The Justice League of Mutual Admiration and Respect for the Customs of All Nations and Indigenous Peoples

One of the first comic book storylines I followed avidly was in Justice League of America issues 166, 167, and 168, a pleasant romp in which the Secret Society of Super-Villains swaps bodies with five members of the Justice League.

I've been casually looking for those issues for a while now, although when I heard the story was referenced in Identity Crisis I figured the chances of finding any cheap copies on Ebay had pretty much evaporated.  To my surprise, I then discovered the first two issues right here in Nashville, and now I've read them for the first time in twenty-five years.

Fortunately, I had no illusions that they'd live up to memory.  But if the wonder of a child reading their clichéd body-switching plot for the first time is gone, I can appreciate them even more as products of that most unique and mysterious of cultural moments - the first one I remember.  They're perfect representatives of the late-70s gentle decline of superhero comics into the steady formulas of the Bronze Age.  These are comics that reliably sacrifice plot and action for forced characterization, that spend more time dwelling on a ruminating android than they do illustrating the climactic beat-downs of the Justice League.  They display all the curious mixture of adult aspirations and fannish obsessions that you would expect from a writer of Gerry Conway's era, and in many ways no writer is more of Conway's era than Conway himself.

Just one example:  the first part opens with a bit of denouement from the previous issue as the Justice League attends the funeral of Zatanna's mother, a whole lot of dancing and garland-throwing.  There's a nice moment as Batman grouses that the wake is too festive for his tastes - and Conway doesn't oversell it, doesn't give us the two-panel origin recap that we'd expect to explain just why Batman isn't comfortable at any funeral, especially this touchy-feely earth-mother crap. When Batman calls the ceremony "a celebration of her death!" his discomfort is palpable; we know we could drop out the "her" and get an even better sense of what's really bothering him.

Conway doesn't quit while he's ahead, though.  Wonder Woman delivers a long, inspirational, rather insufferable justification for the festivities, culminating at the exact moment when the body of Zatanna's dead mother is physically absorbed into the souls of the mourners/celebrants.  Batman is horrified, but Superman chides him with a lecture so patronizing that he can only be acting as Conway's mouthpiece:

On Krypton, we had our own methods of dealing with our dead, methods you might find equally strange.

Different cultures... different customs. The Norsemen once burned their honored dead on ships... some American Indians would leave their dead on platforms in open air...

If there's anything that we in the League should understand... it's that no culture or tradition is any more fitting than any other. We're fighting for truth and justice, my friends... not necessarily our way...!

Is it just me, or does Superman sound oddly like Dave Fiore? Or, more likely, does Dave sometimes sound oddly like a Gerry Conway comic book?

Anyway.  I was stunned when I read this speech, with its vivid reminder of a world very different from our present one.  It was published in February, 1979, the same era when the Super Friends were knocking down barriers by admitting a hypertrophic Indian chief and a black guy who could turn his ass into a lightning bolt.  Conway races beyond the concrete political initiative of affirmative action, though, making a purely ideal push for cultural relativism.  This is an artifact as ancient and strange to us as the gryphon-like statue that takes over "Our minds--our bodies!!" (our selves?),  a kids' comic that takes enthusiastic part in what Timothy Burke calls "the domestication of the counterculture" and its attempted dissemination into the culture at large.  It's the sort of comic that, were it published today, would probably result in neoconservative pundits blaming Superman for September 11th.

And yet it was already too late.  Superman has no idea that the stage for backlash has already been set, that Khomenei and Reagan are waiting just around the corner (and that Anita Bryant has rallied the advance force).  This comic doesn't exactly represent the high-water mark of liberalism, or even the high-water mark of the ambitious but presumptuous left-wing cultural reform that too easily gets conflated with liberalism.  Call it a piece of driftwood, left after the waters have receded.

Who would have thought that, in a comic filled with the superheroes of my youth, this cloying speech would prompt the most powerful and ambivalent nostalgia?  I don't miss the speech itself, which is so busy touting the values of other cultures that it forgets the validity of Bruce's own reactions (and so the backlash brews even in stately Wayne Manor), but the evident acceptance of the idea that it's okay to have different beliefs and that it's okay for a comic or any other work of art to talk about them.  Today's comics may offer a better brand of dialogue, but they've beat a cultural retreat so thorough that the winning formula is to have superheroes posture and boast exactly like our flight-suit donning commander in chief.

Whatever you say, Mr. President.

On the other hand, in this week's comics a squad of trash-talking neoconservative superheroes in the Mighty Millar Manner get their asses handed to them in JLA: Classified #1, and their only accomplishment is exacerbating the very threat they came to destroy.  The message is, of necessity, a more defensive and cynical one, but all is not lost.  Hey, Grant:  keep on keepin' on.

Comments

[David Fiore]

1980 will indeed live in infamy Marc! I pretty much became a six-year old political junkie right there--it started with good news when Canada held its second federal election in less than a year when Clark's Conservative government collapsed and we brought Trudeau back, got crazy with the first Sovereignty Referendum and everyone on the block wondering about a Civil War, and then my family watched in horror as Reaganomics and "Moral Values" began their corrosive assault upon the American Mind (and the remnants of the Great Society").

I've never been a fan of Conway's superteam writing Marc (Spider-Man yes, and Firestorm too, but not JLA, or any of his Marvel team writing...), but yeah, I think I can see why you'd link this Superman's rhetoric with mine--I like "truth and justice" a lot more when you remove "the American Way" from the formulation (not because I don't have a lot of respect for the original New England Way, mind you--but because you can't count on modern-day Americans to understand the complexities of that particular Way!) There's a big difference between a moral life and adherence to a "moral code".

Dave

[Captain Spaulding]

Actually it's an international coalition - you've got the British Batman and Robin from the old Club of Heroes story, the Irish guy from the Global Guardians, and a haiku-spouting Japanese (I presume) guy. That's half the team, possibly more since I don't know the nationalities of the other four. And it's not like it's the first team a villain destroyed a city as bait to capture a super-team.

If only the UltraMarines would try to understand Gorilla Grodd and why he hates humanity and be more tolerant of his cultural differences, there wouldn't be all this nasty war which was started so Wayne Corporation would get the rebuilding contracts.

[matt rossi]

I'm with Batman on this one: Zatanna's mom had herself one creepy funeral.

If only the UltraMarines would try to understand Gorilla Grodd and why he hates humanity and be more tolerant of his cultural differences, there wouldn't be all this nasty war which was started so Wayne Corporation would get the rebuilding contracts.

Or maybe if they would try to understand Gorilla Grodd, they could learn to anticipate what he's going to do (read this as: if the United States had bothered to understand Saddam Hussein and Iraq, we would have seen that there was an insurgency set up to fight us in a guerilla manner - that wasn't a pun - and could have been prepared to fight the war they actually ended up in). Understanding doesn't have to be touchy-feely: know your enemy is still a good goddamn game plan in war. Even if you have overwhelming military force on your side.

[Marc]

Yes, the Ultramarines are international, but then Tony Blair is one of them furriners too. And in case you didn't notice it, Spaulding, or didn't read the interviews, or did notice it and would prefer not to, Morrison has rewritten them into an analogue of Millar's "Do You Think This 'A' Stands For France" Ultimates (with a little Ultimate Spider-Man thrown in).

In any case, Morrison's comic makes a poor example for your liberal caricature, since he recognizes that Grodd is a threat, he just thinks the Ultramarines' way of handling it - arrogant, confident in their technological superiority - is completely mistaken. Morrison's recent work has been just as critical of the dangers of terrorism as it has of the neocons who have appropriated the war on terror as carte blanche for their own agenda.

Dave - I think it was the "my friends" that seemed eerily familiar. I experienced a moment of Lovecraftian horror as I realized that "David Fiore" was not a man speaking about Gerry Conway comics, but Gerry Conway comics speaking through a man...

[David Fiore]

I see what you mean, my friend. My greatest fear now is that I'll take to spouting Father Dowling dialogue... Is Conwayitis a progressive disease? We'll find out!

Dave

[matt rossi]

You do realize that if Dave is Gerry Conway comics that speak as a man, that makes me the Mantlo Factor, yes?

[Dave Van Domelen]

Matt, now it's starting to sound like the basis for one of those LJ meme quizzes. "What comics writer are you the mouthpiece for?"

[aardvark]

With some trepidation at showing my ignorance of things Millar, could someone give a quick explanation of Millar's neo-conservative storytelling? I ask out of ignorance, not to challenge the label... I just haven't read much of him other than his Authority work (mediocre), some Ultimate X-Men (fun), and Red Son (disappointing). Which books, especially? Any particularly good posts anywhere that could bring me up to speed?

[Marc]

Millar's own politics would appear to be vaguely, shallowly leftist, but since taking over The Authority he's written superheroes in precisely the bombastic, arrogant, high collateral damage style that's been adopted by the Bush neocons. The best example is The Ultimates. Millar has bragged about setting a new trend for writing Captain America as a conservative - despite the fact that as a product of New Deal liberalism who's been frozen in ice since 1945, Cap would find today's conservatives a completely alien species even if he'd been a registered Republican. (Not that he wouldn't find the modern left pretty alien, too - there's a lot of mileage in a portrayal of Cap as a feisty New Deal liberal in unfamiliar surroundings, but that's not what Millar has served up thus far.) Morrison has as much as said that the Ultramarines are a shot at Millar's Ultimates.

[Marc]

Not to follow up on my own comments, but this article from the Sunday Herald throws a little more light onto the politics of The Ultimates. Millar is staunchly anti-Bush, but his style of writing the Ultimates is easily adapted to the rhetoric of the war in Iraq. It looks like Ultimates 2 will do exactly what Morrison has done in JLA Classified, using the same tools to represent Bush's foreign policy, albeit more directly and with more fence-sitting.

Incidentally, I'm a little pissed off that the Sunday Herald (a Scottish paper) says Millar's antiwar sentiments have "inspired hundreds of patriotic American comic readers to sign an online petition to have him sacked." No, those are hundreds of hawkish American comic readers, or conservative American comic readers, or hypersensitive American comic readers who don't want to hear any opposing points of view.

Blacklisters, however, even pathetic little failed ones, are just about the farthest thing from patriotic.

[the aardvark]

The Sunday Herald article says that Mark Millar "achieved international renown when he and artist Frank Quitely created The Authority." I think Warren Ellis should sue.

[Marc]

The article's error, not Millar's, according to Fanboy Rampage.

[Marc]

However, now Rich Johnston has a great column (scroll down) suggesting that these "errors" are in fact a canny marketing scheme on Millar's part.