The Justice League is perhaps the most famous superhero team, maybe the Avengers movies widened peoples general awareness of Marvel’s non X-Men characters today but historically I am absolutely sure that more people knew of the Justice League than did the Avengers, and its members are by far more individually famous than the members of the Avengers despite the popularity of MCU movies which are mostly dogshit. DC Comics has had many iterations of the Justice League, both in roster and in name. Justice League International, Justice League Dark, Justice League 3000 to name a few.
What the Justice League does not have, for some reason, is a definitive 7-man roster. Too many iterations of the team swap out the 6 and 7 slots to a small variety of characters. We know Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Green Lantern regularly make the cut- or at least some version of those characters does. The 6 and 7 slot is in my head Aquaman and Martian Manhunter, but we’ve seen Hawkman or Hawgirl or both, Cyborg, and others. I like to respect Aquaman and Martian Manhunter’s seat as I feel they have earned it as much as any of the trinity has. The Justice League is also the seat of the Trinity of DC Comics, Batman Superman and Wonder Woman are the axis around which the team moves and around which the DC universe as a whole tends to rotate or ellipse. The Justice League has historically been 7 members or thereabouts, even teams like Justice League International which involved very few if any of the original members of the Justice League or Justice League of America (really just Batman) had about 10 members, sometimes less. The animated show Justice League had just the original seven with some cameos by other heroes, in Young Justice I think its about a dozen and they take on more and more as the show goes on (See my YJ article: A Group of Teens is DEAD in Rhode Island for my opinion on that) but it was I think Justice League Unlimited that brought it into the modern zeitgeist that the Justice League was a huge organization that might at any point have dozens of members on call and be an organizing force for the entire cast of the DC universe. This idea I think was actually pretty popular in the 90s as well, despite so many heroes that were sort of outside the likely gravity of the Justice League being written into existence and characters getting stories that would put them outside Justice League involvement. Today I would say there are really very few DC characters written so that they would be incompatible with Justice League membership in the style of Justice League Unlimited. Hell, Harley Quinn would probably end up leading the team knowing how things are right now.
Things in DC Comics did not always revolve so directly around the Justice League, or if they did, things existed in a sort of symbiotic parallel to it that was definitive for other characters. One such team was the Birds of Prey. I am a big Birds of Prey fan, I like the concept of the all female team and I like the dynamic the characters have. Shame they had to shoot Batgirl in the spine to make her interesting but it is what it is, I like Oracle. The Birds of Prey of course are gathered by an event proximal to Batman, but they quickly grow their own villains and identity. There was at one point an attempt to create a new DC city for them to operate in ala Gotham, Metropolis, Central, Coast, Hub cities but I don’t think I have heard ‘Platinum Flats’ mentioned since like 2010. In part I blame Marv Wolfman for putting Teen Titans in San Francisco but that’s a diatribe in and of itself. The Birds of Prey are cool because if you have ever met a girlboss type of woman in real life it is exactly the type of thing they would propose if they were any good with a hand crossbow or computers or screaming. It is also thematically appropo to me, Black Canary and Green Arrow have one of the most regularly contentious relationships in comics and Dinah having somewhere to go to decompress and still be a superhero makes sense to me. To me, it did not ever make alot of sense that the Birds of Prey were located in Gotham, which is why is sympathize with the Platinum Flats thing. I don’t know why Batman would encourage their presence in Gotham or why they would want to share that turf or area of responsibility with a notoriously difficult lone wolf who will outwork and out resource them at every turn. Gotham is entirely overcrowded these days. My brave idea? Put them in Hub City. The Hub City of O’Neill’s Question run is a disgusting, evil, corrupt hellscape but it really doesn’t have alot of “supervillains” and the Birds of Prey has been in many cases really a martial arts femme fatale comic which to me sounds like it would fit right in with the faceless detective. Interaction between them and Question would also I think be hilarious, and I think they have canonized JLU’s HuntressxQuestion romance in the comics, but it has doubtless not survived at least one of the 5 reboots that have happened since JLU stopped airing more than a decade ago.
A million billion years ago there was also The Seven Soldiers of Victory, a personal favorite of mine because their enemy at one point made a giant hand to crush the Earth that had to be defeated by building a nuclear bomb. Great stuff. Their lineup was Shining Knight, Vigilante (Cowboy not the guy from Peacemaker), Crimson Avenger, Green Arrow and Speedy, the Star Spangled Kid and Stripesy. The Seven Soldiers are cool because they are the ultimate eclectic gathering of C/D listers that got together to go out and do the right thing. Their original run is very old as I mentioned and colored very much by the World Wars, but resurrections of the team have also hit home for me, and those who have watched JLU will know Vigilante and Shining Knights friendship to be legendary stuff, both characters had arcs in that show of their own I would say were on par with the best stuff it put out.
Longtime readers of DC Comics at this point will know there were several parallel Justice League runs at the start and middle of New 52. It aged me internally to even say that, but New 52 is really at this point old material. I liked the concept of Justice League Dark, I think having a “Magic Team” is fine and interesting and is a good opportunity to compare and contrast some personalities that really don’t get alot of face time in the comics despite having pretty important roles in the way the world works. That is just a natural consequence of having many many characters and writing stories where they all exist together for 100 years. My problem is that they called it Justice League Dark to be frank. While it makes sense to me that most superhero teams would take on the form or factors of the Justice League because they are the example to aspire to, why does nobody not have a better name in mind. Why not like the Magic Pact or something. I liked Justice League Dark so I won’t nitpick too hard, but my grievance stands as being that DC is very invested in making the Justice League a constant force, and still having all these heroes farting around in the world doing stuff and coming in and out of different books, why not organize them. If you are gonna have the JLU League I honestly think that is fine, if you are willing to go as far as having three or four different team books out there all with their own characters and own sort of ‘level’ of action and responsibility I think that is even better. To me, the Justice League is the Gold Standard team, but the Justice League cannot be together all the time.
In the first place, almost none of the members can make the full time commitment to actually doing something like living on the Watchtower and going out to do stuff all the time together. (Justice League International solves this problem by having an all new roster and a totally different gathering impetus) Actually Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter may be the least busy characters on the Justice League. Batman aside from having possibly the most constantly existential threat matrix of villains possible, is the owner operator of one of the world largest ‘everything companies’ in Wayne Industries. Aquaman rules Atlantis which seems eternally under threat from one or two guys, and is a functioning Kingdom. The Flash has a regular cycle of tomfoolery going on in Central City by a very organized group of villains and a full time job, and Green Lantern, any of the Green Lanterns, is in the process of dying, losing their ring, losing or rebuilding the Corps, battling an existential threat to the universe, becoming unemployed in a highly selective and technical field, or being transferred rapidly between Lantern Corps more often than not against their will. So the Justice League is an alliance of convenience, I would say brokered by Wonder Woman. I honestly think that other teams and heroes just have less going on. The Teen Titans are like college dropouts or something, regardless everyone on that team except for Wally West has some sort of monolithic inheritance that allows them infinite free time. They can live in Titans Tower and do whatever in the Bay Area all the time. Solid team. The Birds of Prey are 3-6 mostly single women at their physical peak none of whom have actual jobs I have ever been made aware of that would constrict their circumstance to Gotham, and none of their enemies or groups of enemies single them out or regularly cause any sort of ruckus that draws them away from the team. They should buy a giant penthouse apartment in Hub City, trick it out with a freight elevator and some alcoves and start trying to unfuck that city pronto. The Tower of Fate or the House of Mystery is a ready made superhero base for a magic team, basically a magic version of the Watchtower and no magic character ever has a fucking job, John Constantine is literally more likely to sell his soul to Satan than he is to sign something that would legally employ him.
