JSA in the 90s – Justice Society of America #1 (Apr 1991)

We begin our coverage of the 1991 JSA mini-series! Dr. Chris Lewis and The Irredeemable Shag discuss JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #1 (April 1991) by Len Strazewski and Rick Burchett! When a doomsayer delivers a foreboding message to Starman Ted Knight, it sets into motion a series of events that pits the Fastest Man Alive, the Flash Jay Garrick, against a living constellation! Plus, we discuss the !MPACT line of comics! Finally, we wrap up with YOUR listener feedback!

 

 

 

 

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26 responses to “JSA in the 90s – Justice Society of America #1 (Apr 1991)”

  1. 1. OY another “in a wheelchair but got better charcter” is there a union at this point Batman, Batgirl, Prof x and Wildcat (uh twice?) and moon kight)
    2 AS a wheelchair user myself I DONT always hate cures/ What I do hate is WILLING yourself to walk. That way leads to heartbreak and poor grades in modren dance.
    3 the fact that some charcters get cured and others dont takes me outta the story
    4. yeah my favrote superheroes as a kid were Green LANTREN (HAL) AND THE hulk (all good superheroes are Green!)

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    1. Hello,

      I agree about hating the whole willing your self out of your disability leading to heartbreak. It also leads to false hope and people not quite understanding how disability works. I have been in a chair for about 17ish years now and yea I still have family members who don’t quite understand that this is my normal. I have good health days and bad health days, because that is how it is with a chronic condition etc. I don’t mind a cure, but I would love for it to be believable. Perhaps a surgery then physical therapy to get the strength back and so on and so forth. With that said, in a magical universe with super technology it can be super hard to justify certain kinds of disability still being a thing I guess.

      -Fa†e

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      1. oricle is the the only time it’s ever been even remotely real.
        I want an untold tales of the new x-men
        Cyclops “why do we need Wolverine Professor…he kills!
        Prof “Yes but mister summers in the five years i’ve known you have never helped me urinate. Mister Logan has and thus our disscussion ENDS.

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    2. Sorry for double reply. I wasn’t trying to say representation shouldn’t be a thing in comics with my comment about how it can be hard to justify disability in comics. I just think sometimes writers can find it difficult. With that said, I love it when in fiction you see someone get disabled, or born disabled, and go through the psychological stages that leads to acceptance of their disability. Then see the character still be disable but thrive as a disabled person. I really really enjoyed Oracle as a character. I also like Daredevil and Dr. Mid-Nite as well. With that said, Daredevil almost falls into the trope of being disability as a super power due to him being blind by chemicals gave him super everything else. Disability in my opinion is hard for non-disabled people to handle in fiction sometimes. Like you, I don’t always hate disability cures but I want them to be well written. I do like it better when they aren’t cured but shown accepting it etc and living with it. Imagine a disabled Green lantern using a green construct exosuit or something. Anyways nice to see a fellow disabled people lurking about.

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  2. Fantastic episode. Great guest, great episode… and Shag was there, too.

    As for the Impact line of comics, I am a big fan. Love The Comet and The Fly.

    Also, I was about to type a comment about the dog constellation, but Shag stopped me just i. Time.

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    1. Thank you David. I can confirm that Shag was more than just “there”… he also pressed Record!

      I’m going to ‘wax Shags’ car’, by saying that he has been a terrific host every time I have recorded with him, and provides such great support and research to make every comic sing… and brings out the best in his guests too. I hope that our conversation reflects the fun we had recording. [I expect he’ll cut this from the on air comments section, so it can be our secret!]

      !mpact was great for me as a new comics reader, and I often think back to The Comet as a great example of serial story telling with some twists and turns that I genuinely did not see coming.

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  3. Off to a great start with this mini-series! It is a lot of fun, and your discussion was excellent as always. I did buy this one monthly as it came out, and while the follow-up series is what truly made me a JSA fan, this mini sure whet my whistle, as the kids say.

    I was not expecting to see a callback to New Mexico and Starman in the first issue! I absolutely remember our discussion of it, but doubt I checked the location of Ted’s observatory in this mini at the time. Fun to see it all come together, especially the Strazewski connection.

    I vaguely remember DC Currents, but can’t recall if I ever picked them up. I had more experience with the one page house ad version than the standalone comic. Very similar to Marvel Age, which will be featured soon on my own podcast. That’s a crazy coincidence between our shows.

    Honestly, I’m not sure if Vandal Savage was obvious to me back in the day. Of course, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed (what’s with me and old-timer-isms!). But by this point, I mostly knew him as Wally West’s foe, and wouldn’t automatically link him to the JSA like I would today. It’s obvious in hindsight, so that’s interesting to me.

    I think I bought a couple of the !mpact #1’s, but that was it. Probably didn’t continue due to budget than interest. I really was buying a LOT of monthly comics that year. But dang, now I wish I had from the artists involved alone. So many greats lost too soon.

    Thanks for another All-Star episode!

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    1. Thanks Tim. Vandal Savage’s immortality allows DC to use him in different and interesting ways throughout the timeline. This – being the first time I’d encountered him – is what I would consider “Classic” Savage, but I also enjoyed how he was used in books like Resurrection Man and Demon Knights. He’s got potential to set off a plan in – say – 15th Century Spain, which then comes to fruition in 21st Century Texas; I think he’s a character that imaginative writers can have a field day with.

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  4. Brilliant show, Shagg and Dr. Chris! I had quit comics for a bit when this series originally came out, but I did go back and pick up a hardcover of it not long ago. Living constellations are a very 1950s-sounding concept. The penultimate panel on p. 6 in which we, along w/ Jay, see Ted in the wheelchair for the first time is very effective portraying the surprise on Jay’s face and Ted’s head hanging in despair. Then, that is followed up on p. 7 by the reveal that Ted is being controlled by this shadowy “master”, Vandal Savage. High drama indeed!

    I didn’t catch the DC Impact versions of the Archie heroes, but I discovered these characters pretty early from an ad that I saw when I was a kid. The images of The Comet, The Jaguar, The Fly, etc. promised a whole new and different universe of heroes so I have always been intrigued by them. I enjoyed Ian Flynn’s take on them in his Mighty Crusaders series a few years back and I did read the revivals that JMS wrote for DC.

    Looking forward to more outstanding content.

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    1. Thanks Super Cap! I’d personally love to see a revival of the !mpact version of these characters; I picked up some of the later iterations you mentioned, but they didn’t connect with me in the same way.
      Sadly, I suspect the rights issues around these characters are so convoluted, reprints could never happen… time to hit the back issue bins, I guess!

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  5. Flawless victory.
    And now for something completely different.
    This sounds like a fun series I’m currently reading several books and comics set in ww2
    The adventure of the peerless peer by Philip Jose framer which Sherlock Holmes and Watson have bin Called upon to fight in ww2 in
    A shared universe where they have already met G-8 , the shadow and just met Tarzan him self ,

    And a golden age collection of the winners
    And I finished issue 14 of lev Gleason’s daredevil a print on demand tittle I got from Amazon .

    Has any one read these titles .
    Just wondering also I got book golden age sky man battles the master of steam interdiction by Roy Thomas .
    Also I got to know has any one read project super powers ?
    And does any one have any opinions one three forgotten golden age heroes original daredevil ‘ the face , sky man .

    Sorry i went off track but since every thing I was reading was ww2 I figured it was ok to talk about them

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  6. Good show, as always. I didn’t think I’d have too much to say this time. But all this talk of Impact Comics started me thinking about the Archie character, the Comet.
    If my aging memory isn’t failing me, I believe the original Comet died and was replaced by his brother. That would make him one of the first heroes to die. Marvel had a one-shot hero
    back in the late 60s or early 70s called the Comet. I seem to remember there was some controversy at the time, with Archie claiming this was an unauthorised use of their IP. And then he died again in Impact; making him one of the few characters to die in three seperate continuities.

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    1. Is that the Comet from Xandar who appeared in Nova in the mid-Seventies, Hal, it sounds like you’re talking about an earlier hero. I am intrigued!

