If I were an assassin, I would try not to stand on the foot of my target just before killing them.
Last issue, all of the competent members of the Justice League went into space to find Mister Miracle who had been kidnapped by a cosmic televised shopping network. That means Booster Gold and Blue Beetle would have to be the main characters for this issue. I think Executive Editor Dick Giordano sent a memo down saying, "NOBODY IS GOING TO BUY THAT ISSUE SO MAKE IT ABOUT BRUCE WAYNE, YOU TWO STUPID IDIOTS!" Then Keith was all, "Why does he think DeMatteis and Maguire are idiots?" And J.M. thought, "Why does he think Maguire and Giffen are idiots?" And Maguire probably thought, "Why does he think me, Giffen, and DeMatteis are idiots?!"
The leader of Bialya (the made-up DC country in the Middle East where all the terrorists live. I think that's one tiny level less racist than just making all of the terrorists from actual Middle Eastern countries! Is that progress?), Rumaan Harjavti, has decided to throw a huge international ball where he will announce his new super deadly terrorist weapon (I bet it's a female super villain with large assets in both departments!). All of the most important, good-looking, interesting rich people will be in attendance. That means Bruce Wayne got an invite and Oliver Queen did not. Maxwell Lord's plan is to send to the gala Bruce Wayne and a few other Justice Leaguers undercover. For some reason, he believes it's a good idea to trust Booster and Beetle in a formal gathering where they can't act like vaudevillians. I mean they can because I'm certain they will. But he's trusting that they won't! I guess he's only sixteen issues into his relationship with them and he recently suffered severe blood loss and was probably dead for a few minutes which could have given him slight brain damage. So I can't really blame him for not realizing how badly Booster and Beetle are going to fuck this up.
Or maybe Lord is smarter than I realize! The cover doesn't show Booster and Beetle hanging out with Bruce Wayne. They've probably been assigned to hand out petit fours and hors d'oeuvres (I'm too embarrassed to leave in how I initially tried to spell hors d'oeuvres).
The leader of Bialya (the made-up DC country in the Middle East where all the terrorists live. I think that's one tiny level less racist than just making all of the terrorists from actual Middle Eastern countries! Is that progress?), Rumaan Harjavti, has decided to throw a huge international ball where he will announce his new super deadly terrorist weapon (I bet it's a female super villain with large assets in both departments!). All of the most important, good-looking, interesting rich people will be in attendance. That means Bruce Wayne got an invite and Oliver Queen did not. Maxwell Lord's plan is to send to the gala Bruce Wayne and a few other Justice Leaguers undercover. For some reason, he believes it's a good idea to trust Booster and Beetle in a formal gathering where they can't act like vaudevillians. I mean they can because I'm certain they will. But he's trusting that they won't! I guess he's only sixteen issues into his relationship with them and he recently suffered severe blood loss and was probably dead for a few minutes which could have given him slight brain damage. So I can't really blame him for not realizing how badly Booster and Beetle are going to fuck this up.
Or maybe Lord is smarter than I realize! The cover doesn't show Booster and Beetle hanging out with Bruce Wayne. They've probably been assigned to hand out petit fours and hors d'oeuvres (I'm too embarrassed to leave in how I initially tried to spell hors d'oeuvres).
I wouldn't feel as perturbed about this panel if I knew there were a mirror image panel in a Middle Eastern comic from the time where some American was being introduced as "Chad Chadwick McChadchad."
Batman is pretending he's disguised as Bruce Wayne because I guess this was before DC stopped really caring about Batman's secret identity. I mean, I think they still give a shallow hand wave to it so that the reader assumes mostly everybody doesn't know Batman's secret identity. But way too many disgruntled heroes and super villains actually know it, it seems. No matter how many times he can get Doctor Fate to erase the memory of somebody who has discovered Batman's secret identity. I like to believe that there's a missing panel of the person winking which would usually follow a panel where somebody wonders who Batman really is.
This scene is so awful that I'm assuming Giffen and DeMatteis are still embarrassed about it, thirty-three years later.
I don't think unsubtle references to It's a Wonderful Life and a nonsense name that, I guess, is supposed to sound like Boy George are actually jokes. Even though it's not casual racism like naming that guy Abdul Abdulla Abdul, weirdly, it's less forgivable.
The page after the worst page they've ever written, Giffen and DeMatteis just admit to phoning the whole script in this month.
