RandoMonday: Formerly Known as the Justice League

Here’s a comic chosen at random from my collection.

Formerly Known as the Justice League tpb by Keith Giffen & J.M DeMatteis (writers), Kevin Maguire (penciler), Joe Rubenstein (inker), Bob Lappan (letterer), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Steve Wacker (assoc. editor), Dan Rasplar & Mike Carlin (editors), and Maguire, Rubenstien, & Loughridge (cover)

If you were a fan of the late 1980s Justice League (and later, Justice League International) titles, then this limited series was for you. The band was back together, both in front of the camera, so to speak, and behind it. In fact, that’s the basic premise of the story: getting the band back together. Of course, there’s a weird turn in the story involving the House and Roulette, from a strictly narrative standpoint, though I suppose it sets up a rather poor joke with Mary Marvel. There are really good bits of humor, however, being even funnier than the issues of JL/JLI that I can remember reading all those years ago. In fact, there’s a running gag with Batman that made me laugh out loud a few times as I read this trade, and that doesn’t happen very often.

The Maguire/Rubenstein art is lovely, again, to read. Maguire can do light superhero very well, which complements the humorous tone. If DC had decided to do another series with these characters, I would have bought it. I’m pretty sure they planned to do exactly that, but then Infinite Crisis happened, I believe (I could be totally making this up under the guide of wishful thinking).

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.