Casualties of Editorial Malpractice II: The Justice Society

Sometimes it becomes necessary to euthanize a concept. Redundancy, exhaustion, or the inability to make it fit in - or even some combination of these factors - will deny a hero or group of heroes a place in the comics output of a publisher dealing in shared-universe concepts.

By itself, we shouldn't consider this a bad thing. Poor sales suggest that few readers care, and this, in turn, implies that nothing in the material particularly compels enough people to investigate it to merit its continued publication. However, when editorial decisions call for poorly-conceived and trifling ends for concepts that, owing to their tenure, deserve something better, a concerned readership has a right to raise its collective eyebrow.

In the case of the Justice Society of America, DC has done this more than once, as if not deeming these characters worthy of anything more than a hastily cobbled-together dismissal. The first two demises of the team resulted from the inevitable weight of market forces working against them - not enough people bought or wanted the comics that featured them. However, in their later reincarnations, editorial disinterest unto the point of malpractice did away from the teams, not at particular low points, but when they enjoyed upswings in popularity and even decent sales.

The First Two Strikes: Original Cancellations

Market forces have done in the Justice Society at least twice. The post-World War II collapse of the superhero comics market brought them to an end in the forties, as their individual titles failed to endure after the war. Falling away in the singular ultimately led to a collective failure as well; and in an era where a wonder dog strip could displace Green Lantern from his host title, a superhero team book had little hope of enduring.

Golden Age talents played a role in the reinvention of the superhero market in general in the early sixties, and, owing to their connections to the first generation of superheroes, one can understand that ultimately some writers and editors would attempt to bring back the heroes of the forties. Thus, the Justice Society reappeared in the vehicle of the derivative book Justice League of America. Through annual team-up tales in this magazine, plus backup features here and there throughout other DC books, the Justice Society began to develop a new history. This history would ultimately justify the experiment of providing them a venue of their own, via a title dedicated specifically to the goings-on in the defunct setting of Earth-2.

In a reincarnated All-Star Comics, the Justice Society play out a few interesting tales but ultimately would fail to sustain the necessary sales to outlive the DC Implosion that culled most of the second-tier concepts from DC's line.

Such cancellation wouldn't mean a permanent end to the Justice Society in the long run. Internal changes in Marvel Comics throughout the seventies resulted in a mass exodus of disgruntled talent that would migrate to the only other real place to work: DC Comics. Roy Thomas would play a central role, in his DC work, in returning the Golden Age concepts to prominence - even first-tier prominence - through All-Star Squadron. This, attached to inherited themes from the cancelled All-Star Comics and the theme of a new generation of heroes would furthermore allow the Justice Society to appear as a supporting cast in Infinity, Inc.. By the early mid-eighties, then, it seemed as if the Justice Society had forged an enduring role in the DC mythos, rather than its intermittent and tenuous position as guest-stars in annual team-up events.

However, regardless of their growing following, and despite the efforts of the likes of Thomas and Ordway to make heroes of an earlier generation make sense to a later one, DC Comics would sacrifice the team in a vigorous period to an editorial principle.

Third Extinction: The Post-Crisis Debacle

A Golden Age hero has many ways to die with some dignity. However, it frequently takes resources to which not all superhero comics projects can lay claim: Planning, organization, and, worst of all, good writing must all do their part to make such a well-designed ending work. The evidence which remains - the actual printed stories - indicate that DC Comics did not feel that Justice Society merited the trouble this involved.

DC had a problem in that it had created many semi-redundant "Earths" to house the various stables of superhero properties it had either created or acquired in the past. Others appeared as one-story gimmicks but would ultimately become separate superhero scenarios that required their own maintenance. Heroes existed in multiple copies, and the task of organizing such a mess remained beyond the ability of many editors. We can understand the decision to consolidate, syncretize, agglutinate, or otherwise compile many heroes into fewer heroes and many worlds into one. In the method chosen to dispense with redundant heroes, however, we have a greater justification for disdain. DC decided to rid itself of the Justice Society, essentially as a footnote.

The doppelgangers could have ceased, altogether, to have existed. Crisis had scenes of this nature. A few simple goodbyes, akin to what the Earth-2 Superman enjoyed at the end of Crisis, could have handled more than one Golden Age hero in a batch. Or Wolfman, et al, could have dispensed with them by infusing a bit of reality: Time could have caught up with them, retroactively; surviving Golden Agers, between sixty-something and eighty years old, would have an excellent reason to have retired or, if necessary, passed on.

