JLA #6-7: Introducing Zauriel (June-July 1997)



Issue #6 “Fire in the Sky”: Inside a vase of flowers in a sick man’s hospital room, two members of the Demons Three (Ghast and Abnegazar) rejoice over the rebirth of their brother Rath, who is still in a larval stage.  Lord Neron helps them create a tiny simulacrum of the moon hanging in the air, and by pulling down on it, they make the actual moon start moving toward the Earth, causing gravitational disruptions.



Zauriel the angel falls from heaven to Earth. He’s become disenchanted with heavenly life and has been granted permission to become mortal. But some of his angelic brethren disagree with his choice and come after him violently, which draws the JLA into combat. The end of the issue shows the arrival of the flagship “chariot” of the super-angel Asmodel, condescending into our dimension.

Issue #7 “Heaven on Earth”: Superman charges the moon into an electromagnet with a north and south pole, which repels the moon from Earth, preventing the catastrophe the demons were trying to bring on. The rest of the JLA fight Asmodel and his angels long enough for Superman to show up; due to his combination of strength and pure heart, he is able to stand against Asmodel, who is forced to return to heaven due to some treadmill vibrational sciency thing that Flash and Green Lantern cook up. Zauriel knocks on the door of some woman with whom he has apparently become enamored, which probably explains why he came to Earth.

In the hospital room, the sick man awakens and staggers down the hall. All around him, chaos erupts. Men writing on the walls. Patients and staff raping each other (and corpses? That guy on the right being on a gurney in the hall is weird in a modern comic book no matter what his status).



In an Epilogue, a mysterious figure knocks everyone in the JLA Watchtower unconscious. Cliffhanger!

My Two Cents: New writers on established teams routinely shake up the membership. So Morrison had Metamorpho and others get critically injured in his first issue to clear the decks. Now he’s bringing in new character Zauriel to fill the void, though at least for now Zauriel turns down the membership in the JLA which Superman immediately extends. (See “JLA’s loose membership process” in my previous post.)

If Grant Morrison were going to resonate with a particular part of the Bible, what do you suppose it would be? If you thought of the part of the Bible in which beings in a higher dimension look at our lives as if we are characters in a book, you win the prize!




Morrison interprets this through the lens of his “Worlds within worlds” theme by positing “Heaven” as a higher dimension than ours and “Hell” as a lower one, as represented by the way you have to shrink down inside a vase of flowers to see people living on a smaller scale than ourselves, while Asmodel's chariot fills our sky. And things that happen in one dimension can redound into another, as illustrated by the “pulling the moon” trick performed in Hell. The angels in JLA speak as if our universe is a book (“the plane of the book”) into which they have inserted themselves, and from which they can withdraw. 



Nor is this a new Morrison theme. We were just looking at him linking the idea of heaven to Richard Bohm's "Implicate Order" yesterday in one of John Highwater's expositional speeches in Animal Man.



I knew of the Demons Three from early 80s JLA books. I guess one died but is back now? Sounds like something that would happen in comic books. Even in issue #5 when Metamorpho was buried, Superman was already half-convinced he would return soon. Anyway, the Demons Three date from JLA #10 in 1962, which has one of the creepy/coolest covers ever courtesy of Murphy Anderson.



The Flash has been using cosmic treadmills to cross time and dimensions ever since the early days (specifically, [The Flash #125 (1961) by Broome and Infantino. 



Zauriel’s would-be girlfriend has a pet cat. Who can this mystery woman be? (If you know, don't tell me. I haven't read ahead.) People in Morrison stories often have pets, usually a cat, like Morrison himself. Set dressing in her apartment includes a Rubik's cube and... a Pillsbury Doughboy doll? OK... Also, she appears to be eating a dozen donuts all by her lonesome, as well as a family sized bag of potato chips. That's no way to maintain her girlish figure! She'd better hit the cosmic treadmill. Anyway, Lord Neron apparently plans to use her in some scheme to tempt Zauriel to violate his angelic code.



One of Morrison’s favorite ideas is that Superman epitomizes heroism and inspires everyone around him to rise to the occasion. The idea of “Superman as myth” is discussed explicitly by the characters in this arc (mainly the perpetually awestruck Wally West and Kyle Rayner), and Asmodel is amazed not only at Superman’s strength but at his moral rectitude. The trade paperback collecting issues #1-9 of this run goes so far as to say, “Almighty gods walk among us” on the back cover, referring to the JLA. Note the Atlas image of the panel below, as Flash decorates the JLA Watchtower with trophies of (I assume) Silver Age stories.






This newspaper depicts a hapless “Bumble Bee Boy” who could be a super-teen but also perhaps intends to recall the dancing bee girl from Blind Melon’s “No Rain” music video and album cover.

I remember hearing that Morrison created Zauriel because he couldn't use Hawkman, but I suspect this is a comic book urban legend as the two characters have nothing in common other than being winged (unless Asmodel was going to be something alien originally...)