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      1. I did research… I think this might be the 1940 Comet in Pep Comics #1 – alter ego John Dickering. He was apparently the first superhero to die in comics in Issue #17 of that title (July 1941) after which his brother became a hero called The Hangman. (The Hangman name was also used in the !mpact comic books, but as a villain with no familial connection to the hero)

        Drawn by Jack Cole, John Dickering discovered a gas “50 times lighter than Hydrogen” which he injected into his blood stream… which is both scientifically impossible and medically highly inadvisable, but – Hey! – Golden Age Comics, right?!
        According to the Almighty Wikipedia, John Dickering’s Comet could fire disintegrator beams from his eyes, and had a rather casual attitude to dispatching gangsters and Nazis with his visual powers. The writers figure it out by issue 7, so that not everything he looks at turns to dust. He also fights evil surgeon The Eye Thief; a revival of an evil optometrist sounds ripe for revival IMHO.
        In Issue 17, gangsters follow Dickering to his apartment and end his life in revenge for putting their mob boss “Big Boy” Malone in prison – the first superhero to be killed in comics… Which probably means DC will be bringing him back from limbo any day now! ;o)

        Martin – looks like there was a UK anthology comic called The Comet from 1946 – 1959 published by J.B. Allen and later Amalgamated Press, but I don’t think there was a hero of the same name.

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        1. I was trying to do research on this, but I couldn’t find anything. Chris Lewis is right. The way I remember it; the original
          Archie Comet appeared in one comic and was immediately killed off. I seem to remember Archie threathening legal action. Unfortunatly, Google doesn’t seem to be able to find this. I may be misremembering, or I slipped into a paralell timeline where it never happened.

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  7. I didn’t read this mini. Vandal Savage is my favorite DC villain. The perfectly redundant name is, well perfect. His “super power” was one i thought would be great to have until I examined it deeper. There can be no greater hell than seeing everyone you care about grow old and die. No wonder he became the big bad that he did.

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  8. To carry the dog constellation info even further, not only is the dog constellation named Canis Major, but Canis Major is supposed to be Orion’s hunting dog.

    It’s disappointing they don’t name the constellations in this series—as a kid I learned about the Zodiac and the Greek gods through Avengers comics. Comics can be educational, so who knows how much constellation knowledge this series could have imparted on kids?

    IIRC, Valiant Comics were like Impact Comics in that they were bringing back an out of print comic line—in the case of Valiant it was Gold Key comics.

    I remember being intrigued by Impact Comics, but only enough to pick up some Comet and Crusaders. I’m a sucker for flying energy blasting heroes (I bought the Ray miniseries for the same reason, despite having no idea who the Ray was) but alas, the budget just wasn’t there to try more. I had the opportunity a few years ago to read Fly online and it was a fun series with reliably terrific Mike Parobeck art.

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  9. Hello,

    Woot an episode about who my kids call “Old Man Flash”. They do this lovingly of course. So I have a few comments. The whole Star Man being in New Mexico thing may be to link him to Roswell/aliens/conspiracy theory about space. People think “star”, they think “space”, they think “space”, they think “aliens”, they think “aliens”, they think “Roswell New Mexico”. Anyways as I have said before Jay was somewhat controversial in our house as a kid in a funny way. He was my grand mother’s Flash and she felt the same about Golden Age characters as some people now feel about the Silver Age versions. People of a certain age see Barry and Hal as definitive Flash and Green Lantern, but for her it was Jay and Alan. So on and so forth.

    Also Impact Comics was an interesting idea. DC brings “The Shield” back later on in the 2000s in their JSA book if I remember right. Even gave him a mini series. Then Archie decided to start using them again. I really enjoyed Archie comics more recent attempts of using the red circle characters. I thought the Impact line was a great idea at the time but also I sort of disliked it in concept as they just smashed all their Earths into one Earth and now here they are making another new Earth. Anyways I liked The Shield and Comet at the time. The Fly seemed like a Spider-Man rip off to me mixed with Captain Marvel (Billy).

