INVASION Tie-In: Justice League International #22 (DC, 1988)

DC is planning to release their 1988 mega event INVASION! in trade format later this month so I thought what better time to revisit some of the titles that I bought that tied in with the event. Yeah, that's right, we're going straight into the tie-ins and not even stopping to look at the INVASION! mini-series. Mainly for two reasons: One, I'm sure the other more well-known blogs will be talking the hell out of INVASION! way better than I could, and two, I re-read the series a few weeks back and it did not age well in my opinion. McFarlane art? Passable. Story? Okay. It started off well, I thought, then it veered off into the land of mediocrity and never left. Book 3 was the worse. Every meta human is brought down because of the metagene bomb and they can't find a cure. 80 pages of sick superheroes and supervillains dying in hospital beds while Superman flies around looking for a cure. Exciting! (It's slightly more complicated than that but not by much).

But first I must give some background info to the mini series (which I totally cribbed from Wikipedia): INVASION! sees "the Dominators [putting] together an Alliance to invade Earth and eliminate the threat posed by their unpredictable "metahumans." (Secretly, the Dominators wish to harness this and breed their own army of metahumans, but this goal is kept secret from the rest of the Alliance, and from their own junior cadres.)". Their invasion goes well at first. Australia is theirs, Antarctica is theirs and the aliens are advancing in the South Pacific. The League is dispatched there to hold back the invasion force, leaving Max Lord, Oberon and Booster Gold to hold the fort back at New York. Booster Gold is a bit p.o.'d because he has to pull monitor duty while the other heroes are off fighting aliens. Little did he know that back in Oz, the alien alliance were about to send a group of shape changing Imskians to infiltrate Justice League Headquarters via the captured teleportation tube:

Booster is quickly taken down by 6 inch midgets. His self esteem experiences a downward trend.

With Max none the wiser, Oberon is left all alone to handle the threat:

He finds himself cornered in Blue Beetle's League quarters with nothing but a flash-gun to help him.
It works. Big ass flash gun vs. tiny eyes results in instant knockout. Oberon saves the day. Yay!

But what to do about the prisoners?
"Oberon Unleashed" was just one half of the comic. The other half was about the rest of the League destroying the Khund fleet in the South Pacific. The heroes used a mixture of guile, brute force and a well placed bomb to achieve their mission but it's the Oberon part of the story that I liked more. It was the first time I ever saw Mr. Miracle's assistant kick some ass and of course the only way for Oberon to do that was to give him foes who were smaller than him. Classic issue.