Reading superhero comics as a young boy through to young adulthood, I was mostly a Marvel devotee. I disliked most of DC’s Silver Age work for its weird misogynistic boyishness, its whimsy. I’d watch the Batman TV show if I was home sick and it was in re-runs in the afternoon, but I didn’t really like it much. My vision of Batman was the more serious pulp-vigilante, who did finally appear in the comics in the 1970s written by Dennis O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams.
The one DC comic I always had time for, however, was Justice League. There was a long time where it was drawn by Dick Dillin (from 1968-1980) so it had a visual consistency I really liked. The basic idea of stories involving all the major heroes working together really grabbed me, and I can remember a lot of the story arcs from this era with great fondness. I remember particularly enjoying the recurring cross-overs with the Justice Society of America from Earth-2, though this did produce some weird stuff from time to time—for example, the idea that Black Canary in the Justice League was not actually the Black Canary of Earth-2 moved to another reality but the daughter of that Black Canary brainwashed to think she was her mother while she grew up unconscious from childhood to adulthood in another dimension because she’d been cursed with a destructive sonic cry—which meant among other things that she had her mother’s memories of having had sex with her father inside her own mind, not that they went out of their way to point that out. Comics everybody!
Anyway, near the end of this time frame (often called “the Bronze Age”), DC’s editors apparently decided that falling sales on Justice League indicated that it was out of fashion and that comics readers wanted the soap-operatic subplots and character development then on display in Marvel’s X-Men and DC’s New Teen Titans. So following an invasion by Martians where the “big guns” of the Justice League were nowhere to be found because they were dealing with other problems, Aquaman took advantage of a provision of the Justice League charter and dissolved the Justice League. He reformed it as a full-time team where all the members were meant to live and train with one another, which led to adding a number of young new characters who were meant to represent diversity but were basically stereotypes and moving the team to a bunker in Detroit.
This was not a success.
So it was time for another relaunch—DC plainly knew that they had to have some kind of Justice League title. So following a company-wide crossover series called Legends (where Ronald Reagan was manipulated by Darkseid into banning superheroes) the new Justice League appeared in 1987.
It was a success.
Reader, I hated it. I hated that it was successful. I hated its influence on other comics at the time.
I hated the tone. It was meant to be humorous, in the self-referential style that one of the writers, Keith Giffen, brought to his work with the character Ambush Bug. It wasn’t fourth-wall breaking or persistently ridiculous, but we weren’t meant to take the characters very seriously. I never liked Giffen’s funny writing nor the turn his art took for much of his later career, and in Justice League particularly the writing set me on edge. It was the kind of thing where you were told things were funny, where the characters told you to laugh by saying bwah-hah-hah, where the characters were meant to be seen as funny by being ridiculous or caricatured. It was an extremely masculine kind of humor—a typical ‘funny plot’ was the virginally pure superheroine Ice going on a date with the malevolently hypermasculine Green Lantern Guy Gardner, who took her to a porn theater and then got in a silly slap fight with a goofy supervillain. Blue Beetle spends an entire issue a bit later on ogling new member Wonder Woman in a way that was coded as “this is hilarious, because he has no chance of hooking up with her”.
The writers knew readers like me were out there and enjoyed nettling us—at one point Hawkman joins the Justice League for a few episodes and is portrayed as a grim, disapproving scold who longs for the old serious days and complains about how everything is just silly now. (Batman tells him, “Lighten up! You’re positively grim!” which, ok, was kind of amusing.)
But re-reading a bit, not only do I hate this era even more than I did for all the reasons I disliked it then, I’m also struck at how completely incoherent the basic storytelling and planning is at every level. Half of the first issue is a silly fight between Guy Gardner and the rest of the team because they don’t want him there. It’s never clear why they end up accepting him at all—he’s angry, misogynistic, unpleasant, power-mad and he’s incompetent. Basically he’s set up to be the joke that drives a lot of the stories early on but in a way that makes no sense in terms of a team that in theory can pick and choose its members. The new heroic Doctor Light, an Asian woman, is added to the cast and then promptly forgotten in most of the stories that follow—she isn’t even around enough to count as a token. Mister Miracle joins and his stage manager Oberon is a more important character than any of the superheroes for much of the title’s history. Captain Marvel (aka Shazam) joins, seems like a major anchor for the team, and then drops out again about seven or eight issues in. Doctor Fate joins, is there for one plot arc, and steps out. It’s like watching two kids grabbing action figures from a huge trunk full of them and tossing half of them out of boredom or distraction three seconds later.
There’s a corporate executive named Maxwell Lord (a version of him popped up in the recent Wonder Woman film) who has mysterious plans to control the Justice League but it was years and years before DC actually made any sense of the character. Every plot arc in the first 20 issues or so feels like it’s seat-of-the-pants writing, as if Giffen and DeMatteis had no idea at all of what was coming next. The Justice League dropped “of America” and rebooted as Justice League International (an idea I liked) and then they spun off a second new title, Justice League Europe.
I remember feeling really validated when Grant Morrison, who was then writing Animal Man, has the title character (who had joined the Justice League Europe) comment in a metafictional way that when he’s in Justice League Europe, whomever is writing him never has him doing anything. None of the characters in the first two or three years of this version of Justice League seem particularly good at being superheroes, and much of the time they’re not particularly needed anyway and get themselves into messes that were better left alone in the first place. Doctor Fate is at the center of a two-part story early on (and then leaves) where he pretty much resolves the whole situation single-handedly and the rest of the team are largely bystanders or make the situation worse. (Neil Gaiman would later on take a potshot at the very stupid villain at the heart of this Doctor Fate-centered story: I don’t think I’m imagining it to think that the premier-tier comics writers of the era hated this stuff too.)
Mind you, as far as things Justice League go, there was worse yet to come in the multi-ab steroidal, big-gun carrying, women with impossible wasp waists T&A 1990s, like Extreme Justice.
But honestly I think Giffen and DeMatteis’s Justice League was the influential ancestor of those worse-still portrayals. It wasn’t until Grant Morrison’s 1997 Justice League that this entire sensibility got scrubbed and replaced with something that was a joy to read. By that point, I’d actually given up reading a lot of superhero comics period, because both companies had been swamped by terrible artistic and narrative trends as well as silliness driven by collectible covers and trading cards and so on—there’s a huge hole in my knowledge of most long-running titles in this era. I really remember the Giffen/DeMatteis-influenced work as being one of the big reasons I stopped enjoying comics at that point, and on re-reading I completely see why that was so.