    Have a nice week my dudes 🙂

    -Fa†e

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  10. I’m not going to say that I didn’t send Shag the Direct Currents, but if I did, it was either a double or predated my building a modest collection of them. I stumbled upon some Comico Attractions and or Eclipse Extras in a cheapie bin, completely unfamiliar to me, and a few of them actually hold some value. I’ve managed to score more, many for free, and so I’ve got a few runs going. I almost put together a set of the second volume of Dark Horse Insider as reference for my Aliens podcast, and I almost have a set of NOW What from my Terminator show. Anyway, I grabbed some Direct Currents new, but didn’t value them, and tossed them in the quarter bins at my shops. In recent years, finding them inspired nostalgia, and they’re really thin, so even a few dozen of them don’t take up much space. Why not see how many I can get, if they’re cheap enough?

    I don’t know why Shag feels the need to be coy about Who’s Who !mpact, because we already know how he and Rob will handle it: with the fury of a thousand suns after the heat death of the universe. My little brother was a bit of an edgelord, but hew also had an odd tendency to buy into “wholesome” material like this JSA mini-series and the early !mpact issues. I definitely tossed through this issue, but I wasn’t into the art or the corny old-timey characters who wore an onion in their belt and a hubcap on their head.

    !mpact was also a bit cheesy, but I had a mild preexisting interest. I”d tried some Red Circle Comics and bought most of the Remco Mighty Crusaders action figure line. Both were cheap and bad, but I was taken with the novelty of super-heroes existing outside DC & Marvel. Lil’ Bro bought the first couple of The Comet, and the first issues of Legend of the Shield, The Fly, and The Web. I don’t know if he skipped The Jaguar, as I was the one who got the first two of those. I liked them pretty well, but I think that I was between shops around #3, and never got around to the rest. I felt a tug to try Jaguar again when Mark Beachum started doing the covers, but it was too little, too late, gone with #14. My second chance came when the creative team took over Wonder Woman for the run that made her one of my favorite comic characters. In recent years, I’ve picked up some issues of Jaguar and Crucible out of discount bins, and will give them a read once I pull those runs together.

    My understanding is that !mpact was intended as an accessible, entry-point line for younger readers that initially got newsstand distribution. But it seems like the line was utterly crushed by the avalanche of better options in the boom years. Little kids preferred actual Archie Comics licenses like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, or the Disney Comics revival. If they were interested is super-heroes, they had plenty of ones that they actual knew of from TV and movies, plus they wanted the flash of a Mutant Genesis, not the patronizing “little kid” look of !mpact. I think most of their readership were old dudes who cared about legacy, like the JSA readership, and those books didn’t even last as long as !mpact.

    Looking at the comments, yeah, the MLJ Comet was killed and then avenged by his brother, The Hangman. But the original Comet also looked gooney, not like the more familiar Dr. Solar rip-off when he was revived for Red Circle/the toy. And speaking of Dr. Solar, I think the Valiant revival of the Gold Key properties did better because they had a lower threshold for success solely in the direct market, a more committed publisher, and better leveraged the still present (if waning) talents of the ’70s and ’80s. They mixed mild nostalgia with Alan Moore-style sophisticated deconstruction/revaluation, where !mpact was clearly juvenile-skewing unchallenging material. Plus they led with speculator hooks like trading cards and low distribution zero issues, where !mpact’s pivot in that direction came nearly a year in.

    Archie Comics had a DC Unlimited-style subscription digital library app a decade or so back, and premiered a Mighty Crusaders serial there that eventually saw print. I pretty much always give the Archie super-heroes a try with each revival, but they’re always bandwagon-jumping or trademark protecting. There hasn’t been a sincere or competitive attempt with these characters since World War II, and nearly everyone who read them in that prime is long dead.

    Speaking of, working with Len Strazewski is to comics as The Conquerer was to its cast and crew. See also Dave Hoover on Starman and Norm Breyfogle on Prime.

    With all the !mpact talk, I was curious about when Mike Parobek did his JSA work versus his The Fly release schedule, but it was more of a team-up. Parobeck was a two-book-a-month man. He did the 4-issue Elongated Man mini-series which released simultaneous to The Fly #6-10. He did The Fly Annual the same month as #11, then a Wonder Man fill-in with #12, and then did the JSA “ongoing” #1-5 alongside The Fly #13-17. Later in the JSA run, he was sneaking in work on Justice League Europe #48-49 and The Batman Adventures.

