This should be interesting: I rate Morrison up there with the best of his era when it comes to his independent stuff, but haven't liked what I've seen of most of his work with established characters, with the exception of Seven Soldiers. I'll see if this thread can change my mind about his JLA, highly acclaimed by many fans but just as bad as most DC/Marvel superhero product of rthe last 20 or 30 years, to my mind.

Great to see this thread... I really enjoyed the beginning of the Morrison JLA! I've never read that Lost Years book, though... was it one of those series with different writers and eras every issue?

JLA #1-4: The Hyperclan (Jan-April 1997)

Grant Morrison’s extended run on JLA consisted of discrete story arcs which I will try to cover in single posts, but some individual issues may merit their own post. The first four issues pit the JLA against a new super team:

Issue #1 “Them!”: Meet the Hyperclan, nine new costumed beings. Their spaceship appears over the White House, and they immediately set about making the Earth a better place, with gardens in the Sahara and the like. Humankind takes to them immediately and then mutters about why the JLA always spent its time defending the status quo instead of improving it. The JLA satellite comes under attack by unseen forces and is destroyed, putting several members in the hospital.



Issue #2 “The Day The Earth Stood Still”: The Hyperclan insta-build three fortresses from which to operate in their quest to improve the Earth. One is in Antarctica, one in the Mongolian desert, and one in the Pacific Ocean “near Midway Island.” The JLA split up to check out the three bases, and at each base they are captured or apparently killed. Except for the Martian Manhunter, who accepts an offer to join the Hyperclan.

Issue #3 “War of the Worlds”: Batman isn’t dead! He sneaks into the Hyperclan fortress, where his friends are imprisoned, and promptly begins re-enacting Die Hard, picking his foes off one at a time when they go looking for him. GL and Flash weren’t really defeated last issue. But now they are. Nice try, boys!



Issue #4: “Invasion from Mars”: Turns out that the Hyperclan are all Pale Martians, who don’t think much of Green Martians like our Manhunter. Their aversion to fire proves the undoing not only of the nine villains that we’ve seen so far, but also the other 61 that join them at the last minute in an attempt to take over the whole world at once. With the help of a fire-wielding human populace, the Martians are all captured, their minds wiped, and reprogrammed as humans set loose on Earth to perform noble, thankless jobs like fireman.

My Two Cents: This story is rolling in Silver Age nostalgia. Shall we count the ways? “New heroes with a secret agenda make the old heroes unpopular” was done many times, riffing off of adolescent anxieties that friends are hard to make, and you’re only one school lunch period away from seeing your buddy find someone else to hang out with.



“The JLA splits up to face a threat in tiny teams instead of bringing overwhelming force to bear on the locations serially” was a constant feature of both the comic books and the Super-Friends cartoon. (As a bonus, the head in the middle of the page below belongs to Tommy Tomorrow’s sidekick Brent Wood, a character I was discussing recently in my Twilight write-ups. Hi, Brent! Glad you’re not a lunatic in this story from DC Special #27 (1977).)



Oh, and be sure that one of the locations is in the ocean, so that Aquaman can play! All he can do is talk to fish, you know…



… Except that this version of Aquaman is not only quite surly, but has a ridiculously broad definition of what “talking to fish” entails, giving him a power which is way too useful to ever mention again. (Also, note that Wonder Woman has little patience for Aquaman's complaint about how hard it is to rule 70% of the Earth's surface all by his lonesome. Hey, Alaska is big too, but it's mostly empty, dude!)




Morrison loves how early Silver Age stories of The Flash contained little scientific tidbits, “Flash Facts,” used to prime young readers for some novel way that Flash was about to use his powers. Morrison works a couple of “Flash Facts” into this story. I suspect this was also the partial basis of his own character The Fact who appears in Flex Mentallo looking like Ditko’s character The Question.






The Hyperclan leader takes an interest in Wonder Woman which clearly goes beyond world domination. Mars Needs Women!




“Shapeshifting aliens make our heroes unpopular, and then the defeated aliens get mind-wiped and released on Earth with their powers removed” is the plot of Fantastic Four #2.



The titles of these four issues all recall classic genre stories, invasions from Mars most prominently. Morrison throws in plenty of clues about the Martian threat, including a reference to Valentine Michael Smith from Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.



The issue entitled “Them!” might refer to a 1954 film about mutated giant ants. But it also could be a throwback to the New Wonder Woman story in which Diana’s boutique was menaced by three drag kings. This hits on the favorite Morrison theme of disguise, especially with gender fluidity in the mix, as with the Martians who adopt male or female forms as a matter of convenience rather than biological imperative.





Morrison also uses this throwback story to tackle some then-contemporary comic book concerns about the grim and gritty nature of comic books in the 1990s.



“Now they murder your girlfriend and stuff her in a fridge for kicks,” says GL. This refers to Green Lantern #54 (Written by Ron Marz, 1994), in which GL literally found his dismembered girlfriend stuffed in his refrigerator.



Morrison is two years ahead of the curve in criticizing this trope. In 1999, Gail Simone began writing about the phenomenon of “women in refrigerators” as short-hand for the way that comic books tended to dispose of female characters, and that the relative lack of long-term female characters might explain in part the relative dearth of female readers for comic books. Yet Morrison himself did essentially the same thing in expanding on Len Wein’s brief capsule story about how Amadeus Arkham came home one day to find his wife and daughter dismembered by one of his psychiatric patients, with his daughter’s head stuck into her own dollhouse. “Women in Dollhouses” might mean something else I guess. Anyway, for more discussion of this GL issue and the "Women in Refrigerators" phenomenon, see Wildfire2099's thread on GL beginning here.



Always watch the set dressing of homes for homages. Here in Wally West’s house we see the expected Flash-related puns in his movie collection: Speed, The Running Man, etc. But then there’s also The Dark Backward, a weird 1991 film about an aspiring but terrible stand-up comic who inexplicably grows a third arm.



Howard Porter and John Dell are on pencils and ink for most of Morrison's issues. Nothing shocking, but solid, except some tinyhead syndrome, especially on women.

It was by Mark Waid, so I omitted it. I think I will briefly cover Waid's work in the middle of Morrison's run just for continuity's sake, though. Wally and Kyle's junior status is played up throughout Morrison's run, though Wally at least should have been a seasoned veteran by then.

There have been many Martian Invasion films, but one in particular that comes to mind is V, a two-part TV "movie-of-the-week" that aired in 1983. It was basically an allegory about Nazi Germany, exploring how a population would come by fits and starts to accept a fascist dictatorship that devours the citizenry. The story features "Visitors" with a vaguely swastika-esque sigil who arrive in giant round spaceships, as aliens tend to do. One settles over each major city or landmark in the world:



They smile benevolently at us and appear human. They even offer medical advances such as the cure for cancer. But soon their "safety officers" are everywhere, guarding us against "terrorist elements" who resist their encroaching involvement in human affairs.



But under the facade, they are really monsters who plan to bake us into pies.



Soon they are recruiting our youth for their Loyalty Leagues...



And impregnating our daughters with lizard-baby hybrids...



I don't know whether V aired in Scotland, but it certainly made a big impression on Junior High me. It also featured early performances from the likes of Michael Ironside, Marc Singer, and Robert Edlund.

I left a picture from the kerosene sequence out of my write-up; here it is.  Morrison makes Batman the brains of the JLA, as we'll see in future installments.