Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Justice League Quarterly #7 (Summer 1992)


Is the secret that they're all terrible at oral sex?

The price of the Quarterly went up fifty-five cents and the editors at DC thought, "Who wouldn't pay extra? Look at the line-up of stories we've got this quarter: General Old Fart that nobody likes! More boring than Cyborg in his toaster phase in Wolfman's late Titans comic! And lastly: Who?!" I probably didn't realize I was paying extra at the time because I just grabbed the comics I was used to grabbing off the shelf without any thought at all about quality or passion or interest even. Or I saw Ice looking so fucking adorably sexy on this cover and I just grabbed the issue to hide the boner in my pants on the way to the register. Frankly, it's a toss up.

Last issue, Eduardo Barreto spent most of his time ignoring the script so he could draw women in bikinis. This time, he gets to draw women in low cut gowns! Because Ted Kord is going to his 15-Year Class Reunion! Along with Ice, Fire, and Booster even though they didn't go to the same school probably. Ice graduated from Ikea; Fire probably dropped out to help her parents pay rent on their favela; and Booster would be going to his -500-something-year reunion.


This is Eve Lundquist. Voted most likely to cause Eduardo Barreto to jizz in his pants as he drew her. Bad at oral.

For some reason, Ted Kord feels obligated to go to the reunion. I haven't been to a class reunion yet although I'm really considering going to the 40th if I'm still alive and if my best friend from high school agrees to go with me. We'll just sit at the bar drinking. Maybe Merrill George will ask me back to her hotel room to fuck her while her husband watches. Or vice versa. You know which vice versa! Merrill watching!

Ted's two best friends from high school approach and wonder why they haven't seen him in fifteen years. Probably because they weren't really his best friends. If I wind up at a class reunion, the one guy I know will approach me with more excitement and enthusiasm than anybody I've ever met will be Andy Nesmith. And I'll greet him the same way and apologize for any time I was ever a dick to him because I masked so much in high school that I would occasionally say terrible things as I was mirroring other people's behavior. Not a lot! Mostly I was pretty chill and laid back and hiding in the background. But oh to have the energy and the passion of Andy Nesmith! That's one fucker I know took life by the leash, shoved a stiletto heel on its shoulder, and made it suck his toes.


This is Beatriz da Costa. Voted most likely to not have gone to this school. Loves making the "Oops, did I make you come too quickly?" face.

Ice finds the small talk about jobs from people she's never met and will never see again interesting. I don't know if it's because she's nice or because she grew up in a field of ice and snow and more ice and more snow and little gummy fish. She admits she never even went to high school because her people don't call "Ikea" high school. They just call it Ikea! And Beatriz admits she never went to high school either but she doesn't elaborate because this is a fun comic and not a depressing comic about people growing up in poverty. Ted has yet to reveal why he felt obligated to go. Maybe simply because the Justice League Quarterly needed a 30 page story. Any story!


This is Miranda Waitrose. Voted most likely to glue her hands to her head. Bad at oral.

A highly localized earthquake hits the reunion. Uh oh. Does that mean Major Disaster went to Ted's high school? Poorly theorizing that this reunion takes place in Illinois so the earthquake couldn't be an actual earthquake, Booster suggests it must be an attack by a Justice League enemy. Booster immediately assuming that the attack was on the Justice League reflects poorly on the Justice League. If the percentage of times villains attack the Justice League is greater than villains committing crime against the regular populace, you've got to seriously think about giving up the whole League deal. But Fire buys into his logic, flames on in the middle of the room, and flies naked out a window to scout for trouble.


This is Tora Olafsdotter. Voted most likely to stirre at Ild's fitte as hun flyr ut av vinduet. "Oral? You put your mouth WHERE?!?"

Look, we just have to face reality when it slaps its outer labia in our faces: Eduardo Barreto drew Fire's naughty bits and the Comics Code Authority approved it. I always knew they were dirty knobgobblers over at that organization!

Do you think when Fire "flames on" there's a scant moment where her clothes burn off but you can still see all the sexy details of her nakedness before going completely flamey? Just asking for my perverted friend, Doom Bunny.

Fire discovers a massive alien ship over the hotel hosting the reunion. The ship tractor beams up the hotel. I guess one of the Class of '77 was an alien who was terrible at oral sex.

Fire investigates for a few seconds and then reports back to Ted.


"Even I couldn't fuck it, Ted! And you know how I love to fuck! Right? Did you understand my sexy joke? Ted?"

