BHOC: JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #171

Now this was a comic book that I truly enjoyed. As always, I was very much excited to get the year’s regular team-up between the Justice League and their antecedent counterparts, the Justice Society. It had become a regular yearly event. But the truth is, most of those stories had become disappointing. In particular, throughout the 1970s, as a way of keeping such meet-ups fresh, editor Julie Schwartz and his writers had insisted on additionally mixing in a third element–sometimes a team like the Seven Soldiers of Victory, the Legion of Super-Heroes or the unnamed group of Fawcett heroes from Captain Marvel’s world, and sometimes a more oddball aggregate, such as the previous year’s story including a bevy of characters from the past including Jonah Hex, Enemy Ace and Miss America. This made these stories overly crowded affairs in which the main draw–the JLA and the JSA getting together–get a bit lost in the mix. But for this year, writer Gerry Conway and new editor Ross Andru decided to do something a bit simpler.

What Gerry conceived of was a locked room murder mystery in which both the victim and the killer would be one of the heroes attending that year’s get-together. This instantly brought the number of participants down to a more manageable level, and allowed a bit more space for Conway to find meaningful moments of interaction between them. It also created a puzzle story, which felt like it came out of the traditions of the JLA strip, where at least early on cleverness was valued and proved to be even more potent than super-powers. I only had to take one glance at the Roll Call roster on this splash page to instantly figure out who the victim was going to be–the one character who hadn’t made any notable appearances in over a decade, and whose appearance at the end of the Justice Society story in ADVENTURE COMICS #465 felt a bit arbitrary unless he was going to be significant.

That character, of course, is Terry Sloane, also known as Mister Terrific. he was one of the more derided golden age super heroes by modern cynical fans, which came down to the fact that he sported his slogan of Fair Play on his midsection. As this story opens up, the League and the Society have held a joint meeting on the League’s satellite headquarters which then turns into a joint party. Solan tells both Flashes and Power Girl that he came back out of retirement after encountering an old enemy of both himself and Jay Garrick: the Spirit King. If you’re wondering when the Spirit King battled these two JSA heroes, put it out of your mind: writer Conway created him just for this story. Mister Terrific intimates that he’s holding some great secret about his old enemy, and that one of the assembled heroes will be branded a traitor before the truth comes out. Which seems a bit prophetic and contrived to me, but it definitely gets everyone’s attention.

On a more personal note, there’s a very nice one-page aside between Batman and the Huntress of Earth-2, who is the daughter of Bruce Wayne’s Justice Society counterpart. Helena had had to tell Batman that her father recently passed away, as chronicled in ADVENTURE COMICS a few months previously. It’s a profoundly weird scene on a certain level, as Batman is a younger incarnation of Huntress’s now-deceased father, but it’s nicely handled and carries some genuine emotion–more emotion that the Earth-2 Batman really got in the story in which he met his demise, it must be said.

Anyway, after that, it’s time to get down to plot–and so the satellite is rocked by an explosion that tears through an outer bulkhead. The assembled heroes race to the site of the explosive decompression to affect repairs, and Superman finds the lifeless body of Mister Terrific among the wreckage. But before any of the assembled heroes can deal with the death of one of their own, they must first work to repair the satellite they’re meeting in. This becomes an extended sequence that’s about as much overt action as the issue has, which is why it’s as drawn-out as it is–to provide some colorful moments of super heroes using their super-powers. Together, Superman, Doctor Fate, the two Hawkmen and the two Green Lanterns fix the breach and make the headquarters airtight once again–something that almost any one of them might have been able to accomplish on their own were an action set piece not called for. And then it’s time to turn attention to the matter of the deceased Terry Sloane.

The assembled heroes are remarkably cold about the passing of one of their own–the departed Earth-2 Batman engendered a stronger response a few pages previously. (The Earth-2 Hawkman’s comment that Mister Terrific wasn’t ever really one of the JSA reads as especially insensitive–the man is dead, Carter, show a little decorum!) But much of that is down to the fact that there’s still a bunch of plot to get through before the approaching wrap-up of the issue. As a forensic scientist, Flash has examined the scene of the breach and found remnants of a planted explosive charge–that bulkhead didn’t merely fail, it was deliberately detonated. So Mister Terrific’s death was murder. Zatanna attempts to use her magic to pick up impressions of the recent past from the bomb fragment, but when she does so, she’s instantly zapped by a magic countermeasure, and only Doctor Fate’s intervention saves her life. But there isn’t going to be any peeking at the culprit ahead of time.

The two Flashes do a super-speed search of the satellite to determine if anybody else is present, but they come up empty. The transporter logs also show that nobody has beamed down to the surface or gone back to Earth-2 either. And a closer examination of Mister Terrific’s body shows that he wasn’t killed in the explosion as was first thought–the explosion was meant to cover up the true manner of his death, which is that he was strangled. (This is a seriously dumb move by the killer, by the way, but it makes for a more visual story.) All of which leads Superman to proclaim in the To Be Continued wrap-up to this first installment that one of the heroes assembled among them must be a murderer! and that’s the cool note we go out on. I thought it was pretty clear at this point who the killer actually was at this point, the only thing not settled was where, or who, they might be hiding inside. Anyway, I thought this whole issue was pretty cool when I first read it, latter day criticisms aside, and I was definitely interested in seeing where the follow-up next month would take up.

Again here, we got a new Daily Planet page promoting the comics that would be on sale in a week’s time. And once more, it included Bob Rozakis’ Ask the Answer Man page as well as another goofball comic strip from Fred Hembeck. The big push this time out was for TIME WARP, a Dollar Comic-sized science fiction magazine that only wound up running for around a half-dozen issues. As TIME WARP didn’t carry any ongoing features, it felt more akin to the assorted Mystery titles that DC was still putting out, and so I didn’t bother checking it out. There was a full-page ad for it in this issue earlier on, though: