Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Justice League Quarterly #6 (Spring 1992)


Judging by Fire's expression, that nutcracker grabbed her by the clitoris.

That nutcracker is obviously nutting (or taking a shit (although taking a shit probably helps with nutting, depending on the size of it and how swole your prostate is and how much pressure's being put on it)). That might be why Wally and Ralph have such shocked and disgusted looks on their faces. Judging by Elongated Man's body, he might be getting nutted in right now. More information based on my extensive research of this cover (mostly just casually looking at it and believing everything it makes me think. You know, American research): Nutcracker semen flows orange, red, and black. That's a massive load that nutcracker cracked.

The main story begins by reminding readers that Sue Dibny is way out of Ralph's league.


I bet when Sue's alone, she dips her dildo in Gingold.

I don't know what Ralph's stretchy dick game is like but if I were Sue, I'd have made him sign a pre-nup that said if he ever did the nose twitch or the neck stretch while fucking me, I'd get everything in the divorce. So fucking gross.

Do you think Ralph can stretch his butthole? Like prolapsing his rectum but using it to catch a robber by his face? That's not too far-fetched, is it? Wasn't there a member of Sixpack's Section Eight who was just a walking asshole or something?

Sue suffers from therapeutic levels of low self-esteem and I know this because she's married to Ralph Dibny when she could be married to somebody hot and sexy and super cool like Bruce Wayne. But also because she says shit like this all the time:


You stay together because of your low self-esteem! Get out of there, hot stuff! His personality stinks and there's no way you married him for his looks!

You know? Every time I rant about Sue being way out of Ralph's league, my brain constantly screams underneath every other thought, "He has stretchy dick powers, dumbass!" I try to ignore it because I can't imagine the dick is good enough to have to look at Ralph stretch out his neck every fucking chance he gets because he's too lazy to walk his ass three feet to look out a window. But the proof is in their long-term marriage, I suppose. Ralph has a doctorate in rocking Sue's world.

Also lets revisit what Sue said in the above panel now that I'm off my oft-repeated rant on their marriage: it makes no fucking sense! You're only together so he doesn't lose you?! So if he wasn't afraid of losing you, you'd break up? Wait, wait. I think it's almost making sense in my head! No! I won't let it. It's dumb! I'm moving on! I have to get off the first page. There's still 79 more to go!

Sue discovers a board game left in the foyer of their hotel room so she decides to check it out by warping inside of it. It was either a trap or Sue has a new power (her old power was maintaining her love for Ralph even after seeing the neck thing more than once. I swear to fucking H.P.'s elder gods, I would have left him the moment his neck grew two centimeters longer than it regularly was). Ralph, after declaring he could never lose Sue, has lost Sue. Ralph suspects she's been kidnapped and, according to the cover, maybe she has been? By a nutcracker? But Ralph and Sue are also currently on vacation in Seaside City (DC's Atlantic City, I suppose, because they were there to gamble), so it's possible Sue just thought up a fun detective game for her husband to distract him all weekend and keep him from trying to put his Stretch Armstrong inside her Slip 'n' Slide.

The board game Ralph finds is called Land Baron. So it's DC's version of Monopoly so I'm guessing it's based on Seaside City. Ralph opens up the box and finds the pieces are in the shape of super hero logos! So the game is tied in to Sue's disappearance!


The big white square must represent Rocket Red because he's super boring and unhip.

The cube actually represents Ice which is super rude being that last issue was all about raising her self-esteem. And now her piece is a boring white square?! Luckily, Fire rounded up all the heroes who had game pieces representing them in the box without Ralph telling her about them: a lightning bolt for Flash, a Green Lantern ring for Guy, a lighter for Fire, and a big red Superman dildo for Rocket Red. Oh! I get it! Ice just grabbed Rocket Red's boring square because she didn't want people realizing the dildo represented her! She was all, "Oh, um, I must be this ice cube! So weird that Dmitri is the red dildo! Must be to represent how Communism fucks you!" Fire wink because she's seen Ice's massive Superman rocket wang. And probably Superman's real massive rocket wang! She loves to fuck people!

You would think there would be clues about how to find Sue on the game board itself but Ralph just shoves everything into the box and decides they should go check out the place where the game is manufactured. Is that how detective work usually goes? "Hey, the murder weapon was left at the crime scene! We should investigate the company that made the gun. Maybe they'll know something!" Ralph is shit at detectivanting.


Guy has a long history of head injuries.

Holy shit! Was Mark Waid setting up some new Guy Gardner lore that never took hold because it was dropped in the fucking Quarterly?! If Guy had a head injury as a kid that changed his personality, as we've seen he's prone to, then he started off as a fucking terrible bastard! Then the fall from the roof when the parachute didn't open turned him into potential Green Lantern material! Until the head injury from the, um, faulty Green Lantern, I think it was, that turned him into the pissed off woman-hater that I love so much! Then between Batman punching him in the noggin' and banging his head on the JLA security console, he returned reverted to super nice guy Guy. And then he got hit on the head again somehow — Lobo maybe? — and he returned to his natural state! Of course, there's a lot of Guy history we don't know about so it's hard to tell how many times he's had severe brain injuries and how many times his personality has flipped and flopped. But we can only judge on what we've been told in the stories and, as far as I'm concerned, good old heroic Guy Gardner who became Green Lantern back-up was brain trauma personality from his fall as a kid! Guy really is an asshole!

Aside from all that, Fire's cold response to Guy warms the heartles of my cock. No wait. Strike that. Reverse it. Chills the heartles of my cock!


Sue's kidnappers probably put so much work into sticking clues all over the board game and the cards and Ralph just goes, "Fuck the game. Let's go on a wild goose chase!"

Only it wasn't a wild goose chase, was it? Of course not! Mark Waid only has 36 pages to tell this story and he's not going to waste them on having the heroes go check out boring dead end lead after boring dead end lead. And the only thing more boring than actually playing Monopoly is reading about other people playing Monopoly! So he couldn't go the having the clues to the mystery be in the game route either. So instead, Ralph makes the right call and immediately everybody is attacked by two massive nutcrackers.

If Metamorpho were here, he'd definitely be cracking nut jokes!

Guy Gardner blows the shit up out of one, as, um, Dmitri would say and not as a terrible writer would write, I mean, and Ralph gets annoyed with him because Ralph wanted it captured intact. Why?! He already knows where it was manufactured and since that's his one big detective move, it doesn't matter what happens to it. But Dmitri, being a man who loves to lick the insides of his leader's colon (the tastiest parts are like, four, five inches in), takes down the other one a little more tactfully. Ralph is all, "Yes! We did it! We're safe and now we just have to find out where this giant nutcracker was made!" But guess what? They aren't safe at all!


Fire's on fire this issue!

Turns out the nutcracker's head was full of automated army men who spill out like baby spiders from an egg sac you thought was a pimple only to realize, after popping it and seeing the tiny army of aliens beasts flood out of the seeping wound, that you'd rather be dead if shit like this can happen to the human body. Or maybe it wasn't quite like that because I looked at the images on the page and the need to tear my eyes out of my head maintained a steady level of the usual 7%.


Wally gets shot in the ass though! What's wrong? Can't outrun tiny bullets?

This consequences of this battle are so low stake that the Justice League manage to work like a team and destroy several dozen tiny army men in only two pages. Nobody gets hurt (except maybe Fire's dignity after Guy suggests she's fucked her way through the Marine Corps) and soon they're inside chumming it up with the company's Official Archivist for Barton Toys, Bartholomew Barton. He definitely comes in his pants when Ralph shows him the first edition of Land Baron but I'm not sure how many times. Did he come when he said, "Oh!" And again when he followed that up with, "Oh, oh, oh!" And then maybe one more time when he walked stiff-leggedly away squealing, "Oh, frabjous, frabjous day!"?

Ralph's gut instinct proves right when Bartholomew the Pants Jizzer breaks out an ultraviolet light to see the watermark on the game board that would prove that it's a first edition. I'm saying it was Ralph's "gut instinct" because the clue to what happened to Sue is revealed on the board under ultraviolet light which makes absolutely no sense if the guy who kidnapped Sue really wanted people to know it was a ransom ploy for ten million dollars. Maybe leave a fucking note on one of the Community Breast cards that reads, "You Won $10 Million Dollars marrying a rich broad way out of your league! Now come to the Promenade and give it to me or Sue dies way before Identity Crisis!"


This is supposedly Bartholomew so maybe this whole thing isn't supposed to make sense.

It would be weird if this were a mere kidnapping and the kidnapper left a clue that was all, "You should bring more members of the Justice League with you!" So this Bartholomew and his double must have some other plan besides ransoming Sue. Although that still doesn't explain how lucky they got that Ralph's first inclination was to take the game to the factory where these guys were waiting for them to reveal their stupid ransom ploy! Man, I fucking hate comic books.


No wait! I just remembered why I love comic books!

What the fuck is on that woman's neck? Is it the penis of her previous lover?!

Ralph has had the same thought that I had: Sue set up this whole mystery for their vacation. He says it's because Sue does this every year for his birthday. But then Flash points out that his birthday is still one week away. That's when Ralph finally panics and starts taking Sue's disappearance seriously. I think he finally realized that maybe Sue is behind it all but she's using as an excuse to get the fuck out of her marriage with Rubber Neck Libido Killer.


Eduardo Barreto just wanted to draw half-naked women.

Just offshore, a toy steamboat appears steered by The Land Baron himself! Except he's not actually the Land Baron. He's one of Sue Dibny's cousins who looks exactly like the Land Baron. He must have thought, "Hey! If I ever decided to begin a life of crime (or continue it, in this case, since I already ripped off all those people in a Savings and Loan scam), I can take on the identity of Mr. Monopoly! I mean the Land Baron!" It seems this Augustus jerk lost out on the family inheritance due to being in prison. Now he wants Sue to share and his go-to move was kidnapping her and attacking her husband and his super-powered friends instead of asking her nicely. Although, how broke can this guy actually be? He's already spent way more money than I'll ever spend in my lifetime on massive robot nutcrackers, mini-nano-bot army men, self-inflating (I said INFLATING!) dragon inner tubes that spray high powered jets of water, and a stupid looking toy boat. Did he just spent eight million dollars in an attempt to steal ten million from Sue? Sure, that's a net of two million. But he could have just kept his eight and sat around playing video games and eating Oreos for the rest of his life. You know, the American Dream¹!

During the battle, Guy Gardner tits one of the tits and tits the tits all over the tits. So Fire rushes in to tits the titty titty tits tits.


Tits²!

I knew David Finch, Tony S. Daniel, and Frank Cho draw the thirstiest comics imaginable. But I didn't know until today that Eduardo Barreto did as well! Kudos, you horny devil!

Pretty soon, Ice subdues one of the inflatables by doing that move that caused me to gain me to start crushing on one of my earliest crushes: shoving her crotch against the back of its neck! Oh, younger me didn't realize the devilry a woman could get up to by the mere placement of her nether regions casually against your body!


I've got to find more Eduardo Barreto comics!

Normally when I read comic book fights, I always think, "No way they'd stop me that easily!" or "I would totally beat them if that's all they've got!" But I admit, Ice would incapacitate me with this move. She wouldn't even need a follow up move. I'd just fall over on the floor drooling while trying to find a razor to cut Ice's name into the back of my hand.

The third inflatable sprays knock-out gas on everybody and they all succumb. Ralph wakes up alone in a prison cell and doesn't think, "Maybe Sue planned this a week early to throw me off my game? Why would she have a broke cousin who looks exactly like the mascot based on the location of our vacation who also somehow paid for all of these cool toys?!" I bet Sue was one of the two "Bartholomews" in a fancy and really expensive disguise.

Ralph breaks free and saves his friends locked in some other cell somewhere else or, more probably, just sitting around waiting for him to rescue them so Sue doesn't yell at them for ruining the game. Ralph finally realizes that the game board has all the clues on it and that they're traveling from one location to the next. But they've been to all the locations! Which, he realizes, means they have to pass Go and return to the first location on the board: the hotel where Sue was kidnapped! Which, come on, if Ralph hadn't figure it out before, he surely has now. Sue would have booked the room at the starting location on the game board. Obviously she's in on this ruse!

At the hotel, Ralph doesn't find anything. But then the trolley goes by and he's all, "I forgot about the railroads! I mean the trolleys! Let's hop on board!" And then they hop on board and wind up trapped and I'm all, "Should my next scan be Fire's tits or Ice's ass?!" It's a real conundrum! And you know what they say about conundrums! When you conundrum, you make a drum out of, um, never mind that! No time for aphorisms! I've just realized the answer!


If they weren't on the same page, I totally would have chosen Ice's ass.

The Justice League finds themselves battling automated trolleys which doesn't seem like much of a battle because you could just not stand on a track. It would be like if in Stephen King's Maximum Overkill only the trains had become sentient. Everybody would be all, "Oh no! Get off the tracks! Stand away from corners!" And then I guess the last hour and a half of the movie would be everybody celebrating while all the trains pouted and ran out of coal.

Like every other battle against toys, somebody in the group is reminded of their childhood. This time, we get another Guy Gardner story. It's not about early brain trauma this time.


I don't think this is Waid shaming young boys for playing with dolls. This is Wally thinking there's something wrong with that because he's gross and Guy feeling ashamed of having played with dolls because he can't stop trying to project super masculinity.

Oh, you might have also noticed the extra panel where Ice looks super sexy while Ralph tries to cop a feel. Some people don't like Ice's vaguely '80s inspired outfit but I think that whole underboob thing is super hot and I'm not at all a pervert and I'm going to start writing smart stuff soon!

But not yet! First, Ralph finally unravels the mystery: it was J'onn J'onzz the entire time! He was Sue! He was Bartholomew! He was the Land Baron look-a-like! Oh shit. He was Sue? I hope he wasn't Sue the entire previous night! Also, is that why Sue was so hot earlier? Is it really Martian Manhunter to whom I'm sexually attracted?!

The reveal ends with the narrator asking the reader if they've figured out where Sue is! What?! I haven't been paying that kind of attention. But I suspect she never left the hotel's shower and she's been in there with her Gingolded-up dildo this hole time.


Oh! I think I found her! She was bathing topless on the beach the entire time!

Oh no! That wasn't her at all. Sue was disguised as Ice all day! So it's Sue I've been eye fucking! And that means Ralph copping a feel wasn't inappropriate. I mean, it was because he didn't know it was her at that time (he admits he only found out later!). And Sue now knows that Ralph grabbed Ice's boob while "saving" her! I bet this is why Sue later fakes her death.

Later at the hotel, Sue discovers that Ralph figured out the mystery immediately because Sue never leaves Oreo crumbs all over the bed sheets. And then it ends with Sue distracting Ralph with a bunch of hippos in top hats for some reason? I have no idea what that's about! It must be a reference to something. Did Ralph once fuck a hippo in a top hat? Or does Sue always distract Ralph with inane bullshit when she knows he's about to get weird with her. He rushes downstairs and Sue returns to the shower with a bottle of Gingold.

The next story is about Fat Blue Beetle because he's been too fat for too long! So fat! He's so fat he's going to change his name to Blue Bonnet! He's so fat, he wobbles but he won't fall down. He's Blue Weeble! He's so fat . . . wait a second. How many fat jokes can I get away with before it goes from charmingly facetious to mean-spirited bullying? Because I want to get right over the edge of that line but pretend that I never crossed it at all when replying to all the anonymous messages I'll get on tumblr calling me ableist. I'll say things like, "What did I do?! I was just making fun of how casually Ostrander was mocking fat Beetle?" or "I'm just channeling the feeling I get from all the writers who decided to portray fat Beetle as a huge joke?" and "I'm not fat! You're fat!"


He doesn't look fat. He looks like he ate bad clams while bees stung him in the face.

Ostrander begins this story in a way that the reader might think Ted just found out he has the ass cancer but the title, "Fighting Trim", that's just over his head on the same page ruins any possible tenseness to the situation. Everybody knows the doctor just said Beetle was obese and, if he wants to lose the weight and not that he has to lose it, then he needs to go on a diet. It'd be funnier if he had ass cancer. Also, his doctor isn't very good.


I mean, it isn't really that simple. But this was written in the '90s. Nutrition was still suffering from the Lobbyists Basically Get to Set Nutritional Guidelines '80s.

It gets less funny and way less interesting when it turns out General Glory will be training him. Ugh! Fuck that patriotic twat! I can't believe Guy Gardner is in love with that narc! I might not even finish reading this comic book! Although I have a feeling the story will be various JLA members giving Blue Beetle advice on how to lose weight until he finally just get locked in hotel room with Fire for 48 hours and they fuck off all his extra weight in sauna conditions.

Blue Beetle winds up hating General Glory too so the doctor advises dieting with a partner, preferably one who won't lose as much as he will. So he partners with Power Girl who, frankly, doesn't have any weight to lose³. But she does drink a lot of diet soda and has major anger issues and Blue Beetle loves to taunt and mock people. So flaunting his weight loss in front of Power Girl gives him the impetus to finally work his diet and exercise program until he's back to his old weight. After that, he refuses to eat a hot dog for some reason.

The Power Girl story reintroduces the character of Ghy, a magical imp from Atlantis that knew Arion, Kara's super great grandfather (at the time of this story being published, anyway). It was so fucking boring that I took at least three masturbation breaks. Um, those are breaks I take to snack on a Pop Tart. I just call them that so nobody knows I have an addiction to Pop Tarts. They all just think I'm super normal instead.

The final story features the Global Guardians and . . . whoops! Would you look at that? I accidentally went to the store, bought a lighter, came back home, tripped, and meticulously burned the comic book to ash in the bath tub. I'm so clumsy!

Justice League Quarterly #6 Rating: C. Mark Waid's story was actually decent and kind of adorable. The other stories were terrible. That's what happens when some editor needs to fill 80 pages of a comic book every three months. They basically just accept any script that falls into their laps. I'm pretty sure this is how Scott Lobdell got the job and then nobody knew how to get rid of him.







______________________________________________________________________________
¹ Okay, fine. My American Dream. But I'm sure some people share it with me!
² Boobies!
³ I will not make the obvious joke here².

No comments:

Post a Comment