When I'm on a first date, I always spell some ranch dressing on the front of my jeans so later when I jizz in them, I can be all, "That was the ranch dressing, remember?" And my date is all, "Oh, yeah! But it sure smells like Linden trees all of a sudden!" And then I panic and yell, "I didn't come in my pants! You came in my pants!" Later, I never wonder why they don't want to have sex with me. I know why. God do I know why.


This is Maddie Stouffer. Voted most likely to make everybody think about oral. Surprisingly bad at oral.

Turns out that more than one of the Class of '77 were aliens. No wonder they were all bad at oral! In their true alien forms, they probably don't even have a mouth so they're all, "You want me to put the ovipositor in the what now?!" And then they were sexily gagged by their prom date as they searched for their disintegration gun to make it stop. But being 17 or 18, there's really no such thing as bad oral. You just want another person's lips on your pud or pudenda! Just the thought that it's about to happen is enough!

Turns out Ted and his family were the only actual humans in Ted's home town. Now he suddenly realizes why they all stared at him in the shower or why all the girls at his school were so grossed out by him. To them, kissing Ted would have been like Ted kissing a cow. And nobody wants to grope a cow! At least not for sexual reasons. But if Ted did get laid while in high school, does he have to amend the age when he lost his virginity now? You can't count losing your virginity if you lose it to another species. Believe me, I know!

Being that Fire blew her cover immediately, Ted and Michael decide to suit up and expose that they're Blue and Gold, the two worst heroes to discover are your only hope at being saved. Also Ice but she's probably been recruited to keep all the drinks cold for the long journey back to Klaarsh, the alien planet the hotel is being hauled to.


This is Tina Murkowski. Voted most likely to commit a hit and run. Bad at oral.

Beetle calls up Guy Gardner on some kind of interstellar communicator he's been working on and convinces Guy to come rescue them because Ice is flirting with all the male members of the Class of '77 and some of the cuter female ones. Guy gets jealous and horny (due to the former and then the latter) so he'll definitely be heading out to help. Mostly to see Ice kiss some hot thirty-year-old Midwestern women. I should stop writing things like that because then I turn back to the comic book and Ice isn't making out with a hot thirty-year-old Midwestern woman and I become sad and angry and disappointed. Stupid comic books not being written the way I want them to be written.

Guy Gardner arrives with all the other members of the Justice League who want to see Ice put her tongue down the throat of one of Beetle's lady classmates. That would obviously be Ralph, Wally, and Rex. But it also includes Power Girl! I'm intrigued!


Great idea! Pierce the force field so all the oxygen rushes into space and everybody asphyxiates!

Guy and the other Leaguers can't break the force field so Booster, Beetle, Fire, and Ice manage to break a hole in the underside of the ship. They then defeat a small battalion of laser-wielding aliens with fists and ice clubs. Also with some fire and energy bolts. Those probably help a little bit. Or maybe a lot because Blue Beetle realizes he's useless against armed aliens and skulks off to find the Force Field Shut-off Valve. He wanders about thinking, "It could very well not be in the place I'm looking but, oh my God, look! There it is!" He doesn't shut it off because he knows it'll kill his classmates. So using his great Beetle instincts for how to manipulate the alien user interface, he creates a weak place in the field for Guy to break through! But, um, how will Guy know?! How will he see it?!


Look at what?! What are they looking at? I don't see a signal anywhere!

I guess the shooting stars in a forcefield is standard protocol for Justice League members to alert other Justice League members that there's now a weak spot in the force field to exploit. It works like a charm because Guy blasts through it and then Power Girl blasts through the hull of the ship and then all the aliens blast their pants full of space diarrhea (and maybe space jizz because you've seen Power Girl's suit, right?).


Great. I'm starting to sound like Wally the Sex Pest.

I know 40% of my blog posts already sound like they're written by a sex pest. I just don't want to sound like sex pest Wally West specifically. He's so gross with the constant unwanted sexual advances toward Power Girl and also the red hair. I can make that joke because sometimes I roleplay a self-loathing ginger during sex.

Ha ha! That was all a made-up joke! I've never actually had sex!


Does looking at this picture, making a little grunting sound, and feeling intense shame and discomfort from sticky underpants mean I'm not a virgin anymore?!