Big Barda, Rocket Red, Martian Manhunter, and G'nort lose the trail of Mister Miracle because Lord Manga and his cosmic boot sale enter hyperspace. And since this is the era of DC Comics where they were downgrading the power levels of everybody, I guess the Green Lantern ring can't do nearly instant interstellar travel. Or maybe G'nort is just an idiot. It's hard to tell if this inability to travel vast distances has been caused by an editorial mandate or one of Giffen and DeMatteis's dumb jokes.
Barely speaking of Martian Manhunter, have I questioned his name enough? Moving to Earth and choosing the name Martian Manhunter is like me moving to Paris and choosing the name American Who Loves to Murder French People. Maybe it's not quite that aggressive but have you heard of the concept of hyperbole? You should look it up. It'll help a lot when understanding this blog.
Barely speaking of Martian Manhunter, have I questioned his name enough? Moving to Earth and choosing the name Martian Manhunter is like me moving to Paris and choosing the name American Who Loves to Murder French People. Maybe it's not quite that aggressive but have you heard of the concept of hyperbole? You should look it up. It'll help a lot when understanding this blog.
Fire wouldn't be this into Batman if she knew his policy on oral sex.
The woman on the cover stepping on Bruce Wayne's toe is Queen Bee. She's the leader of H.I.V.E. She's working with Bialya to do terrorist things which makes sense because her organization is called the Hierarchy of International Vengeance and Extermination. Obviously that's a terrible name. But it's okay because everybody expects people to come up with a cool acronym and then decide what the acronym stands for. I suppose, according to the name, H.I.V.E. keeps a list of currently needed vengeances and exterminations (which would probably just be called "targets for assassination" if they didn't need the whole Bee Theme) which they rank in order from most important to least important. You would then think that everybody who is a member of H.I.V.E. is supposed to work from the top down. So if "murdering the Teen Titans" was at the top of the list, every assassin in the DC Universe should be targeting the Titans that week. But I don't think it totally works that way. I'm not sure the organization works any way at all close to how I'm interpreting the name. Maybe they describe it better in the Who's Who
Apparently H.I.V.E. did not start out bee-themed (although I think they are by 1988, right?). They were just a "hive" because the organization brought together seven scientists thwarted by super heroes to work together to destroy those super heroes. They could easily have been called C.O.L.O.N.Y. or T.E.A.M. or T.O.T.A.L.L.O.S.E.R.S. And I guess their list of vengeances and exterminations were just the seven different heroes or heroic organizations that thwarted them, the Teen Titans eventually becoming their big target.
Booster and Beetle are kidnapped after, it seems, the whole undercover operation has been sussed by Rumaan (or Queen Bee, more likely). I guess Bruce Wayne didn't get an invite to the big secret weapon reveal party like I'd thought. I suppose if you're revealing a secret weapon to bring Western Civilization to its knees, you don't invite the guy who makes all of Western Civilization's weapons which are constantly killing your people. What was I even thinking?! Sometimes it's like I don't understand global imperialist attitudes at all! It sure is a lot harder to read comic books that purport to be about justice when you finally understand how the term "justice" is often used to justify insatiable greed. But then that's why DC invented Bialya in the first place! They're just pure evil! Every citizen in the country is unequivocally evil so you don't have to worry about collateral damage (which is just Newspeak for killing innocent civilians when you meant to murder different civilians that probably weren't quite as innocent (but still civilians)).
So instead of heading to the gala as Bruce Wayne, Batman disguises himself as Maxwell Lord. I don't know if that's a better choice! Why would the guy running the new Justice League be a good disguise to infiltrate a terrorist ball where they're going to be announcing their new terrorisms?! Hopefully Lois Lane and Clark Kent are here but in actual good disguises.
Helping out with the procurement of Bialya's new secret weapon are Jack O'Lantern and Owl Lady and maybe some other members of the Global Guardians. See what happens when you put other super hero teams out of work?! They become the bad guys to make ends meet! I think this is everybody's argument for not firing police because if they lose their jobs, they'll become criminals. Which isn't the best argument for the police, I'm afraid. I guess we all just know they're criminals and at least being a police officer keeps them out of non-racist murder trouble. It's just that some of us are actually concerned about all the racist murders they love to commit.
It's possible the Global Guardians are performing the old loopity loop play which normal people call being a double agent.
I read this comic book thirty years ago or so which is why I can't remember what the Bialyan secret weapon is. I want to say it's The Extremists but I don't think that story happens until Justice League Europe begins. Anyway, the secret weapon is . . .