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  11. Chris mentioned the JSA as having the purity of principle, and man do I love that! One of the reasons we love these characters is they’re not overly complicated. They know what’s right and there’s something so earnest about who they are and what they fight for. They don’t need overly tragic back stories, they don’t need deconstruction, they are who they are and we love them for it. You know what else I love about this issue? I love Jay’s helmet being slightly tilted to the side in many panels. I dunno, it looks cool. I also like the idea of tying what James Robinson established later with Ted into this mini-series. You all know I love Starman. Finally, as someone who was a kid when Impact Comics came out and who loved seeing all these new characters, it really makes me miss the days when we had these companies with new universes to discover whether they were a shared universe like Impact, Malibu, the Ultraverse, or Valiant, or whether they did their own thing like NOW Comics and that awesome Green Hornet series they did which, much like Starman, tied all the previous versions from the serial and television series together as a legacy, even including the Lone Ranger.

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    1. Thanks Jose. As we discussed, I do think that the JSA provide something of a moral foundation to the DCU. I agree with you that there’s an earnestness of purpose about the JSA characters, but it was nice that this book also highlighted Jay’s sense of fun in fighting the Big Bad, especially as a contrast to his later portrayal as a Senior hero & Elder statesman.
      The James Robinson Starman series was so thorough in its approach to folding in the past histories and stories of the various Starmen into the series. I wonder what the research process James Robinson went through when planning and writing? I would not be surprised if this miniseries was part of his background preparatory reading.

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  12. This was another fun episode, gang. I bought this series and enjoyed it at time, but I enjoyed the “ongoing” series more as it was set in the then-present day. I also bought ALL of the Impact titles. (I have trouble starting it’s name with an exclamation point, even if that’s what they did.) I was working at a comic shop in Milwaukee when Image Comics launched in the summer of 1992. They books were selling like crazy, but I, like some comic readers, felt they were more style than substance. I specifically remember someone coming in asking about those new Image titles like Spawn. I thought I was saving the industry by directing them to the Impact section of the racks. I looked it up on Mike’s Amazing World and the first issue of Savage Dragon came out the same month as the Comet #13 and the Fly #12. The customer was confused and I thought I was clever, but I also felt like I was doing the right thing. Even though I was working at a shop, eventually I was buying SO many shared universe super-hero comics from the Ultraverse to Milestone to Valiant to Impact and more. If I’m being honest, I miss those days.

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  13. Impressive podcast most impressive.
    So this was the story line before the one ya’ll read last time. Interesting. Not my thing, but M’kay. The cover isn’t bad. Does the job leads your eyes to jay and to the typography of the title at the top. Ah Star Man in a chair and mentally taken over. Though Grundy and Vandel don’t have the powers to make this creature work. So must be Star Sapphire, Shade or some one who can create this or an inverter who made an android that could do this .
    Decent story, even though it uses a lot of pseudosciences .

    Hmmn, wait is Savage using Star Man’s rod to create this? Might be it, also let’s hope this isn’t an Irish or Scottish or some form of Celtic God that they’re faking and they decide to not wear underwear under the thing. Cause when he turned gaint pour Jay and everyone else got an eye full. lol sorry, still the art work to me is neat and potato’s. Does the job just isn’t my thing.

    Like the artist has good story telling. And all of this stuff is credible. I just not a fan. Decent enough story though that’s pretty much all I’ve got can’t wait till the next episode.

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  14. Oh well dome Shag, I’ve been waiting for this set of episodes to begin, it was such a refreshing series – zippy characterisations, breezy art and a very intriguing set-up in this first issue.

    So far as the complaints about it taking so long for the team to reunite in this mini is concerned, I was with them. Yes, the original All-Star Comics had the format of solo adventures with everyone coming together for a few pages at the end, but that was when comics had 64pp to play with. The Nineties books had perhaps a third of that for proportionately a lot more money – the title was Justice Society of America, had it been All-Star Comics there’d be less reason to complain, perhaps.

    And yes, best logo ever.

    I love the !mpact line, with the Jaguar and the Comet my favourites bring on that podcast!

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