The Justice League defeat these alien invaders more easily than any other threat they've ever faced in their lives. If I were these aliens, I'd be thoroughly embarrassed by my showing. The Justice League had so little difficulty defeating the alien warriors that they worker through all of their worst one-liners and fighting banter. At one point, Rex is all, "Watch where you're pointing that thing! You want to go and hurt somebody?" And Ice is all, "You tell 'em, Rex!" Rex couldn't even be bothered to come up with new material and Ice couldn't even be bothered to steal old material so she just complimented Rex on his use of the oldest material.

In the end, the hotel gets put back, Beetle promises to not expose the aliens living on Earth, and the aliens promise to not expose that Ted is the Blue Beetle. Not like that was a hard promise for them to keep since they hadn't heard of Blue Beetle before this night. They don't promise to not expose Fire and Ice and Booster's identities though. Although aren't Fire and Ice kind of public already? And nobody wonders why they're always hanging around with those losers, Ted and Mikey? Who just happen to resemble Beetle and Booster? Oh, who am I kidding? Nobody's that interested in Beetle or Booster or the two idiots hanging around hotties Tora and Bea.

The next story is about General Glory so I'm going to invent "sleep reading" now. Just slide this comic book into my pillow case, take a couple of Gabapentin and a shot of whisky, lay my head down, and let's see if this works!


*snrt* *snore* *mutter* "...racist...old...white...bore..." *snrrrk!* *byu byu byu byu*

According to the notes I left in my dream log after my experiment, General Glory gets naked and seduces me in this story. His penis is tattooed red, white, and blue and he's got a Prince Albert that dangles patriotic charms from it, like an apple pie and an AK-47. I was sort of into it except he kept saying racist shit like "Fuck me like a yellow barbarian!" and "White people invented everything!" Declining his personalized twenty-one gun salute caused him to declare some really racist shit that I had to tear out of my dream log and burn lest somebody accuse my brain of having come up with that nonsense.

I guess I should actually attempt to read this shit.


You really don't want to know what General Glory thinks he knows.

Unfortunately, General Glory doesn't get Easy Ridered at the end of that scene. He goes on to wish that Hitler hadn't killed himself which doesn't sound like the greatest thought for a patriotic American to think. But then again, I've seen what people who consider themselves patriotic Americans think these days and maybe "Wishing Hitler hadn't killed himself" is right up at the top of the list, along with "Cops shouldn't be burned in a giant wicker man" and "Minorities are scary!"

I don't know where General Glory is going on his motorcycle but I suspect he doesn't spend a lot of time on it. When he gets to the house he was headed toward, he just lays it down on the lawn like a kid riding his BMX to a friend's house.


Maybe this is just how cool people get off their bikes.

This might be Yellow Fang's mother's house where he lives in the basement doing evil because a bunch of trap doors open up in the lawn and gun-toting ninjas come out and do not shoot General Glory. I think these ninjas spend as much time around guns as General Glory does around motorcycles because don't they know they're supposed to be used at range? These ninjas decide to sneak up on General Glory to get as close as possible, maybe so the bullets really fucking hurt when they hit him. But one of them, the worst ninja ever, steps on a twig and General Glory escapes the ambush! He kicks all of their asses without one bullet being fired. So they're either terrible ninjas or this is all a set up. Which, by the way, it is! That bit was mentioned earlier by Rick Feral, head of B.U.L.W.A.R.K., the American organization that tells General Glory which minority's ass to kick next. They're using General Glory to get Yellow Fang to do their dirty work for them. The only way I can think that plan is meant to work is that if B.U.L.W.A.R.K. wants General Glory dead?

Fang's plan is to shoot down an American satellite, blame it on the Russians, and begin World War III. But that plan doesn't take place for a few weeks. General Glory, attacking Fang, causes Yellow Fang to track and shoot down the satellite as soon as possible. But that was Rick Feral's plan! Fang winds up shooting a Russian satellite down and they don't blame the Americans and start World War III because they're less barbaric than America. Is that the moral of this story? If Fang shoots down an American satellite and blames it on Russia, World War III is certain because America has only one diplomatic move: "Give back worse than we got!" But Russia is all, "Oh, I get it. Yeah, mistakes happen. We can't blame America if Fang blew up our satellite! And we totally trust that America has told us exactly what happened and they had no hand at all in the destruction of our satellite! We're not monsters! You know, we love our children too!"

