Pre-Crisis Primer: A JLA For the Eighties

Justice League of America 233-236

“Rebirth”

The old Justice League is gone. Long live the Justice League. 

For better or worse, Vibe is the mascot of the new JLA.

It's been a while since we checked in with the Justice League, but as far as stories and membership is concerned, this is where Post-Crisis continuity really starts. While it's not officially Post-Crisis yet, the stories from this point forward do not have the caveats of continuity discussed previously. From here on out, what's in the story is what actually happened. That really shouldn't be too much to ask in the first place, but if continuity wasn't complicated, there wouldn't be a need for this blog. Continuity Alerts aside, what did happen to the old team?

Pre- and Post-Crisis continuity incongruities not withstanding, what happened is simple: The JLA became too big and unwieldy for its own good. With Superman as a reserve member and official membership stretching upwards of twenty different heroes, the team grew unable to efficiently handle credible threats. With this in mind, as acting chairman, Aquaman took it upon himself to both disband the JLA and then immediately seek to rebuild it as a smaller fighting force populated with heroes dedicated to the team and able to respond quickly if called upon.

While Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Zatanna and the Elongated Man (along with his partner-in-crime-and-marriage, Sue) are the only veteran members to remain on the team, they are joined by a motley crew of new blood. Vibe is an Hispanic man from the inner-city who, because comics can't leave any cliché well enough alone, used to run with a gang but has since reformed his ways a bit. Not only is he a break-dancer (it is 1984, of course) but his powers involve focusing and targeting waves of seismic force. Vibe's followed by the more straight-laced Steel. Steel's interesting in that on the surface: he's a legacy hero, son to the World War II masked avenger Commander Steel, who took the fight to Hitler back in his day. Steel lives up to his father's legacy in a different way in that he's actually part machine: most of his skeleton replaced with steel, his muscles bionics and his flesh bullet-proof plastics. The kicker is that Steel did not require these 'enhancements' because of an accident or harm done to him: his grandfather, eager to continue his son's legacy, forced these surgeries and procedures on his grandson to literally build him as a hero.

Vixen has a less gruesome and drama-ridden origin: she's a fashion model who inherited a mystic relic, 'The Tantu Totem.' Comics can never let go of alliteration. The Totem gives Vixen the ability to mimic animal traits: speed of a cheetah, skill of a fox, strength of a gorilla, so on and so forth. Finally, there's Gypsy, a mysterious girl with the convenient ability to turn invisible who tags along with the League but doesn't appear to be a full-time member just yet but she does have a growing relationship to the Manhunter. 

Aquaman had his moment upstaged by a lame bad guy. Poor Aquaman.

While the injection of new blood adds new life to the League, it also brings with it all sorts of drama-rife interpersonal problems. Steel and Vibe predictably are often at odds; Zatanna thinks Aquaman is pushing the new Leaguers too hard and generally being a dick about it; Elongated Man feels left out of the new team, eager for camaraderie with the new members that is slow in coming; and Gypsy plain doesn't trust anyone, opting to remain in the shadows when around the others. Aquaman may have wanted a team of Leaguers able to dedicate all their time to the cause, but he was a ways to go before their the fighting force he envisioned.

In direct contrast to the old League's base of a satellite in geosynchronous orbit above the Earth, Aquaman decided that the League needed a more grounded approach. He took himself literally by basing the team in a warehouse in Detroit. The team also takes a break, at least temporarily, from cosmic menaces and alien invaders to take on some local gangs and other terrestrial menaces such as putting a stop to street gangs in Detroit and Vixen going rogue from the team to take out a dictator named Maksai, someone with a connection to Vixen's past, and a claim to the Tantu Totem, that goes unexplained for now.

She broke both his damn arms. Pretty sure she doesn't like the dude.

By the last chapter of this story, the League faces their first major menace in a return to cosmic adventure: The Overmaster who kidnaps the team to his mountain base in Antarctica to decide the fate of the human race. In the DC Universe, the Antarctic continent is dotted with hidden alien bases.

The Overmaster is an alien menace who claims to have been responsible for several extinction events on Earth going back to the birth of the planet. Who killed the dinosaurs? This guy. At least that's what he says, like most comic book villains, Overmasters recruited a band of like-minded bad dudeds to do his fighting for him. His unnamed team consists of Black Mass, who can open black holes; Fastball, who throws objects so fast, they explode on impact; Shirke, a winged woman with a nasty set of claws; Crowbar, a guy with a crowbar; and Shatterfist, he who shatters things with his fists. 

Overmaster and his lame-ass team. Just look at Crowbar. The guy with the crowbar, FYI.

These guys are so inconsequential, The Monitor, dutifully monitoring the events of the story, wonders where a being like The Overmaster has such power to recruit and create new superhumans. He eventually decides that investigating the matter is not worth his time and moves on to bigger and better. Not even The Monitor, the guy who hired out Javelin, can be bothered with the members of Overmaster's new bad-guy team. They're all universally lame and aside from Black Mass and Fastball, I don't think a one of them is seen again after this story. The next time we see Fastball again, he's killed. Spoiler.

While the two teams enter into the obligatory battle royale, Aquaman uses his powers of aqua to deduce that any being, Overmaster or not, who claims the power he does would not need this band of losers to do his fighting for him. Stealing away from the fight, the orange-clad hero discovers that Overmaster may not be who he says he is (a villain lie?) but instead an alien parasite with delusions of granduer who's been lying in wait and observing the League, deducing them to be the greatest assemblage of heroes in way of his dominance of the planet. When Aquaman jettisons the hidden bases command center, blasting it into space, Overmaster disappears and take his motley crew of lame henchmen with him. Another day, another dollar for the JLA and the first big victory for the neophyte team.

Overmaster is a disappointment in this story. Every chapter opens with a scene from pre-history with new forms of life struggling for existence and some narrator, presumably the Overmaster deciding its not yet time and extinguishing said life. It's quite a nice build-up but the conflict and resolution fail to deliver, with the extinction events being lies told by a boasting alien menace and the conflict being the sort of rote beat-'em-up comic books are known to peddle. Basically, new JLA team does not equal new conflicts at all. The Overmaster as presented here is someone the original team could have wrapped up in much the same way.

The League takes on street crime.

This era for the JLA team is much maligned by fans, but it's not something I've read before. I know the character of Vibe is subject to much derision from comic-book readers. Given this reputation, I can't say the story of 'Rebirth' did much to sway me from this team not being a stain on the history of the Justice League. Admittedly, stain is a bit harsh; while the larger conflict and plotline for this particular story was a failure, I am interested in seeing the various interpersonal conflicts among the team members play out, specifically if any kind of resolution occurs regarding the origin of Steel. A legacy character who has this legacy forced upon him is an interesting twist in the 'son taking up the fathers mantle' story. This story may be a muddled failure, but the characters have promise. It will be interesting to see where everything goes as we approach the Crisis.