JLA: Earth 2 (Jan 2000)
Creative Team: Grant Morrison wrote it. Frank Quitely provided art.
The Story: In the antimatter universe where Earth lies under the sway of the Crime Syndicate of America, Alexander Luthor escapes their prison and teleports to our Earth. He convinces half of the JLA to return to his universe and help him free it from tyranny. Subduing the Crime Syndicate proves relatively easy. Transforming the world to function under altruism and fairness is much harder. Things get worse when the Crime Syndicate are turned loose on the JLA’s universe, causing chaos and battling the other half of the JLA. Also, the whole universe-hopping adventure is secretly a plot by Braniac. He hopes to collide the two universes in a matter-antimatter collision, releasing enough energy to allow him to ascend back to the dimension whence he came. Unwilling to kill Braniac themselves to stave off disaster, the JLA return to their own universe, causing the Crime Syndicate to do the same, and Ultraman kills Braniac, preserving both worlds.
My Two Cents: This 96 page graphic novel broaches more concepts than it elaborates and walks a line between its imaginative Silver Age origins and a more modern take on the same ideas. Like many of the villains of Morrison’s run, the Crime Syndicate first reared their head in the Fox/Sekowsky era – in this case,
JLA #29 (1964), “Crisis on Earth-Three,” a JLA/JSA team-up which upped the ante by adding a third team from an evil dimension, with criminal analogues of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Flash, and Green Lantern. So naturally Morrison takes those five heroes to the evil dimension in his own story.
Note that this 1964 story precedes the famous 1967
Star Trek episode “Mirror Mirror” in which the central characters exchange places with versions of themselves from an evil universe. Did Star Trek writers read comic books? Or is there an older proto-story of this type?
This is not the first time (or even the first post-Crisis time) Morrison has used the Crime Syndicate; Ultraman and Power Ring figured in the existentially oriented, fourth-wall breaking finale of Morrison’s time on
Animal Man as well.
This is, as far as I can tell, the first appearance of the future Morrison motif of the Underworld/Dark Side. If our universe can be conceived as a flat plane or a piece of paper (and for Morrison it can and often is), it has two sides which mirror each other. The “Dark Side” will be a major concept in Morrison’s upcoming (for my reviews) series
Mr. Miracle and
Final Crisis, and it’s similar to Earth-2 here: a world where evil wins. See this similar discussion in Morrison’s recent
Klaus and the Crisis in Xmasville (2017) in which the hero must face his evil twin from the Dark Side:
So let’s look at that. The story’s central conceit is a universe of opposite morality. Putting aside whether such a world would be anything but a pile of ruins, what would people of such a universe call their own behavior? Good, or evil? Comic books often operate from a childish moral perspective in which evil people relish being evil and give their teams names like “The Brotherhood of Evil,” as in this scene from
New Teen Titans:
It’s a black hat/white hat convention we accept just for the sake of the conflict in the story. But as an adult, I prefer stories which articulate a clash of worldviews in which both sides see themselves as championing morality, even though they disagree about the moral thing to do. So it’s satisfying in this story when the good version of Luthor reflexively (but presumptuously) dubs his own universe “Earth 1” and the universe of the JLA “Earth 2.” That makes perfect sense from his perspective.
Less satisfying is the idea that the Crime Syndicate considers their universe to be made of “anti-matter” before they even know that our “matter” universe exists. Surely they would consider their universe to be the matter universe, and ours to be anti-matter. It’s just a matter of convention either way, isn’t it? Similarly, would they consider themselves to be practicing “Crime” or just the natural Nietzschean order of things, might making right? (I know, Morrison is stuck with the title "Crime Syndicate of America" because Silver Age. But how delighted I was in the first X-Men film when Magneto simply called his team "The Brotherhood of Mutants!")
That aside, it’s great that the JLA find that cutting off the head of the serpent (i.e. imprisoning the Crime Syndicate) doesn’t fix a crooked world. A society accustomed to “every man for himself” can take generations, centuries even (or millennia?), to develop enough
social capital for freedom and altruism to flourish. Remove one crime boss, and all you’ve done is give everyone a promotion to everyone underneath him.
There are other differences as well; in the anti-matter universe, Gotham City Police Commissioner Thomas Wayne (Bruce’s widower father) wages a fruitless battle against the corruption of Boss Jim Gordon’s city hall. The tender meeting between Bruce and Thomas is marred when a thousand bats fly out of a nearby tunnel, bombarding the crowd with guano. (The white droplets starting to fill the sky are not snow!) Message: Bats make a big mess.
We don’t get a chance to see the reverse dynamic play out on the JLA’s Earth, with goodness refusing to be crushed even under the thumb of the Crime Syndicate. But we do get to see Ultraman committing what may be a capital offense for Grant Morrison: He nukes a kitten with his heat vision while trying to give Owlman a hot-foot from a distance.
OK, so Alexander Luthor comes to the JLA’s world in a rocket ship homaging the original arrival of Kal El. That’s cute. But it does make me wonder: What happened to the evil Luthor? The story hinges on the premise that when one team is transported across universes, the other team will make the reverse journey 24 hours later. Then there’s some dialogue that calls this rule into question; I didn’t entirely understand it. But whichever dimension evil Lex is in, he doesn’t enter the story.
“Drugs make you better” motif: Both Ultraman and Johnny Quick derive their powers from periodic exposure to super-substances. Johnny Quick is specifically shown injecting a drug, and without it he goes into withdrawal, functioning at sub-human speed rather than super-human.
Evil Lex’s secretary is “Miss Teschmacher.” This refers to his moll from the first Christopher Reeve film, played by Valerie Perrine.
Worlds within worlds motif: Braniac says he’s from a higher dimension but was imprisoned during a visit to the antimatter universe. He also refers to the heroes as having a “third level intelligence” which presumably means that they experience space in three dimensions, whereas he can perceive N-dimensional reality. This is one of Morrison’s favorite tropes.
Braniac’s plan to collide Earth-1 and Earth-2 to release energy for his own needs appears to come from the villains in Denny O’Neil’s “Peril of the Paired Planets” story in
Justice League of America #82 (1970):
Morrison's JLA/CSA graphic novel is the Bizarro opposite of the “World War III” running concurrently in the monthly JLA. That was all danger and action with few ideas. This one has big ideas marred by a lack of real menace; the JLA defeat the CSA too easily. Wonder Woman kayos Superwoman with one blow. Aquaman takes out Power Ring. Martian Manhunter slaps Ultraman silly. Green Lantern imprisons all the villains in their moon fortress (Morrison loves his moon fortresses!) easily. Owlman never shows the cunning of Batman. Superman could easily kill Braniac; he just doesn’t feel like it, leaving the dirty deed to Ultraman. Still, I’m a fan of Quitely’s stylized, elongated art, so at least it’s fun to look at. YMMV.