I just realized that was the mistake in Sting's song! Asking if the Russians love their children too. Because America fucking hates their children. Mostly conservative Americans who only want little conservatives and not individuals and will disown a child at the drop of a gay hat and then change every law they can to make being gay illegal because they think somehow their child will then not be gay and will finally love them (while not being gay)? I think this was a major theme in Heathers where Christian Slater says, "I wonder how he'd feel about a gay son with a pulse?" And then Winona Ryder laughs during the funeral and then she makes eye contact with the "dead gay" son's sister and feels like shit.

Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah! General Glory fucking sucks!


Shit.

Why do I fucking bother? A Rocket Red story?! Sorry! A Rocket Red "ADVENTURE"! I mean, who the fuck really cares?! Who at DC thinks Rocket Red can carry his own story? Even a lousy eight pager?! He'll walk around being super nice to everybody while getting some colloquialisms and slang wrong.

Except I'm wrong, aren't I? This story takes place in the Spring of 1992! So it was certainly pitched with the idea of viewing the recent fall of the USSR through Dmitri's eyes (meaning through the eyes of an American pretending to be Ukrainian which probably means a lot of sympathy toward capitalism and America). Being that Dmitri is Ukrainian, the perspective falls more towards Ukrainian independence and the anger at any Russians in their midst. The people in Dmitri's hometown drive out the manager of a factory as he is Russian and was a member of the Communist Party before the collapse. Now he just wants to live in the place he's called home for fifteen years but nobody wants him around. Dmitri shows compassion for him but ultimately points out he's going to have to go or they're going to kill him. I guess that was kind of exciting! It would have been more exciting if Dmitri joined in with the townspeople and was all, "You treated your neighbors like shit just because they weren't Russian! You made people work for scraps! You never gave anybody any of the chocolate bars smuggled in from Europe and America! We always heard you playing The Beatles from your house while wearing Levi's while sitting on the porch spitting on Ukrainian culture and heritage!" And then Rocket Red could have ripped his arms off. He could have saved his compassion for the guy's kids since they were born in the village.

What do I know, though? If I knew anything, I'd compare this story from 1992 to what's happening with Russia invading Ukraine now! But to write about that, I'd need to learn some dick jokes in Ukrainian. I should ask my friend Misha for some.


You can tell he's Russian because he's in a suit.

The final story stars Doctor Light (the Japanese scientist and not the pedophile) and Rising Sun. Let me read it to see if there's anything interesting happening here. The editors probably thought, "We need to balance all that Yellow Peril Yellow Fang racist shit out with some good guy Asian stuff! Who do we got? Doctor Light or Katana?"

But first, an advert from 1992 that seems to have reacted to our current times.


Fuck Trump.

Trump's a dumb, mean-spirited piece of shit. And anybody who supports him is either dumber or more mean-spirited and probably both. You don't have permission to read my blog if you support Trump or the GOP. You do not have consent. Reading any more after me revoking my consent means you're stealing, you thief! Go read a blog by ChatGPT! It probably won't call you a prick.

The Rising Sun story was twelve pages of Rising Sun harassing Doctor Light for a date. She finally relents when she discovers he's afraid of the dark like she is but, being a woman, she has to put aside her emotional trauma to take care of him. Like his mother. It's at that point that he meets her kids and she's all, "I guess I have time for three children! Let's go on a date!" And then Rising Sun is kidnapped by Owl-Woman because she, along with Doctor Mist and Jack-o-Lantern, is getting the Global Guardians back together. I guess that's the whole point of Justice League Quarterly. "A place for stories to boring to tell in any other context!"

Justice League Quarterly #7 Rating: What? I may have accidentally rated some of these but that's because I didn't want to bother explaining how I don't rate Annuals or shit like this! Sure, sometimes I do because I can't be bothered to not do it. See, not doing something that I normally do in my reviews takes more effort and explanation than just sticking a stupid letter grade that doesn't even really mean anything. You think I have a system for rating these comic books? No fucking way. Mostly I just go with my gut! The only real system I have is that if Lobo is in the comic book, it gets an A+. That's about it!

Also, why does Rising Sun feel he has to date Doctor Light?! It's because they're both Asian, right? So racist! Oh, wait! It's probably because they both have light powers! Which also seems racist because of the whole Land of the Rising Sun thing! "Hey, what should this Japanese hero's powers be?" "Oh, you know, really good with a sword that sucks souls or time travel by screaming, 'Yatta!'?" "No, no. Light powers! Like the rising sun! And name him Rising Sun! Get it?"

No comments:

Post a Comment