Justice League #1

I received my Mile High Comics order today! The first one I grabbed out of the pile was Justice League #1, which became Justice League International, which became Justice League America. It's a long story. However, this is the best of the era. This is the reboot that the Justice League of America received after DC destroyed the multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985. This series jumps out of a popular mini-series in the DC mythos known as Legends, created by John Byrne who also helped to reboot Superman in 1986.

This issue begins to set the tone of the series into the comic romp that it becomes. I never got to read issue #1 before. It was always too expensive when I was a kid...egad! $7.00?! Now I can get a fine copy of it for about 2 bucks. Nice. All this issue really does is start to show how the Green Lantern Guy Gardner is a jerk that wants to fight Batman and starts to bring the team together. They get together and stop a rather weak takeover of the United Nations building by a gang of regular human terrorists.

The high point of this issue though only comes now into the light. This issue is dated May of 1987. I was finishing up eighth grade. This year, the DC Universe has been shaken up by its new Crisis, known as Infinite Crisis. One of the triggers of the new Crisis is a character by the name of Maxwell Lord. He founded this new Justice League. He was always a power hungry character as he was just plain human. He was always pretty much a jerk too, interested in the publicity and the power that his new team provided. In the latest issues in the DC Universe, Maxwell Lord helped to unleash the OMACS to hunt down the superheroes and other metahumans. He is the guy that shot and killed Blue Beetle. Wonder Woman actually killed Maxwell Lord recently by breaking his neck. Now Superman and the heroes are mad at her for stepping over that boundary. At the end of issue #1 here, we find that he was responsible for setting up the little terrorist takeover by providing the bomb that was wired to the heart of the main terrorist. That terrorist dies at the end, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound because his bomb did not go off after Batman left him alone. Maxwell Lord did not give him the firing pin.

Even though the only casualty was the terrorist, this still shows the deviousness that Maxwell Lord has. In the comic book Countdown to Infinite Crisis in which Maxwell Lord shoots Blue Beetle, Lord himself says that he helped to create the new League and keep it ineffective all those years, the comic years started here, and was able to keep an eye on this team and lead it where he wanted it to go. This is an amazing revelation and one that shows the current writers have really done their research. Since I didn't know this before, I had one of those "Ahhhhhh!" moments of revelation. Cool.