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Just Like Always I'm really very fond of the Justice League -- always have been, even when they were goofy, even when they were silly, and even when the stories didn't make much sense but were bright and noisy anyway. Mark Waid's stories have been like a quiet, cool breeze in comparison to the Grant Morrison run on the book. I'm even glad they kept Plastic Man on the team, because he's one of my favorite characters. I'm fond enough of the JLA that I even pick up the one-shots and mini-series. Hell, I even picked up JLA: Act Of God, an Elseworlds project written by Doug Moench -- and read it, despite discovering I would probably have preferred to have my scalp chewed by weasels instead. You know this means that I'm probably going to end up with a shelf of DC Archive Editions (fortunately, there is only the one Plastic Man volume so far. I'll just make up for it with Legion of Superheroes volumes instead.) A JLA/Avengers team-up has been kicking around as a possibility for close to twenty years, with George Perez attached to it for a good eighteen of those (I'm not sure which got to play the albatross, or if they took turns at the job.) I believe Marv Wolfman was originally going to write it, but others may well have been involved along the way, just as possibilities rather than certainties. With Kurt Busiek having assumed the mantle of Marvel's Avengers and endless-continuity expert (Avengers Forever is the product of a deranged mentality, did I ever mention this?), his position as writer/co-plotter/super-factcheckerman was a certainty. Many would do this for the money. Busiek will do it because he's compelled to, just as a certain fanboy sector compulsively chases the Thor-Superman power question (I'm weird; I want a showdown between Ted Kord and Hank Pym.) Yes, this means the team-up/crossover is a go -- the announcement coming at the 2001 Orlando MegaCon. The fanboys are raving, the creators are doing the company line-dance, the companies are looking at potential Oodles Of Boodle, and a few of us are sitting out here with the same expression and uttering very similar noises, all of which sound like, "So what?!" Busiek is already babbling on about how cool his Captain America/Batman fight scene is going to be, while I'm sitting here befuddled, wondering why there needs to be a fight at all. The sad thing is that this giant, glossy, four-prestige-issue inter-company crossover is going to be a walloping great slugfest, and little more. 192 pages of flash-and-trash. It'll probably look great. It may need to -- the sticker price per issue is probably going to hit $7.95. There'll be all the tie-in product, the hardcover, the limited hardcover, the t-shirt of the limited hardcover, the trade paperback. Maybe I'll go pitch Dan Raspler the idea of a CD soundtrack for the book. There is no doubt the market can use a high-profile project such as this, but it feels crummy and pointless in its blithely mercenary deliberateness. I don't want to go down this road, to be a target of this kind of project -- I want something brighter and more cheerful, something with a soul, something that will amuse the fanboy inside of me (hey, I was hungry and all the NewComix donuts were gone.) This, obviously, is not it. This is Just Like Always. ©2001 by Steven E. McDonald |
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