I have read these stories before but I don't remember who the woman is.

Thanks! Evidently Zauriel the hero was originally going to be named Asmodel, but that name ended up going to the antagonist.

You are correct ... I do recall that.

I'm guessing that heroes doing their own monitor duty might be due to the fact that they knew they could trust each other. When you involve unknown citizens , you have a potential for betrayal or even the targeting of those people by their foes.

JLA #8-9 The Key (August-September 1997)

Issue #8 “Imaginary Stories”: A villain named The Key has put each of the JLA members into a fugue state in which he dreams about his heart’s desire. Superman is back on Krypton, invited to become a Green Lantern. (Morrison will return to this in the future… the far future that is.) Batman is married to Selina Kyle and retired, his son taking his mantle. Aquaman becomes the star of Waterworld, swimming through the streets of drowned Manhattan. (Actually, this “heart’s desire” kinda worries me! And interesting that Superman's heart's desire involves working, while Batman's involves retiring.)



Wonder Woman dreams about the mod Emma Peel powerless version of herself kung-fu-ing her way through Nazi zombies to confront a German scientist who has a bottled planet.



Green Arrow II, recently accepted into the JLA, beams up to the Watchtower to find The Key leering over the dreaming JLA. They fight inconclusively; GA is injured and retreats. He finds a cache of his dad’s old trick arrows and prepares for another sortie against The Key, who somehow plans to use the dreamers to “hand me the keys to all of creation.”



Issue #9 “Elseworlds”: Kal-El the Green Lantern enters a bottled world and there saves the Batman family from Joker’s nuclear bomb. Wonder Woman similarly gets sucked into her own “world in the bottle” and lands in Aquaman’s dream. All four enter a portal and encounter Green Lantern, who is dreaming he’s a cyborg dictator. That’s disturbing! They realize that this is all ridiculous; they must be dreaming, so they will themselves to wake up, which is actually what The Key wants. He was counting on them to be that smart. Their awakening powers the machine that will make The Key a god. But a boxing-glove arrow from Green Arrow kayos him, and all’s well that ends well.



My Two Cents: You don’t need me to tell you that this lighthearted two-parter homages all of the “What if…” stories of the DC universe, which were called “Imaginary stories” in the Silver Age and “Elseworlds” stories in more recent decades, hence the titles of these two individual issues. But I said it anyway, just for the record. Along the way, Morrison gets a lot of mileage from laughing at Green Arrow’s absurd weaponry while embracing the goofiness of it all the same.

The bottled planet is another riff on the Morrison theme of “Worlds within worlds.” It is a version of the fishbowl motif which has appeared in numerous Morrison stories. The message is always the same: Higher powers, outside our dimension, are watching us and shaping our lives. More fishbowls await us in future Morrison JLA stories.



Morrison is very careful to say that Steve Trevor is carrying “The clockwise Buddhist swastika, a symbol of life” rather than just show him wielding a swastika. Indeed, the swastika is an ancient symbol of the sun, and thus of life and good fortune, but thanks to the Nazis it will be a long time before that’s what people think of when they see one. I am surprised DC allowed Morrison to use it, even with the explicit disclaimer. He appears to have gotten away with it.



The Key gets his powers from the extra senses which give him expanded awareness. And how does he get his higher awareness, according to Morrison? If you said “drugs” you must be a long-time Morrison reader; well done. "My psycho-chemicals have begun to open all the locked doors in my head... it's giving me such wonderful ideas" could be a quotation from Morrison's manifesto Supergods, explaining his own creative impulse. (To be fair, the drugs were always part of The Key's character, which may explain why Morrison chose to use him.)  Morrison also works in the discredited notion that humans don’t use 90% of their brainpower. This limitation (specifically, overcoming it) was also part of Deathstroke the Terminator’s power set in the 1980s. There was a similar offhanded mention of this idea in the Starro “Space Seed” story.



In his dream, Flash imagines that he was granted his powers by “Fastbak.” This is a nod at Fastback, the terrapin speedster from Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, Roy Thomas’ 80s funny-animal superhero comic book. (Edited to add: I have it backwards. Fastback himself is a parody of Jack Kirby's New Gods speedster Fastbak.)



This run of comics bucked trends by having covers that were actually about the interior story rather than just random pin-ups. Issue #9’s cover caption is “Keys to the Kingdom” which fits with the Key villain within. It’s also a quotation from the Bible, with Jesus granting his disciple Simon Peter authority:


The Key is one of the JLA’s oldest foes, having debuted in issue #41 back in 1965. In this story, he makes a disparaging comment about Dr. Destiny, another dream-based villain who was the focus of the three-part Justice League: A Midsummer’s Nightmare miniseries which immediately preceded Morrison’s run and set the stage for the reunion of the classic JLA line-up. Yet another dream-based story arc awaits us several issues from now.

If there's one thing that takes away from this run , it's that they had revolving artists instead of the same guy every month. Maybe that's all gone with the likes of Dick Dillan and Jim Balent.