Yesterday, I took a little road trip to the nearest comic store to my current locale. Unfortunately, that's still about sixty miles, so we won't be repeating that trip anytime soon. In classic fashion, I chose a Saturday when the town was doing homecoming or something, so Main Street - where the shop is located - was cordoned off for the bands, or floats, or whatever. The Pitt Probabilities strike again. At one point I wound up in an adjoining town, then had to struggle to make it back to some place I had a frame of reference for. And yes, I had a map, and yes, I was trying to use it.
Eventually I was able to reach the store, which I had visited once many, many years before (I think it was in the last decade, actually), and do a little back-issue scrounging. Among the comics I picked up were a handle of the Giffen/Dematteis JLA issues, including the first 2 parts of the big fight with Despero. I have a few questions, though:
1) When Despero first reforms on the space probe, he's tiny and deformed. By the time he reaches Earth, he's massive. Where'd all the extra bulk come from? He mentions that he had been scattered, held together only by his will and hatred, waiting until an energy source helped him reform. So did he draw more strength from the space probe and use that to get large? Or was it that he once had partially coalesced, it was significantly easier to draw the remainder of his molecules back together?
2) What was up with Mr. Miracle? He kept repeating things the people around him were saying. I felt really bad for him in #37, when he showed up and kept trying to introduce himself, and everyone kept blowing him off (because Guy was fighting with what became Power Girl's cat, and it had startled Fire, and she set off the sprinklers). He tried to introduce himself to J'onn and just got ignored, and he looked so terribly sad, with the sprinklers raining all over him. It was actually somewhat of an odd tone shift compared to the rest of the scene going on around him. Did they do that a lot, swing from absurd to depressing and back in a couple of pages?
3) At the end of #37, there was an advertisement for some big event that was going to happen in the Justice League books, Breakdowns. But it wasn't even starting for another 16 issues. That seems like awfully excessive advance marketing. "Hey, be here in a year-and-a-half when we totally shake things up!" Well, OK, perhaps that isn't excessive by today's standards, but it wasn't something I expected in an older comic.
4) I also found the issue where Guy takes Ice to the Ice Capists (or vice versa), and Beetle probably pushes things too far. So which is more representative of the Giffen/DeMatteis issues, the big Despero battle, or Ted messing with Guy when he's promised to behave?
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I have no idea about 1) because it's been a long time since I read this story. (Probably should read it again, what with Despero's involvement in Trinity.) However, your theory sounds good to me.
2) During this storyline, Mr. Miracle had been kidnapped by an alien named Manga Khan and replaced with an android duplicate. Readers knew this (and could follow the real thing in the concurrent Mister Miracle comic), but the JLIers didn't. Again, I don't have the comics in front of me, so I can't say whether that's depressing in context.
3) Wow, that is a long build-up! In hindsight I guess the crew knew they were going to leave the books after five years (although #37 would have been about 2 years ahead of that) and wanted to alert the readers.
4) The Ice Capists issue is more representative. The Despero storyline was the creative team's attempt to do something different and more traditionally superheroic.
Truth be told, the JLI issues, though often thought of for their comedy, were usually pretty darn depressing. One of their first arcs, featuring the Grey Man as the villain, was a real downer.
I don't really remember the issues you're talking about, and, since it's late on a Sunday, I'm resisting the urge to start crawling through the basement archives, but I seem to remember it being rare that the JLI would actually fight anyone. Usually, they'd arrive on the scene, argue with the bad guy, argue with each other, and then things would somehow work out (occasionally, Batman or J'onn would punch someone).
I'll dig them out tomorrow to see if I can comment more intelligently on them.
Oh yeah, also, I believe that this was right after Scott Free "died" and that's the reason why Mr. Miracle is introducing himself (that's when Shiloh Norman took over).
Oh, so Tom has a much better handle on this than me. This is what happens when I comment on books I haven't read in a decade (or more).
Oooh, good stuff. The Mr. Miracle in the book is actually a robot. The real Scott Free is off doing a road show for Manga Khan. They are quite surprised when he shows up, safe and sound a few issues later. THIS Scott ended up getting blown up by Despero, so there was a funeral and lots of angst for a brief time.
The date with Guy and Ice is hysterical, but seriously, Beetle takes the whole gag WAY too far.
Poor Guy.
tom bondurant: Ah, robot duplicate. That explains him introducing himself then. I don't know if it's actually depressing, he just looked sad in that one panel, hand extended, saying "Mr. Miracle" in this quiet voice because J'onn couldn't wait long enough for him to finish. I don't know, odd things trigger my sympathetic impulses.
jason: That kind of surprises me, that they were actually often depressing. But that's good to know that they didn't often fight villains. It'll help me adjust my expectations the next time I find some issues.
sallyp: Yeah, i remember the store had the issue where they had a funeral for the robot Mr. Miracle. And he was on a traveling road show in the interim? Interesting.
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