For the next year or two, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA turned into a bit of a forgettable series. I still was buying it every month, but some of that was simply out of momentum. I had loved the series when I was younger, but whether it was that nostalgia made those earlier issues look better to me or the fact that as I got older and my tastes changed I wanted more and better material out of my comic books, JUSTICE LEAGUE simply wasn’t hitting the way it used to. The book still looked the same–Dick Dillin, who had been the artist since I began reading the series, was still drawing it. But the change in editorial teams had an impact. This wasn’t a great period for the title.
This issue is another one that I’d completely forgotten until cracking it out to make this piece. It had slipped my mind that writer Gerry Conway had brought his creation Ultraa, who had been introduced as the one and only super hero of Earth-Prime, the world that we readers all lived on, back for another story after his initial two outings. I remembered a bit more after reviewing this issue, but none of the details had remained with me. and maybe that’s just down to it being a 47-year-old comic book, but I don’t think so. I recall exacting details about other books published at this time. No, I think the problem was that this issue just isn’t all that memorable.
The story opens with the members of the Justice League on trial before the world court. Their crime: unlawfully imprisoning Ultraa after he attempted to take away their super-powers and ability to act in a prior adventure. Ultraa is being represented by Ernest Sloane of the World Citizen’s Defense Society, and he intends to prove that the Justice league acted unlawfully against his client. Out front, there are supporters of the League as well as protestors against the heroes, and as team is led out following a recess, the two groups wind up attacking one another. The League snaps into action to prevent anybody from being injured, then turns itself back into custody. It’s a way to get some action into the opening pages, pretty much.
But the protestors aren’t the only people in the world who are suddenly and inexplicably becoming violent. All across the globe, similar instances are being reported. And it turns out that Ernest Sloane is the cause. He’s actually not a human being at all but rather a colony of organisms that share a hive-mind existence called Over-Complex. They’ve got their own reasons for wanting to stir up trouble in the world, and in the guise of Sloane, they’ve neutralized the Justice League from being able to take any action to interfere with their plans. I think this right here is one of the problems with the JLA stories of this period: the villain lacks any genuine sense of presence or individuality. Over-Complex is kind of dull, actually, so the situation that the League is up against doesn’t have a compelling prime mover behind it.
Still in custody, the League becomes aware of events transpiring across the globe. Taking a look with his telescopic vision, Superman notices that the sea level has fallen by almost six inches, which means that a tremendous amount of water is missing. The Man of Steel crashes his way out of the window to go investigate, and his fellow Leaguers conceal his departure–Flash swiftly repairs the glass while Green Lantern uses his power ring to conjure up a stand-in Superman so that the guards don’t realize that the genuine article is missing.
Superman is able to confirm that the seas are all shrinking but he can’t dope out what’s happening to all of the water. Before he can get make any further headway on his investigation, though, he’s attacked by Complex, the Ernest Sloane conglomeration of organisms, who can’t have him looking into their affairs. Complex is bound together by Neutrino Energy which proves powerful enough to stun even the Man of Steel, and at the finish of their encounter, he drops into the ocean unconscious. Meanwhile, Batman, who is on monitor duty on the JLA satellite and not a defendant in the trial (since he wasn’t present for the story in which Ultraa was incarcerated) uses the computers to determine that the reason for all of the discord around the planet is that the levels of oxygen in the atmosphere is growing at an alarming rate. But the Masked manhunter isn’t sure what he can do to nail down the cause.
Back at the World Court, Ultraa is beginning to have second thoughts about putting the League on trial, having seen them behave honorably earlier when they broke up the riot and turned themselves back in afterwards. He’s about ready to pull the plug on everything when he happens to spy the Complex creature returning to the area and transforming itself into his lawyer, Ernest Sloane. Figuring that this entity must be behind the troubles on Earth, Ultraa resolves to let the trial continue on until he can determine what is behind everything. But unbeknownst to him, a piece of Complex has seen him seeing them resume their human form, so his attempt to play innocent is already compromised. And that’s where this first part is To Be Continued. Not a whole lot happens, though the idea of putting the Leaguers on trial for having avoided due process and acting unilaterally is a decent one. It’s just that the story deck is stacked against anything but an obvious outcome.
And on the back page, there was yet another edition of the Daily Planet to read, DC’s promotional page, their equivalent to Marvel’s Bullpen Bulletins. The Fred Hembeck cartoon on this one is especially dumb, but Bob Rozakis’ Ask the Answer Man column continued to be entertaining and wasn’t yet completely filled with questions about the value of random back-issues sent in by hopeful fans.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
So why did Superman break that window when the Flash could have phased him through it as could Green Lantern or Superman who demonstrated in World’s Finest Comics#245 ( June-July 1977 ) that he could imitate the Flash’s ability to vibrate through things ( page 9 panel 2 through a tent wall while holding the Martian Manhunter on Mars II – Super Vibes he called it )?
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The World Court of the UN does not, of course, look like the lobby of the local police precinct, and there wouldn’t be New York City cops behind the JLA, because it’s in the Netherlands.
There would also be 15 judges there, not one guy with a gavel, attended by no other court officers.
Ah well.
I’ll note that the description of the HOUSE OF MYSTERY issue in the Daily Planet page says that a story has a “rather surprising star,” and I dunno, the star is Sir Morgan Parks, who no reader had ever seen before (or since), so I’m not sure how surprising that was. He was also clearly meant to be Sherlock Holmes, which makes me wonder if it had been originally intended to be a Sherlock story before someone decided they didn’t want a legal fight with the Doyle Estate.
If so, they changed their minds before the story was lettered, because there’s no sign of any lettering corrections in the character names.
And if that wasn’t trivial enough, I’ll also add that this week’s Answer Man column had one of the aspects that bugged me about the column — Bob tended to give flat answers to things that would have been more interesting if he’d done more than the minimum.
In this case, he answers the question about how Wonder Woman can fly by saying that she doesn’t, she just glides on the winds. This would seem to suggest the obvious follow-up, “Okay, Bob, but how does she do that?” — but it doesn’t seem to occur to Bob that David Bacian might be asking how she manages the being-up-there-in-the-air-with-no-clear-explanation thing. Adding, “And she can do that because [name of god] gifted her with that ability at her birth” or whatever would make the answer a whole lot more of an actual answer.
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Can’t think of a comic book story by Gerry Conway that I liked. He wrote some Batman stories in the eponymous title and “Detective Comics” drawn by Gene Colan and Don Newton. And I like their work very much. Just not the scripting. I wasn’t alive or was too young for his Marvel years. I know he’s got one of the best resumes in the business. But except for one issue, one of his last, of Despero’s return to “JLA” (which was wrapped up by JM DeMatteis), his writing and especially his dialog wasn’t for. I’m glad he co-created the Punisher, but it’s the work of Mike Baron, Klaus Janson, and especially Garth Ennis that interested me in that character.
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