Welcome to our coverage of the middle chapter of 1976’s Justice League of America/Justice Society of America crossover event, guest-starring “Shazam’s Squadron of Justice” — i.e., the Fawcett Comics heroes that DC had licensed the rights to a few years previously. Although if you missed last month’s post about JLA #135, you might want to go back and catch up on things there before digging into today’s entry — because, as we’ll soon discover, this comic’s very own writers opted fifty years ago not to offer even a brief recap of this frankly overstuffed storyline’s first installment — and this blog is opting to take its cues from them. Hey, fair is fair.
Before getting into JLA #136’s interiors, however, we’ll take a moment to note that — not counting last issue’s floating headshot — this issue’s cover by Ernie Chan and Frank Giacoia features the first appearance of the Golden Age/Earth-Two Batman on a comic-book cover since — well, whatever your personal headcanon holds to be the last published issue of Batman, Detective, or World’s Finest featuring the OG Caped Crusader. And now, on to our main event:
While there’s a lot more superheroes than the ones shown in this symbolic splash page involved in this three-part story overall, most of them split into smaller units in the previous issue, so we have a tidier group of eight featured in this one: Earth-One’s Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Earth-Two’s Batman and Robin, and Earth-S’s Bulletman, Bulletgirl, Mr. Scarlet and Pinky. Why double the number for Earth-S? Well, this installment of the trilogy is entitled “Crisis on Earth-S!” — and that, along with the fact that this crossover more or less serves as that world’s DC Multiverse debut, is probably justification enough for giving these lesser known costumed crimebusters a larger share of the spotlight.
So, anyway — we have eight heroes. Which makes it something of a head-scratcher that the credits box at the top of the next page, in addition to acknowledging the efforts of writers E. Nelson Bridwell and Marin Pasko, illustrators Dick Dillin and Frank McLaughlin, and editor Julius Schwartz, makes a jokey reference to “12 heroes!” But, rest assured, all will be made clear by the time we get to the end of this comic…
Hmm, I’m not sure exactly how the organic systems of a human body — OK, fine, a Thanagarian body — could continue to function normally if a significant chunk of its living tissue was suddenly transformed into presumably nonliving volcanic rock, as has just happened to Hawkman. But we’ll just have to chalk it up to comic-book science, or magic (at this point, it seems it could be either), and roll with it — especially since this sort of thing is going to keep happening throughout the issue.
With the entrance into the story of Billy Batson, one might say our hero-count has risen to nine — even if Billy isn’t exactly the same person as the guy he turns into when he says “Shazam!”, i.e., Captain Marvel (at least, not in every version of the Fawcett heroes’ continuity). Yeah, it’s a bit of a cheat, but I think we’re going to have to allow it.
Given that they’re on Earth-S, Robin seems to be leaping to conclusions in assuming that only the Earth-Two Joker could be responsible for these unfortunate construction workers’ death-grins. It’s not like there isn’t at least one other Joker active in the multiverse whose existence he should easily be able to hypothesize, regardless of whether or not the Justice League have ever explicitly told their Justice Society comrades about Earth-One’s own Clown Prince of Crime. For that matter, some completely unrelated villain native to Earth-S could easily have adopted a similar M.O. to the Joker’s. But, as it turns out, the ex-Boy Wonder is right on the money — so, no harm, no foul, I guess.
Naturally, the Joker needs no more introduction to the readers of this blog than did the Penguin in the previous issue. But the Weeper has had rather less exposure than either of those Bat-foes, so some of you might be interested to know that this Fawcett villain, who was also known as Mortimer Gloom, was a recurring foe of Bulletman and Bulletgirl who first appeared in Master Comics #23 (Feb., 1942).
Searching the scene of the crime for clues, our heroes notice some distinctive scratch marks on the sidewalk. “Nml tmng hrd enmph tdm tht s dmndmph!” observes Batman — which Robin helpfully translates for the others (and us) as: “Only thing hard enough to do that is diamonds!” The two dynamic duos dutifully follow the trail left by the weird markings all the way to a run-down brownstone…
Just when you might be thinking that Mister Scarlet and Pinky are no more than knockoffs of Batman and Robin, the former whips out his “infra-red ray pistol” and lets the Joker have it. Let’s see Bats pull one of those out of his utility belt, eh? (On second thought, forget about it; he probably could.)
Say, did you miss that earlier panel that showed Pinky’s hair turning to diamond? Me too. I think that’s because there wasn’t one.