On a more meta and commercial side: This is how you get books out to readers who want to see these niche characters. Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, Shining Knight and Vigilante, Zatanna and John Constantine. I would not necessarily categorize them all as niche, but none of them get the printed volume that they deserve, and just writing team books would solve that problem, separate characters narratively, streamline interactions between those characters, and provide ample avenues towards incorporating new characters and dropping old ones. I don’t think Batman needs to be on ANY teams. None. But if you fucking have to do it then having him be a “part time” member of the Justice League is absolutely a fine way to do that. If he is not also helping out the Outsiders, Batman Inc. the Birds of Prey and travelling to China to link up with August General in Irons. He doesn’t need to be doing any of that shit at all its complete nonsense. Do female Dove and Male Hawk and force him to interact with the Birds of Prey you cowards that shit would be hilarious. Do male Hawk and male Dove and put them on the Seven Soldiers, or make an entirely new team and put them on it. Instead we get an eternal publishing of Justice League that is obsessed with edging Darkseid. In a narrative that actually had a long term plan, and an END in sight that would be acceptable to me. I will take Darkseid as the end all and be all of bad guys for the Justice League to come up against, but not their first threat, or thirty first threat, or three hundredth threat out of thousands. The New Gods are functionally their own superhero team anyway, with hero teams within that hero team in the Forever People and Orion’s various hangers on. If you wrote the Justice League as the managing element to five smaller superhero teams I would actually not be against that.
We have a situation where all the characters from Earth 1, or 2 or whichever one it is, the characters from Jay Garrick’s Earth from The Flash of Two Worlds (THE most important comic book ever written, btw) and the Justice Society are coexistent and colinear with all the regular Justice League characters and many of them seem to have been brought over to the main earth to just retire. To not get books or even have their legacy characters get books. Why do that. We do a million Elseworlds titles a year, and some of them are even good, put those fuckers back on their Earth and leave them there. Batman and Catwoman deserve their happy ending there, they might not get it on the main earth, Superman and Lois chill out in Metropolis or on New Krypton and Jay Garrick can be an old fudd and not constantly traumatized by Professor Zoom which is like Atomic Bomb vs. Crying Baby tier match making in any of the dozen examples of it happening. You can’t erase the years of crap that readers have endured since Crisis, or Flash of Two Earths, whatever break point you blame, but if you are going to reboot everything anyway- why not do it in a way that makes things easier to keep track of for your audience?
My proposal is simple: The original seven members of the Justice League each get a book/show, and the Justice League gets a book/show. Every other hero of note gets put in a duo or team book/show. There can be 10 or 15 team books/shows I don’t give a fuck. Green Lantern Corps counts as a team book, Hawk and Dove counts as a team book. You put a massive QR code on the back of every book and you put a poll in front of every DC Animated movie on every platform you are showing them on that asks people what characters they liked that month, who was interesting and what teams they were following. You gather data for a year and after a year you announce another huge poll and you distribute it the same way. This poll collects all the previous data from the entire year and what people thought of the year long arcs of everything up until that point. You don’t cancel anything during the year up to this. Those polls guide what books and characters get emphasis in the next year. I am aware that over time this will pyramid into having only a Batman show, which is why I propose this only for the first three years of the narrative. Something to this effect would immediately problem solve down this strange issue comics have with pop-up books for certain characters (Green Arrow) doing poorly for a couple months and then getting cancelled. If a bi-weekly title doesnt perform in the first 8 weeks it only actually published like 100 pages of material. Comics are now written like movies so shit takes absolutely forever to get anywhere narratively but that is even too little time to give a story to mature. If I gave you the first hundred pages of War and Peace and asked you if you wanted more you’d set me on fire and you’d be right to do that. People need to know the other 1,100 pages are there, and that it will get more interesting. This post is slightly exploratory, I will be getting more into what my idealized DC headcanon is, what the major orders of the day are, and what characters get the sort of treatment I am advocating here. That to come after a short expository on Max Landis, who is a terribly underappreciated creative, one of the only good comics book fans, and a personal favorite youtuber of mine.
“Sir Justin, if you want to be watchin’ stuff on my big TV with the 5.1 surround sound, you had best watch what you say about Mr. Clint Eastwood.”
