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.

Booster Gold: 52 Pick-Up HC (DC, 2008)

Pros: real fun comic. Booster Gold goes time travelling with "Rip Hunter" across DC's history and tries to right some wrongs. Booster inadvertently helped make DC history by suggesting to Sinestro about setting up a corp, making Hal Jodan the greatest Green Lantern by persuading Guy Gardner to go home and make peace with his dad and causing the lightning bolt that gave Barry Allen super-speed. Also, Ted Kord is back! However, the world must not know he is alive but that doesn't bother me. Blue and Gold are back together again. Yay!

Cons: If you're new to DC, boy, is this book not for you. Seriously, this entire book is a fanwank and not newbie friendly at all. Which is a pity because there's some good, old-school superhero adventures in here. Go back and get Batman: The Killing Joke, all four volumes of 52, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Countdown to Infinite Crisis (that one-shot where Blue Beetle died), Infinite Crisis...oh, heck. Just get all DC's big-event books from the past twenty years before picking up 52 Pick-Up. Paul Levitz will thank you.

Or you could just pick up all four trades of the new Blue Beetle currently available instead of this book and I will thank you. Either way is good.

Justice League America #34 (DC, 1990)

Why do I love the post-LEGENDS Justice League? Simply because it was fun, dammit. There were some people who didn't like the snappy dialogue and the off-beat adventures that this incarnation of the League had. Those people are dead to me, dead. Giffen and DeMatteis were the Alan Sorkin of comics at the time. It was the only comic at the time, I think, that even had Batman crack wise deadpan-like once or twice. And the Booster Gold and Blue Bettle double team? Fergedabouit. Comedy gold, they were.

In JL #34, the Gold and the Blue decide to open a holiday resort called "CLUB JLI" complete with casino on the Pacific island of Kooey Kooey Kooey. The League was actually invited to establish an embassy on the island by the tribal chief so his small island can boast a powerful deterrent force of super-heroes. Smart man. The resort and casino idea was never part of the deal. That was all Booster and Beetle. Of course that idea was unauthorised and unknown by the rest of the League especially by their boss, Max Lord. This was the 1990 pre-Countdown to Infinite Crisis Max Lord. He's still somewhat of a good guy in this series.

Club JLI quickly becomes a success and attracting all sorts of people including Z-grade villains Major Disaster and Big Sir who arrive on the island incognito to try their luck at the blackjack table. Actually, it isn't luck. Major Disaster learns that Big Sir, a somewhat simple minded lunkhead (who once destroyed Barry Allen's face back in the early '80s), has the Rain Man like ability to count cards. And just like that scene in the movie, (which was where Giffen and DeMatteis probably copied...erm, took inspiration from), Major Disaster and Big Sir are soon raking it in.



Big Sir's so good at counting cards, he broke the bank much to Beetle's displeasure:



Losing all that money was bad enough. What made it worse was that Beetle and Booster "borrowed" all the money for their capital from the Justice League's accounts. Now, not only are they bankrupt, the League is as well. Max Lord soon finds out and rushes over to Kooey Kooey Kooey with murder in his mind. Prophetic, I must say.

Meanwhile, Aquaman shows up all angry-like. He tells the newly bankrupt venture capitalists to evacuate the island because it's about to dislodge itself. Apparently, all the construction on the ground has awaken Kooey Kooey Kooey.

The damn island is actually alive! It's alive, it's awake and it's going walkabout. And it's taking the natives, tourists and shocked heroes along for the ride. The chief knows about the island being sentient. He just didn't tell anyone else. Didn't think it was a big deal. He's a card, eh?

Major Disaster and Big Sir are oblivious to all this at first seeing as how they have moved upwards financially. With the money, the Major wants to go forward with his plan to RULE THE WORLD!


I like that panel. It features cameos by three characters from Mike Barr's Maze Agency, a whodunit comic book that was very well written and beautifully drawn but hardly anyone read because it didn't feature any superheroes. I'll talk about that series one of these days. Why were they inserted in an issue of Justice League? Well, they shared the same penciller: Adam Hughes.

Anyway, back to the story...

Well, when your villain name is Major Disaster you shouldn't be surprised, really. He should have picked Tsunami Man or Agent Orange or something more bad ass. Agent Orange is not so bad ass but, c'mon, it is a bit better that frickin' Major Disaster if he knows his Wiki. So, he lost all the money and is back on skid row (no, not the band, wiseguy).

What about Blue Beetle, Booster and Aquaman? Their fates were resolved in the next issue but it's this issue that I consider a classic: the concept of a sentient island that goes swimming to another location once it's awake is just great. This is the kind of bizarre stuff I like to read in my super hero comics. Sure, punch ups between spandex clad guys and gals are nice and all but sometimes writers need to be creative and come up with silly stupid cool stuff like Kooey Kooey Kooey so that nerds like me will talk about it in their blogs in years to come.

Justice League America #34, January 1990. Good times. Gooood times.