BEYOND THE JSA
By Andrew Wheeler.

Sometimes it takes more than one superman to save the world.

There's a reason crossovers still create sales spikes, even in a day where people pretend to hate gimmicks. Taking two larger-than-life spandex clad characters and setting their lives on a collision course is bound to mean fireworks. It also explains the appeal of the team book. One hero is good. Seven heroes is great. Seven heroes leads to meaner villains, bigger fights, and more spectacular fireworks. This month, Beyond takes a look at the big leagues. Beyond the superteam.

THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA - The first superteam was created in 1940 by Gardner Fox at National. The idea was to bring together all the company's star players in a single book, a book that would draw in a wide number of fans and expose them to the other heroes in the line. The original line-up included Flash, Green Lantern, Sandman, Dr Fate, Spectre, Hawkman, Hourman and Atom, but over the years the likes of Dr Midnite, Mr Terrific, Starman and Johnny Thunder all made an appearance. Gardner Fox led the team through three years of stories, and established the familiar team-book formula; the villains defeat the heroes one by one, then the heroes team up to beat the villains. Fox performed an encore at National in 1960, when he created the Justice League. Today, the JSA and the JLA form the core of DC's generational super-saga.

THE AVENGERS - Created by the legendary partnership of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, Marvel's answer to the JLA inevitably developed into something of a soap opera. Founded by Iron Man, Thor, Giant Man, Wasp and the Hulk, the Avengers carries all the Marvel standards, including complicated family trees, conflicted marriages, redeemed villains, earthbound gods and the resurrected dead. Probably the longest running of the team-books, the Avengers is the centre of the Marvel Universe. The Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Eternals and the Inhumans have all had representatives on the team. While Grant Morrison went for the epic angle on the JLA relaunch, Kurt Busiek and George Perez stayed true to the Marvel roots of angst and human drama.

THE MINUTEMEN - The story behind Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's WATCHMEN is that Moore wanted to take the old Charlton characters and spin them into a new story to explain what became of them. He couldn't get the rights to the characters, so he created a parallel team, the Minutemen. Belonging firmly in the same era as the original JSA, the Minutemen's story was one of murder, rape, corruption and Communism. WATCHMEN is really the story of their legacy, but the fabric of the story is so rich with the events of their lives that this 'team book' without the team perhaps says more about the dynamic than JLA or the AVENGERS can ever do. It takes the team book from the outside, and tears its way in.

SUICIDE SQUAD - The key to a good super-team book is the "team" element. The team is a group of people who choose to work together for the good of the world. The Suicide Squad is not that kind of team. Originally formed by the US government when the JSA was disbanded, the Suicide Squad was meant to conduct dangerous or 'suicidal' missions overseas. Because the US wanted to recruit agents it could control, it employed two recruitment methods. First of all, it approached heroes in need of help, and offered to give them the help they needed. Secondly, they recruited villains, like Captain Boomerang and Deadshot, who would be given a pardon at the end of their service. If they survived. The beauty of hiring villains, of course, was that they were expendable, which increasingly meant the government could send the squad on missions that were truly suicidal.

THE DEFENDERS - Some teams are destined for greatness. Others are just too bizarre to last. The Defenders was founded by the unlikely trio of Dr Strange, the Hulk and Namor the Submariner, three of the least team-oriented characters in the Marvel Universe. Along the way, it picked up other equally strange recruits, such as the Silver Surfer, Valkyrie, Son of Satan and Moondragon. In fact, the Defenders was comics' first 'non-team'. They only convened at times of need, when earth was threatened by some strange otherworldly force. They had no headquarters, no ID cards, and no DefendiCar, and at the end of the mission, they all went home again. In fact, the only way you could tell you were a Defender was if you met the basic membership requirements. You had to believe you were a Defender, and the other Defenders had to believe you were as well.

THE SERPENT SOCIETY - One of the best wild ideas to come from the ever-fruitful imagination of the late Mark Gruenwald must surely be the Serpent Society. It was founded when the teleporting villain Sidewinder noted that the Avengers benefited from strength in numbers and a solid infrastructure for their operations. He reasoned that villains could benefit from the same, and created an Avengers-style team of snake-inspired villains, such as Viper, Constrictor, Anaconda and Cobra. Though it was far from the first team of villains to be formed, it was probably the first to move beyond the Masters of Evil model and actually try to instill a sense of loyalty and camaraderie into its members. Its attempts, and failure, formed the core of a prolonged saga in the pages of CAPTAIN AMERICA.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN - If the central conceit of the JSA was to bring together all the major figures in the National family of books, then doesn't it make sense to do something similar with the characters of Victorian fiction? Probably not, but Alan Moore decided to try it anyway, and in the excellent LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, with art by Kevin O'Neill, we get to see the result. The League is a team-book in the true classic tradition, but the members are familiar even to those that have never picked up a team book; Alan Quartermain, Dr Jekyll and Captain Nemo, for example.

THE AUTHORITY - The name says it all. In his run on STORMWATCH, Warren Ellis decided to apply real political agendas to the idea of the superteam. Through the machinations of Weatherman Henry Bendix, we find out what superheroes can really do if they put their muscle to it. We also discover what they could have done if people like Bendix weren't in the way. The same themes carry through into the successor to STORMWATCH; THE AUTHORITY. In the first year of the book Jenny Sparks led her team to defeat an insidious foreign menace, fight back an invasion from another earth, and kill God. The moral of the story? Change or die.

THE SQUADRON SUPREME - Even before Warren Ellis created his JLA corollaries in STORMWATCH and PLANETARY, Marvel pulled a very similar trick. In their 'alternate reality' Squadron Supreme, the part of Superman was played by Hyperion. Batman became Nighthawk, Wonder Woman became Power Princess, Green Lantern became Doctor Spectrum, and so on. Just as in STORMWATCH, the question was asked; what if these heroes really did want to change the world? When Hyperion tries to use brainwashing to recondition major - and later minor - criminals, and uses this as a launchpad for a major programme of social reform, Nighthawk is appalled. He leaves the team in order to fight his former colleagues. The end result is a tragedy for the team-members, and one of Marvel's most entertaining series for the readers.

THE THUNDERBOLTS - The Masters of Evil, a more conventional villain-group than the Serpent Society or the Suicide Squad, had its finest moment in a Roger Stern story detailing its siege of Avengers Mansion. Its second finest moment came in its decision to go straight - or rather, in the ruse that it would go straight. Under the leadership of Baron Zemo, the Masters of Evil adopted the guises of heroes and stepped in to replace the Avengers when they went AWOL. Then they found they liked being heroes, and wondered if it would be possible to make the act a reality. When the team book formula was first established by the JSA, it seemed nothing much could be done to subvert it, and the best most writers could do was emulate it, and sometimes turn the volume up high. With THUNDERBOLTS, Kurt Busiek came up with an original concept that broke the mold.

Next Month: Beyond Mandrake.

Andrew Wheeler is Editorial Consultant for PopImage.

Back

Attitude | ProFile | Industrial
Interviews | Reviews | Pi Comics
Talkback | Archives | Gallery