The heroes leave the lab so that Jim Barr can change into his Bulletman gear; while he does, Robin points out the obvious: these weird crimes are way out of the Joker’s league. “This is Kull’s work,” he asserts, “what we were sent here to intercept!” At that point, the Hawks and Bulletgirl arrive on the scene, the latter bearing a couple of photos she’s just pulled off the Associated Press’ wire service:
If not quite as familiar to the comics-reading audience of 1976 as the Joker, both the Shade and Doctor Light were at least better known than the Weeper — especially if you’d been following DC’s output since the Silver Age. The Shade had been introduced as a foe for the original Flash, Jay Garrick Flash Comics #33 (Sep., 1942); that debut ultimately proved to be his one and only Golden Age outing, as he had to wait almost two decades for his return in Flash #123 (Sept. 1961). There, he’d fought Jay Garrick and Barry Allen in “Flash of Two Worlds” the classic story that got the whole parallel-Earths thing rolling at DC; his latest appearance prior to this one had come just one year before, in 1975’s JLA/JSA crossover. As for Doctor Light, he’d begun his perfidious career by taking on the whole Justice League in JLA #12 (Jun., 1962), and had appeared multiple times since then; sometimes battling the entire League, other times going up against individual members.
You can see what plotter E. Nelson Bridwell was going for in this middle chapter of this storyline in trying to do something novel with the familiar tropes of the JLA/JSA crossover events. Hey, he may have thought, instead of having the JLA and JLA and their allies split up into purely random smaller teams, why not have these smaller units made up of heroes with the same basic shtick? And why not have the villains they fight parallel that in reverse, by pairing bad guys with opposite shticks? These aren’t bad ideas, necessarily, but since there’s no good in-story justification for them, the contrivance of it all is quite glaring. The same goes for the extra wrinkle added here, with the Hawks and Bullets switching partners so as to “confuse” their enemies. Yeah, tell me another one, guys — although I will give our storytellers points for allowing the two superheroines to team up with no hand-wringing about whether a couple of females could be expected to handle things without a guy hero around.
Another downside of the “four heroes with the same shtick” notion is that the action within each individual segment of the story ends up being rather samey; after all, one of the big draws of seeing superheroes team up is seeing how their different powers and abilities play off each other. Besides which, if you’re not careful, one set of similarly-operating crusaders may outshine the other to the extent that a reader might well wonder why anyone would ever want to read about, say, Mr. Scarlet and Pinky, when Batman and Robin are also around. Just sayin’.
With the arrival of Mary Batson and Freddy Freeman, we can add two more superheroes — albeit currently powerless ones — to our count. Even so, we’re still one short of the credits box’s total of twelve.
I suspect that all of the “painted figures come to life” we see on these pages are based on actual masterpieces hanging in the Louvre — but with the exception of the tall woman in the robe (who’s gotta be the Mona Lisa), I have no idea who’s who. Anyone with more art history expertise than your humble blogger care to take a guess?
Once the Shade has been brought to earth, he confesses to Hawkman that he’s been using his cane to control an orbiting satellite that’s causing the artificial darkness covering half the world. But when Hawkman tries to use the cane to reverse the process, nothing happens — a fact that comes as much of a surprise to the villain as to the hero…
Why are Dr. Light’s suddenly sentient light-duplicates so much nicer than the diabolical doc himself? Um… because the plot needs them to be? Honestly, that’s all I’ve got.
And now, we finally have our twelfth and last hero: Johnny Thunder. Gee, I wonder what use a guy who can summon a genie in the form of a magical thunderbolt can possibly be to three heroes who transform into theie super-selves when struck by a magi — oh, wait, I think I got it.
Anyway, if you were a comics reader in August, 1976 who was simply looking for a JLA/JSA crossover installment featuring lots of heroes, villains, and action, you might well have been satisfied with Justice League of America #136 — that is, as long as you didn’t stop to think about why our main bad guy King Kull, who was obviously perfectly able to operate his matter transformation satellite technology without any help, bothered to enlist four subordinate bad guys in the first place — let alone give them the ability to move said satellites, so that they could be made to collide and blow up his plans.
And if I’d first read this story as a nine-year-old, rather than a nineteen-year-old — or, gods forbid, a sixty-nine-year-old — those questions might not have occurred to me, either. But, here we are.
Still, we’ve got one more chapter to go — and surely the Fawcett heroes everyone actually wants to see, i.e., the Marvel Family, are going to finally get to go into action early in the next issue. Won’t they? I guess we’ll find out, come the first week of September. I hope to see you then.
Gotta love the inspiration of bringing Johnny at this exact moment of the history.
It is as surprising a development as it is logical; plenty of Golden Age and Silver Age Marvel Family stories operated under similar rules.
I have to admit that I am hoping that somehow this turns out not to develop in the predictable way. But it is fair if it does, and good use of established lore and of the colorful variety of superbeings that these annual team-ups have available for use.
By this time, it was obvious to the teen-age me that the writing was not up to the standards of Gardner Fox, Denny O’Neil and Len Wein. Thank goodness we didn’t have to wait too much longer for Steve Englehardt.
Not my cup of tea, but to each his own.