The Last Days of The Justice Society, instead, became, for a time, the cemetery of the Justice Society. This special edition comic ended with the trapped in some other dimension, fighting a giant in a time loop forever, somehow doomed to continue this struggle ad infinitum to contain some great evil. More details would only make the premise shine out as more silly (in an unfortunate and unentertaining way). Roy Thomas, doubtless grinding the enamel off his teeth as he wrote the story - certainly not of his own volition - did this in an ironic effort to make comics more lucid and credible. Yet what standard for silliness, we might ask, would bar the surreal (yet entertaining) paraphernalia of Weisinger-era Superman but still let this fight-a-giant-in-limbo-forever nonsense (leaving Stupidity to travel alone while Fun worked in other comics) through?

We can explain DC's behavior more easily than we can justify it. Perhaps the elder statesman of superhero comics companies intended to leave itself a safety hatch not too difficult to open so that even a mediocre hero might retrieve the Justice Society from the Ragnarok dimension. More likely, however, someone had about ten minutes to come up with an answer to "How can we have the JSA go out heroically?" - and won the prize for coming up with an answer with eight minutes remaining on the clock.

Ultimately, it fell to two staples of DC megacrossovers - the Spectre and the tiresome, yet handy, Waverider - to release the surviving trapped members of the Justice Society in Armageddon Inferno, as part of the Spectre's plan to defeat some disposible DC demon. Yet to bring back the Justice Society only exposed them to a subsequent calamity of poorly-considered writing within the Zero Hour event.

Fourth Extinction: The Zero Hour Calamity

DC did badly enough with its solution to the redundant Golden Age hero problem in the eighties with a contrived ending to the group that, fortunately, does not reappear in more recent histories of the group. The Justice Society reappeared sometime before 1996, when I took up the comics vice again, and the details of how they came back in time for a new interpretation of the group to make ripples again in the superhero comics market.

In 1994, however, Showcase '94 appeared to acceptable, though probably undramatic, commercial success, with a stylishly retro approach to art and the scripting by a Gerard Jones still showing the vitality of such pieces as Emerald Dawn II and early Wonder Man.

One finds the combination of inspired talent and enthusiastic readers for previous-generation material fairly rarely. It the world worked otherwise, we would expect the Golden Age superheroes across the board to constantly spawn new titles rather than to occasionally rear up when driven by the vision of single figures, like Roy Thomas, with a commitment to the material. Cancellation, furthermore, should depend somewhat on market forces rather than arbitrary considerations of style; in a market-driven endeavor, one produces what sells, rather than discontinuing the merchandise that moves.

However, someone, motivated the notion that a principle that worked in theory must work in the real world, decided that the continuing existence of the Justice Society in the DC universe represented a reactionary affront to the creation of a stylish and forward-looking art form. We leave to posterity to fret over such pretenses for such a backward-looking form as superhero comics within a shared universe. Nonetheless, the decision came down: The old-school heroes of the Justice Society belonged in a generation altogether different, and therefore had to go. And DC killed them off in a single, and singularly lame, scene within the regrettable Zero Hour: Crisis in Time megacrossover event.

In a two-page sequence, to show the uber-goober "Extant" as a serious villain, DC had him age most of the Justice Society to death. And, in the process, they established themselves as repeat offenders in the crimes-against-one's-own-intellectual-property division. The business about fighting the giant in limbo forever reeked badly enough; but the stink of this particular stunt made the previous silliness seem like a flower garden.

The Jubilee?

The Old Testament prescribed a Jubilee Year, to occur on roughly a fifty-year cycle, at the end of which debtors forgave debts and slave-owners freed slaves and the burdens attaching to human beings, in general, went away. Perhaps it took somewhat less than fifty years, since the Justice Society had several abortive attempts at redemption in the interim and, furthermore, only some forty-plus years separate the eviction of the superhero team from the pages of All-Star Comics and their reappearance in a robust and popular title (today's JSA).

JSA has things going for it. It has talent, especially in the form of Geoff Johns, with credentials that do not condemn them as backward-looking or neophobic. This talent makes the Justice Society concept work without burying it under its entanglements to the past. The design of the team, furthermore, works better than previous versions (which attempted to cast many or all of the originals in an ageless form, causing a disconnect between forties origins and modern interpretation); the current membership enjoys the benefits of a multigenerational aspect where a core of World War II era heroes combine efforts with younger heroes tied either by blood or themes to deceased predecessors from the Golden Age. It has, for the time being, people who want to buy and read the book.

In the short term, then, we should consider the Justice Society fairly well butressed against the kind of bad editorial decisions that did away with them twice before. However, the recurring specter of arbitrary elimination based on a desire to promote a fatuous image of newness still exists. Across the aisle, for instance, Marvel Comics has cancelled books based less on sales figures than on the notion that such books create the image of the company as backward-looking navel-gazers, a move with speaks loudly to some fans the statement "We don't want you." With comics not selling in substantial volumes, drastic measures based on wild speculation and desperation may become commonplace. We can only hope that the Justice Society, and its vehicle JSA, will remain undisturbed by another round of ill-conceived conceptual cullings.

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Column 236. Completed 11-MAR-2001.