Justice League International Special #2: Featuring The Huntress (1991)

The Huntress wasn't even supposed to be here today.

Not only was The Huntress not meant to be at work on the day dozens of old fashioned gangsters attacked the Justice League, she wasn't meant to be on the team at all! Flipping Maxwell Lord used his psychic mind control powers to get her to join which I could describe as rape but nobody wants to hear me discuss rape! First and foremost, I'm too facetious to write about anything that other people hold as profane or sacred, like The Bible or The Koran or rape. Second and almost more foremost than the first, nobody wants to read any serious and intelligent essays on rape, especially from an emotionally immature male dufus. But still! We all know mind control is a rape metaphor so this entire book emits the grossest vibes possible. It could only be worse if it were written by Gerard Jones. No wait! It could also have been drawn by David Finch! He'd have The Huntress getting out of the shower at least three times!

Just to clarify, I don't think women taking showers is gross. I think it's the opposite of that in that it's pure and clean! It's also quite sexy if you happen to live beneath the bootheel of the male gaze (which I do!). And nobody wants to be thinking "sexy" and "rape" at the same time! Therefore, grosser than gross. And if you don't know why it would be super grosser than gross if Gerard Jones were writing this book, just go read his Wikipedia page. I'll wait.

This issue was written by Joey Cavalieri. I've written thousands of these "reviews" and I don't have an extant tag for Joey Cavalieri (meaning I've reviewed no books written by him!). But that doesn't mean I don't know who he is! You should also know who he is because he wrote The Oz-Wonderland War starring Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew! That's one of the first comic book series that I ever owned, second only to Crisis on Infinite Earths (which really catapulted me into the world of comic books). I don't remember if what Joey wrote was really any good but the books of Oz and Wonderland were some of my favorites in elementary school. So I remember the series fondly even if I don't totally remember the series.

This issue begins by lubing up my male gaze with a shot of Helena relaxing in her yard while reading a book and minding her own business.

Now I'm all raring to tube the esopus!

Helena is living in upstate New York with the child genius James and his robot invention. She recently gave him The Wizard of Oz to read but he was all, "Why was that interesting?" And Helena was all, "I never read it." That's probably something writers do called "building character." We now know that Helena is illiterate and the Brainiac child she lives with has no childhood sense of whimsy. Later a young white man is introduced but I don't know if he lives with Helena and James. I think Helena is Catholic so it would probably be a sin to live with a man outside of marriage. He probably just drops by for anal on the weekends.

Turns out the guy is The Huntress's sidekick but I don't know who used to kick the side of The Huntress. He probably thinks of himself as her partner but if I don't know who the fuck he is, he was definitely a sidekick. Plus he's got Dick and Jason vibes all over him.

Helena sees some giant Robocop dude in the papers and decides she needs to go back to New York and alert the Justice League. I guess it was a picture of Robo-Mob. That's the opposite of Robo-Cop, at least on the East Coast.

Oh, sorry. She doesn't want their help; she just needs a babysitter.

The Robo dude is some guy named The Hunter and he's killing cops and high level mob bosses while working for some other mob guy named Angelo "The Brick Wall" Brancati. So it's a mob story. I never liked comic book mob stories. That's probably why I didn't read The Huntress comics much and I tended to be wary of Batman comics. Some writers of Batman didn't seem aware that he has dozens of crazy and off-the-wall villains to battle and would usually just have Batman fighting plain old regular mob bosses. I couldn't stand any story that starred Falcone, even if he were battling Penguin or The Black Mask. Unless it was that New 52 run of Catwoman and then it was okay for a variety of non-mob-boss-related reasons (the number one reason of which was "no longer being written by Ann Nocenti").

I'm not familiar with The Huntress and her various cast of characters so while Huntress fans might have been excited to see a couple of pages of some Jimmy Olsen looking motherfucker telling his wife about cop stuff, I almost put the book down to go do something more interesting. Like maybe go in the other room to grab the shredder and see if it can take a full annual in one go. This cop tells his wife that some vigilante is killing cops and she takes the news pretty calmly. Probably because it wouldn't be much of a loss to lose a Jimmy Olsen looking motherfucking husband.