Have to agree with the sentiments expressed by the late, great Martin Pasko in the interview excerpts that Alan included in his post on the first chapter of this storyline: too many characters, top many different events taking place, and definitely not enough pages to fit all of it in. I know JLA soon after became an extra-sized book (I forget exactly when, but I know it was in effect when Steve Englehart started writing the series) and I think it’s unfortunate that the giant-sized format was not already in use when E. Nelson Bridwell plotted this three-part story.
Oh, well, once again the ever-professional Dick Dillin does a very commendable job juggling these multiple characters, setting & plot elements. Of all the other artists who were around in 1976, I think that probably only George Perez would have been capable of doing a better job of it than Dillin did here.
Ironic then that Perez took over the book at Dillin’s untimely passing and it was in the midst of that year’s two team story.
I think the only thing this trilogy of stories did was prove that writing a JLA/JSA team-up, especially one that had to give up a fair amount of it’s real estate to a third team as well, was much harder to pull off than most might have thought. Bridwell was further contrained by the fact that he not only had to include his beloved Fawcett heroes, he had to introduce them to an audience who might not have any idea who the heck they were! That, I think, is why we get team-ups that don’t make sense and things like Pinky’s hair turning to diamond happening “off-stage.” There’s just no room within the confines of a normal comic to include them all, even if the story covers three whole issues! In fact, I think Bridwell’s major mistake in this story was to not use the “three-comic” format to spread the story out and give it room to breathe. Instead, he crams each issue with too much and all the heroes (and villains) are poorly served by it.
As to the art, I don’t particularly care for Dillin’s version of the Joker here, but I do applaud his trying to keep the cartoony way C.C. Beck drew Billy Batson intact while making the rest of the Marvel family look more realistic. It doesn’t really work, but it’s a nice effort.
Teaming Joker up with the Weeper is a bit of inspired irony, even if it doesn’t make sense in the story. I think part of the problem is that we never see the villains interact with Kull and therefore have no evidence of him acting in concert with the Rogue’s Gallery in any meaningful way. It just makes an already confusing story even moreso and creates even more loop holes for the plot to fall through.
Great job, Alan. You’d hardly know you were out of town all last week while not one, but two different blog posts were posted. You must be magic!
Thanks, Don. As they say, it pays to plan ahead. 🙂
This hands down the worst JLA-JSA crossover ever to see print. I loved Bridwell’s stories normally and Pasko was middling on my list of writers but together they created pure drek. As is pointed out, essential plot points are hand waved and ignored. And Mister Scarlet and Pinky? A quick Googling shows that Bridwell could have chosen Captain Midnight, Golden Arrow, Master Man, Minute-Man, Phantom Eagle, Scoop Smith, or Spy Smasher. It lists a teen squadron for Phantom Eagle so a sidekick is readily available there.
Well, Spy Smasher had been in the previous issue… but, otherwise, you may well have a point, Steve. (I have to confess to being largely unfamiliar with most of the characters you mentioned, but it’s hard to see how they could be *less* interesting than Mr. S. and the Whiz Kid.
First off, a salute to Alan!
I offer that not simply due to what Don shared about his personal schedule, but primarily because…well, damn. This was not a good comic book. That’s clear just from the snippets we saw in the review. But our host had to read that entire issue. Probably more than once!
While everyone’s noted the many of the shortcomings of JLA #136 – as well as Dick Dillin’s noble attempt to make the unworkable work – Alan touched on what I consider a key problem. Who did E. Nelson Bridwell see as the audience for this book? 9-year-olds who simply marveled at a comic book crammed full of heroes and villains with less attention to detail? Or was he aware of the older, more sophisticated readers with different expectations? I bring that up because Warlock #15 – the topic of last Wednesday’s review – clearly reached out to that latter audience, providing considerable content that would remain with the reader for some time afterwards. This one – not so much.
But while I still have all of you, let me share my one positive from this crossover. I confess to an absolute fascination for Bulletman and Bulletgirl. Some of you see “Coneheads.” I see marketing potential! Picture a Mr. & Mrs Smith dynamic with silly lines about “shooting your mouth off”, “gunning for that individual” or “I’m that caliber of a person.” And I would not touch their costumes!
