BHOC: JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #162

It was at around this time that JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA had begun to feel tired to me. It had once been a favorite series, but in recent months, coupled with a growing interest in the Marvel style of storytelling, the venerable JLA had seemingly been slowing down, becoming a bit trite and simplistic and, well, dull. I had no way of knowing, of course, that we were in the final months of Julie Schwartz’s long tenure as editor of the title–an editorship that ranged back to the series’ formation in BRAVE AND THE BOLD #28. It also may have been that, at least at this particular moment, write Gerry Conway’s work with the League was paling in comparison with what Steve Englehart had done with the group a year or so earlier. Regardless, I was growing tired of the Justice League at this point.

Having inducted Zatanna into the League in the previous issue, Conway made her the focus of a multi-part story that delved into her history, background and origins. I don’t know that there was really any more of an origin needed that, “Daughter of Zatara, who employs the same manner of spells that he did”, but Conway felt differently, and so the new recruit became the center of the storyline. I wasn’t entirely sold on this reworked version of Zatanna, though, and so this wasn’t exactly a welcome direction for me. Artist Dick Dillin provided his typically solid and often oddly-composed work on the series, as he had done consistently since I’d begun reading it. I quite liked Dillin’s work, but it has to be said that his figures and compositions could be as strange in their own way as his predecessor Mike Sekowsky’s.

The issue opens with the League responding to an emergency call from an off-the-books secret S.T.A.R. Labs facility. They had been working on Compound One, a genetic compound that can be used to rewrite the DNA of any subject, changing them in a myriad of ways. The Lab was sabotaged and Compound One stolen, and the lead scientist can tell the assembled Leaguers very little about what may have been behind it. Attempting to divine a lead mystically, Zatanna touches the discarded cannister in which a portion of the compound had been held–but she’s suddenly zapped into unconsciousness by whatever she makes contact with there. She wakes up in the JLA satellite headquarters, where the Elongated Man and the Red Tornado fill her in on what happened next. Green Lantern probed the cannister with his Power Ring, somehow connecting with the image of the Miami Radiological Research Center. So that’s where the rest of the team has gone off to, following up on that lead.

As she recovers her senses, Zatanna admits to her two fellow heroes that she seems to have been under a Spell of Forgetfulness for the past couple of weeks, one that her psychic contact with the cannister disrupted. She had no recall as to why or how she redesigned her costume, nor where her father Zatara might be. This despite the fact that Batman spoke with Zatara just last issue, as the Red Tornado points out to Ralph Dibny. The Elongated Man’s nose smells a mystery, and so the three heroes head off the last theater that Zatanna can recall performing in with her father, which they find abandoned. Rifling through her father’s possessions, Zatanna comes upon a photograph of her parents–but when the other Leaguers look at the picture, only Zatara is visible–Zatanna’s mother is not in the image.

Meanwhile, the rest of the League has journeyed to Florida in search of the thief who stole Compound One. Approaching the Research Center, they find themselves under attack–first from an anthropomorphic wave of water and thereafter from a gigantic squid from beneath the waves. But before they can get the lay-of-the-land, a figure whizzes by them so swiftly as to defy identification. And Superman has been laid low my psychic brain blasts, so he’s in no shape to give immediate pursuit. But Superman did hear where this mystery figure is headed next: the Navy’s Deepsea Probe Proteus, an experimental underwater environment. Green Lantern has similarly been shaken by a psychic attack, enough to put him out of action for the duration, so it’s only Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Arrow who make it to Proteus Base. There, they’re ambushed and quickly overpowered by the Shark, Green Lantern’s old foe.

Elsewhere, Zatanna, Elongated Man and Red Tornado have made their way to Zatanna’s childhood home in upstate New York (“Near Arkham Asylum” we’re told in at least two instances, which raises some interesting questions concerning the location of Gotham City) The house is in shambles, but that doesn’t prevent it from coming to life and attacking the Leaguers. Battling their way past the obstacle, the heroes locate a dimensional portal. Meanwhile, below the sea, the Shark reveals to his team of Leaguers that he stole Compound One in order to create others like himself, super-evolved animals so that he will no longer be a solitary creature, and which will inherit the Earth once the human race is wiped from it. That’s all the team needs to hear, and they break free of their restraints and hurl themselves into battle with the Shark’s creations.

Unable and unwilling to simply destroy the Shark and his minions, the League trio instead lures them back into the evolution chamber that birthed them all, and then turns the power up to maximum, evolving them past the evolutionary curve so that they are transformed into harmless amoeba. Back in New York, Zatanna casts a spell to disrupt the dimensional whirlpool that her group has found, only for her unconscious father Zatara to be spit out of it unexpectedly. And that’s where this issue is To Be Continued. The Shark plotline felt too fragmented and incidental to carry much weight, and the search for Zatanna’s roots also felt like a bit of a dogleg, a bunch of pages to stall the heroes from locating Zatara in the first place. So I can’t say that I loved this issue especially.