I always keep a sense of humor when it comes to cops being killed!

That caption was a leftist joke. I just want to point that out in case Elon Musk is reading this because he thinks humor is outlawed on the left. But he's wrong. We actually have all the really funny and insightful jokes! The only reason Elon Musk and his idiot fans think humor on the left is dead is because nobody on the left looks at a skinny kid on a playground and calls him a fag. Those are the only real jokes they have: playground bullying. It's all they find funny! And while I admit that some playground humor is funny, like when you fart on your friend's face and catch him with his mouth open, the really mean stuff that's the foundation for racism and hate crimes isn't particularly humorous to me. If you make a well-crafted joke that calls me fat, I'll probably laugh and then go cry in the bathroom in private for five minutes. But if you just call me fat and turn to your friends and high five them as they laugh their asses off (not because "You're fat!" was a good joke but because you just hurt somebody's feelings (which is the only thing they seem to find funny)), I'll just cry right there in front of everybody for even longer then five minutes because he'll probably punch me in the mouth for quickly replying, "Your mother is fat!"

Violence and mean-spirited humor is all the right thinks is funny. Sometimes I also think those things are funny. But I also find loads of other things funny too! Like that speech in Hamlet where he's all, "I'm so sad! Should I kill myself?! Boo hoo! Nobody's ever felt worse than me right now!"

The Huntress comes into the cop's apartment through the window leaving her shampoo and body lotion smell all over the room so when the cop's wife comes in and asks, "Who are you talking to?", she'll smell Huntress all over this guy and stop trusting him. She just ruined this guy's marriage. Unless I'm supposed to believe The Huntress is completely without smell! I guess that's not the most important part of the scene to the writer. The writer just wants to give The Huntress all the information the cops have on this Hunter guy so she can begin her investigation.

I'll skip her investigation and get right to the part where she catches The Hunter and unmasks him!

Who the fuck is this guy?

Oh! That's the guy from the beginning. I didn't know who he was then either. Then I put the comic book down for several days and didn't recognize that it was the guy I didn't recognize earlier. Man. Who the fuck is he?! Dick Grayson's stand-in?

A bunch of mob guys descend on Huntress and Hunter after Huntress saves the cop Hunter tries to kill. Then the NYPD rush in shooting anything that moves. One of the things that moves which they shoot is The Hunter. Huntress is all, "I'll get you to a hospital and dump you off in the lobby before skedaddling so I don't have to answer any questions that might cause me trouble. I hope you survive!" But Hunter is all, "No time! I'm dead!" Then he dies and The Huntress thinks, "Fuck this investigative shit. I know whose ass needs kicking and I'm just going to go kick it." The ass she's talking about belongs to Angelo "The Brick Wall" Brancati, mob boss.

I get why you made that whole "brick wall" metaphor, Angelo. But that part where people are lining up behind it doesn't really make sense. This is sounding like Nocenti dialogue.

Angelo's metaphor is messed up in a number of ways but that's what happens when somebody fixates on something to this degree. The Brick Wall is his whole identity! So begins by talking about a structure which has a brick wall on top. Doesn't make any sense, buddy. He's the cement that holds the entire structure together (or just the brick wall) but then he's also the brick wall itself. I suppose it's a minor quibble to say "cement" over "mortar" since mortar uses cement but a brick wall isn't just stuck together with cement itself. I'll let that pass. But to stand there acting tough and explaining how he's the cement and the brick wall one sentence after the other? He's a fucking lunatic! Then he finishes off by saying how when there's a brick wall, people either line up behind it or get shot up against it. It's like he worked the entire metaphor out just to get to the point where he can say, "If you're against the brick wall, you're about to be shot!" Which is a fucking good line! That I wrote! He should have just said that! But no! He has to say you're either against the wall getting shot or lining up behind it. But who lines up behind a brick wall?! A bunch of guys who need to pee?

Meanwhile, the Justice League (because this is a Justice League comic book, remember) has been spying on her and they figure maybe they should help her out of this mess. They probably also want to protect some cops but I don't like that part as much so let's forget about it.

Blue Beetle's bug comes flying in to the rescue just as The Brick Wall drops that line about The Huntress being on her own. It's like this thing were written by a writer who has never learned the word subtlety. The mob guys, also never having learned the word subtlety, beginning firing all of their tommy gun bullets into Beetle's flying bug. Beetle decides a hail of bullets is the best thing to jump into and heads to the ground in the middle of one. Ice clings to his chest because I guess she hasn't learned that thing that Iceman does where he just constantly builds ice ramps to slide all over the place. I know civilians hating the X-men was a metaphor for racism but thinking about how Iceman probably flooded so many buildings just so he could swoop around on ice ramps has me hating the X-men too.

The battle takes place on a bridge already falling apart due to New York's infrastructure completely falling apart (it's been a theme of this issue that I haven't commented on because it was boring and too close to the truth). The battle makes the bridge fall apart even more.

The cover shows Fire and Martian Manhunter taking place in this fight because DC's covers are constantly full of lies.

Is this the scene where The Huntress lets the mob boss fall to his death to show how different she is from Batman? I hope so! Even though Batman could let somebody fall to their death during a fight in which he took part that helped weaken the bridge that collapsed under the person falling to their death and still pretend like he didn't kill that person. Batman likes to pretend his no-kill policy is black and white but his no-kill policy is actually all kinds of gray. It's just nobody wants to argue with Batman about it because he debates like a fucking dick and wins most arguments because people just get so frustrated and annoyed while arguing with him that they give up.

It's also possible that this is just an easy way to end this conflict. The Brick Wall dies through no fault of The Huntress and thus she can't be hounded by the law for killing a guy. And The Huntress doesn't have to worry about this jerk making her life a living hell because he's been killed. But he'll also have fallen into a river so is he dead? Will he come back for a new mini-series? If this issue sold well, I'm sure he did.

The Brick Wall plummets into the river and his body is never found. Nobody tries to save him because he's a gigantic asshole. You know Ice could have done something if the writer had wanted her to. And J'onn wasn't in the fight but he was flying the Bug so he could have done something too. I don't think Beetle could have saved the guy though because Beetle is useless.

The issue ends with The Huntress throwing her costume into the incinerator. Does that mean this was the final story with Helena Bertinelli? At least until The New 52? Did a new woman take over being The Huntress? I have no idea because I never really read many of her comics.

Justice League International Special #2: Featuring The Huntress Rating: C. It's lucky to get a C! The Justice League was hardly in it. The antagonist was hardly in it. The Huntress was hardly in it. How did I even just read 38 pages of comic book when every single character that made up the plot was barely even in it? I think most of the pages were taken up by Helena which I don't count as The Huntress. And the Justice League didn't do a single thing worthy of their name. That one panel I scanned where Beetle and Ice are battling mobsters is the only action they took part in! The Huntress threw maybe two punches and one kick before the bridge collapses under The Brick Wall and kills him. Her partner who caused this entire story to unfold never even gets identified as anything but some guy she was working with! I'm probably wrong but I don't think he even got a name! And why was she living with some genius orphan? Oh, probably because DC has genius orphans coming out of their buttholes. Every main character needs at least one. This comic should have been called The Huntress Special Barely Featuring The Justice League because only The Huntress fans would recognize any of the bit players in the story. I sure didn't know who any of them were! I wonder if I can sue DC thirty years later for the blatant false advertisement that this was a Justice League comic book? I'm so angry now! Why did I fucking re-read this?!

I just realized the first special was exactly like this but using Mister Miracle instead of The Huntress. That one also wasn't a Justice League comic book! It was more of an offshoot of Mister Miracle's monthly book. And now they did the same thing with The Huntress. Wait a fucking second. This wasn't false advertisement at all. It was simply an advertisement! These fuckwits at DC convinced young me to pay $2.95 for a fucking commercial for a different one of their comic books! At least this fucking advert ended with The Huntress throwing her costume away so I didn't think, "I should read more The Huntress comics!" Instead I probably thought, "Good riddance!"