Apparently H.I.V.E. did not start out bee-themed (although I think they are by 1988, right?). They were just a "hive" because the organization brought together seven scientists thwarted by super heroes to work together to destroy those super heroes. They could easily have been called C.O.L.O.N.Y. or T.E.A.M. or T.O.T.A.L.L.O.S.E.R.S. And I guess their list of vengeances and exterminations were just the seven different heroes or heroic organizations that thwarted them, the Teen Titans eventually becoming their big target.
Booster and Beetle are kidnapped after, it seems, the whole undercover operation has been sussed by Rumaan (or Queen Bee, more likely). I guess Bruce Wayne didn't get an invite to the big secret weapon reveal party like I'd thought. I suppose if you're revealing a secret weapon to bring Western Civilization to its knees, you don't invite the guy who makes all of Western Civilization's weapons which are constantly killing your people. What was I even thinking?! Sometimes it's like I don't understand global imperialist attitudes at all! It sure is a lot harder to read comic books that purport to be about justice when you finally understand how the term "justice" is often used to justify insatiable greed. But then that's why DC invented Bialya in the first place! They're just pure evil! Every citizen in the country is unequivocally evil so you don't have to worry about collateral damage (which is just Newspeak for killing innocent civilians when you meant to murder different civilians that probably weren't quite as innocent (but still civilians)).
So instead of heading to the gala as Bruce Wayne, Batman disguises himself as Maxwell Lord. I don't know if that's a better choice! Why would the guy running the new Justice League be a good disguise to infiltrate a terrorist ball where they're going to be announcing their new terrorisms?! Hopefully Lois Lane and Clark Kent are here but in actual good disguises.
Helping out with the procurement of Bialya's new secret weapon are Jack O'Lantern and Owl Lady and maybe some other members of the Global Guardians. See what happens when you put other super hero teams out of work?! They become the bad guys to make ends meet! I think this is everybody's argument for not firing police because if they lose their jobs, they'll become criminals. Which isn't the best argument for the police, I'm afraid. I guess we all just know they're criminals and at least being a police officer keeps them out of non-racist murder trouble. It's just that some of us are actually concerned about all the racist murders they love to commit.
It's possible the Global Guardians are performing the old loopity loop play which normal people call being a double agent.
I read this comic book thirty years ago or so which is why I can't remember what the Bialyan secret weapon is. I want to say it's The Extremists but I don't think that story happens until Justice League Europe begins. Anyway, the secret weapon is . . .
Oh yeah! The good guys from The Extremist world had already arrived. That's probably why my brain wanted this to be The Extremists.
Wandjina was the teammate of Blue Jay and the Scarlet Witch whom everybody thought had sacrificed himself earlier to stop a nuclear disaster. But he actually survived! I think.
Wandjina's first act as Rumaan's secret weapon is to kill Rumaan. He was less Rumaan's secret weapon and more Queen Bee's secret weapon. If that's even Queen Bee. Nobody has called her by name this entire issue! She might be Lady Shiva for all I know! It could go either way because she's been referred to as queen and lady!
No letters this issue! Just an add for The New Guardians which looks terrible because one of them is Harbinger. Although one of them is also The Floronic Man so maybe that balanced it out? There's also an add for Animal Man which I probably thought looked terrible at the time because the name Grant Morrison meant nothing to me in 1988. That would be rectified when I began reading Doom Patrol. Justice League International #16 Rating: C-. I was about to rate this a "B" and then I remembered all of the terrible jokes and also how Batman went from pretending to be Bruce Wayne to Maxwell Lord to seem less suspicious. I think my fictional memo from Dick Giordano was more correct than I realized because this issue would have been better with a little more Bruce Wayne and a little less Booster and Beetle, even though they were only in the comic for about four pages. It was way too many!
Wandjina's first act as Rumaan's secret weapon is to kill Rumaan. He was less Rumaan's secret weapon and more Queen Bee's secret weapon. If that's even Queen Bee. Nobody has called her by name this entire issue! She might be Lady Shiva for all I know! It could go either way because she's been referred to as queen and lady!
No letters this issue! Just an add for The New Guardians which looks terrible because one of them is Harbinger. Although one of them is also The Floronic Man so maybe that balanced it out? There's also an add for Animal Man which I probably thought looked terrible at the time because the name Grant Morrison meant nothing to me in 1988. That would be rectified when I began reading Doom Patrol. Justice League International #16 Rating: C-. I was about to rate this a "B" and then I remembered all of the terrible jokes and also how Batman went from pretending to be Bruce Wayne to Maxwell Lord to seem less suspicious. I think my fictional memo from Dick Giordano was more correct than I realized because this issue would have been better with a little more Bruce Wayne and a little less Booster and Beetle, even though they were only in the comic for about four pages. It was way too many!
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