I should sign off now. My wife is telling me I’ve had too much caffeine and need to step away from my desktop. ☺️
https://tombrevoort.com/2017/08/20/the-next-issue-of-justice-league-of-america-that/
I became familiar with the Shade through James Robinson’s Starman series, of which I found one omnibus at a used book store about a decade ago and enjoyed enough to get the rest of them. I had re-read most of the series recently. Shade was a prominent supporting character in the series and very intriguing as written by Robinson. Alas, can’t say the writing in this particular story made me interested in any of the multitude of characters featured. It strikes me as all intricate plot without any depth. I’d also recently re-read a Splash Brannigan story by Alan Moore and Hilary Barta, with strong Kurtzman and Elder vibes, and included a plot wherein paintings come to life as in this story. It was one of several fairly short tales in Book Two of Moore’s Tomorrow Stories. Anyhow, Barta did an effective job of making famous paintings seem to come to life. Can’t say I got any such vibe from Dillan’s efforts on that – if the caption hadn’t stated what was happening I would have had no idea from just looking at the art. It was apt when Bulletman noted his hand was becoming “two-dimensional” – every character in the story was two-dimensional! Even by the standards of 1976, the writing on this story was as in Silver Age DC, when Marvel’s style was very distinct from that of their Distinguished Competition.
Your comments mirror my conclusions as well, Fred. Not being as knowledgeable of DC comics in the late 70’s, my question for you – and everyone else – is if that broad distinction between Marvel and DC was truly companywide or is this issue an exception?
Speaking only for myself, Rick — and in broad strokes, to boot — I’d say that mid-Seventies DC was, for the most part, quite consciously pitching their wares at a younger demographic than Marvel was. That had been much less evident just a few years before, in the heyday of O’Neil and Adams on Batman and GL/GA, Wein and Wrightson on Swamp Thing, etc.. The gap would narrow again, but with the exception of certain outliers (e.g., Englehart and Gerber’s late ’70s DC output), it would take a few more years.
That makes sense, Alan. I’d stopped reading any DC comics a couple years earlier for essentially that reason (as well as personal economics as there were only so many lawns to mow). Your posts are about a year before I stopped collecting comics until X-Men #129 brought me back into the fold. As a result, I look even more forward to your future posts.
My first encounter with the Shade was this Carmine Infantino cover (https://www.mikesamazingworld.com/mikes/features/comic.php?comicid=10209). It looked so good but it was years before I finally bought a back copy of the issue. Turns out to be a fun story so I wasn’t disappointed.
If anything, this second instalment was even worse than the first and I salute you, Alan, for wading through it on our behalf.
The most jarring thing about it is the contrast between the presumably unpleasant deaths suffered by the innocent bystanders variously transformed into rock, steel, water etc, or poisoned by the Joker’s laughing gas, and the callously jaunty tone employed by the writer to depict said deaths. Unless, of course, part 3 contrives a suitably clunky plot twist whereby everyone gets better. I suppose we’ll all find out in September.
With all due respect to E. Nelson Bridwell, this reads like a story made up on the run by two boys playing with their action figures. ‘My Kull is going to destroy things’. ‘Well, I’ve got all these heroes to fight him’. ‘So what, I’ve got these baddies who work for Kull to fight the heroes’. One of the boys had been playing with a paint set and done what we all did, mixed all the colours together to make a neutral grey, so he decides to dab some paint on the figures. ‘What are you doing?!’ ‘Well, they’ve been turned to rock. Or metal’. Then little sister comes in. ‘I’m going to play the girls’. They both fly off together. ‘Don’t paint glitter on his head!’ ‘It’s not glitter, it’s diamonds!’
Sorry, but I think my version of the plot/story conference makes as much sense as being asked to accept that paid professionals collaborated to come up with this. And we thought the previous issue was an undistinguished mess.
Having mocked the less-than-impressive Ibistick last time, what exactly does Mr Scarlet’s Infra-Red Ray Pistol do to villains? Cause muscle relaxation and improved circulation, like an infra-red lamp used in medical treatments? Prolonged exposure might cause localized burns, but I’m not sure how an ‘infra-red ray’ would cause a concussive blast to knock the Joker off his feet.
The only positive I can see is Dick Dillin’s solid but possibly unexciting art. I started with the JLA when he was being inked by Dick Giordano, and that was very pleasing to the eye. My young fanboy self had a dream of seeing Dillin do a year of the Avengers, while Buscema or Romita Sr did a year on JLA.
Yet again, thank you Alan for a review that was way more entertaining than the comic being reviewed.
This is like a throw back to the many, if not all JLA stories of 10 years earlier. Because truth be told, imho, most of that run was pretty awful.
Strongly disagree if you mean the Gardner Fox run.
The Joker also teams with an Earth-One Weeper in Joker 2, and with a third Weeper, described as the original gimmick criminal, in Batman: Brave and the Bold. Apparently lots of people liked the comedy/tragedy aspect of putting them together.
Not to pile on with the negative comments, but man, that cover is terrible. Ernie must have been working to a strict deadline! However much you have drawn by 3pm, that’s the cover!
There actually was a Squadron of Justice in the old Fawcett comics. That name originally applied to the teaming up of Captain Marvel with the Three Lieutenant Marvels. One further comment. In an old story teaming up Bulletgirl and Mary Marvel The Weaper in that story states he is the son of the now-deceased original Weeper. As far as I can tell that is not referred to in this story.