators" away and keeping their existence secret to most of humanity. The League was saddened when Hammerskjold died in an airplane accident in Africa, and in plainclothes, attended his funeral. U Thant, Hammerskjold's successor, also kept the secret.

Of course, malevolent aliens were not the only type of foes the Justice League fought---just the most common. They fought the other-dimensional Despero and the Crime Syndicate of a parallel Earth. (That story was the first time the League had been to a parallel Earth. "Crisis on Earth-One" and its successor carried on the dual-Earth fiction started in "Flash of Two Worlds", to throw off an inquisitive reporter who was investigating the truth about the Justice Society. The League and the Society did team up to fight the Crime Champions, but not on seperate Earths.)

They fought scientific criminals such as Dr. Destiny and Dr. Light, or the artificial creations of such criminals, such as Amazo or the Shaggy Man.

They even fought would-be sorcerers, such as Felix Faust....who owned his own copy of the fabled Necromonicon, often mentioned in the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and summoned ancient demonlike entities--- to battle the League.