Sunday, February 9, 2025

Justice League Quarterly #9 (Winter 1992)


Booster Gold has more muscles in one leg than I have in my entire body.

I just realized you're probably picturing me as a huge flabby mess after that caption! That couldn't be farther from the truth. I'm full of muscles! Just a big muscular muscle man! I guess you need that context to understand that my comment was to point out that Booster Gold has way too many muscles in his legs rather than just the right amount and that I have none. I just told you I have loads and loads of muscles to provide that context and not to brag about all of my muscles. So many muscles! But not too many so that I look like one of Booster Gold's legs! That would be gross.

I'm assuming nobody reading this has too many muscles otherwise I never would have said it was gross because I don't want to be hunted down and punched in my flabby face by some overzealous roid-brained hulk.

On a lighter note, did you see Fire's ass on the cover? Hot cha cha cha cha!

On a heavier note, was Max Lord ever not a villain? Just a total piece of shit from his first appearance through to whatever the fuck happened to him. I don't really care. Just an awful character.


What the fuck, Bea?

What's Fire got against Central America? Does she find everybody from Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama disgusting? Or does she just hate the way Central America looks on a map? It's kind of like the inverted rectum of North America. Although I don't know what that would make South America. Double ick! Maybe back in 1992, the people of Brazil had some kind of overarching hatred for every single country in Central America and Mark Waid was doing some character building here by showing how Brazilian Fire is in her disgust of Central America. Or Fire's just a huge racist fucking pig. I don't know!

The Justice League have come to Central America (more specifically? Who the fuck knows? Mark Waid couldn't be bothered to open up an atlas at the time) to arrest Ira Quimby. Or as his friends begrudgingly refer to him, I.Q. The Justice League head into his lab cocky and arrogant because the guy's name is Ira Quimby. How hard can it be to catch a nerd with that nerd name? Nerd! But little do they know because they're not good at word puzzles and anagrams and initialisms, he's a certified genius! Not because he was born smart or he studied hard but because he rubbed an ancient alien rock all over his body and now when he gets in the sun, his mind work goodlier.

Just a sec! Me needs go rub rock on me and go sit under sun for moment.

Okay! Let's continue!

The Justice League enter Ira's lab and are immediately attacked by five hundred lab monkeys.


Oh man! I hope Ira was running experiments on how fast monkeys could take off women's clothing. That's something a nerd would do, right?!

Ira concentrates so fully while working that he doesn't hear the Justice League beat the shit out of all of his monkeys in the other room. It might also be because he's in a suit with an enclosed environment so he doesn't get any diseases from the monkeys. Wild monkeys may be cute but I'll offer you some advice you may not have considered: you shouldn't try to kiss them. Ira also might be wearing that suit to protect himself from a bacterial weapon he's developing which causes people to become super violent after one hour of coming into contact with it.


Uh-oh.

Don't worry too much yet! That might not have been the rage bacteria. It may have been the concoction that allowed the monkeys to take women's clothes off quickly! This comic book is about to get either super bloody or super sexy! Hopefully the boner I'm sporting is in anticipation of super sexy or else I might need more therapy.

Also I just realized that's probably Ira Quimby on the cover and not Max Lord. I was wondering why he had a monkey on his shoulder.

Ira calms the Justice League by telling them that his Rage Virus only affects one out of every six people due to some genetic factor that he's too stupid to figure out. Blue Beetle believes that means one of them will wind up trying to murder the rest of them instead of realizing that maybe none of them will be affected. That's only a 17% chance for any of them to wind up a multiple murderer and since I can't do more complex calculations than that, I'm pretty optimistic that none of them will wind up infected!

I just did a quick Maths study on the Internet and while I'm in no way confident in what I think I've learned, I believe there's only a 32% chance that none of them will have been infected. That doesn't sound great, does it?! Now I'm fucking worried! Or super horny because, remember, they might have been infected with the taking clothes off women quickly virus! Fingers crossed!


Ice is super against nerds who want to see women's clothes torn off.

Blue Beetle confidently tells the others that one of them will go berserk in exactly one hour. Thankfully, Ira shuts him up and is all, "Or two. Maybe three? One in six is a probability, idiot, not a certainty! Learn some statistics, asshole." It's a real shame because Blue Beetle doesn't have any super powers to fall back on so humiliating him for the only thing he has — his brain — must be devastating.

Also hanging about the lab are more monkeys that weren't rounded up by the Justice League in the first scene so I guess maybe some of them might go fuckshit bonkers too?

Some of the Justice League realize they can't leave without risking the rest of the world and that "some of the Justice League" is Booster Gold for some reason. I bet he went through some kind of horrible space measles pandemic far in the future so he understands quarantines. Since they're stuck together until they wind up murdered by whoever's infected (unless it's Blue Beetle and then, well, you know. Guy Gardner will just hold him by his forehead as he foams and rants and tries to tear out Guy's entrails), they gang up on Ira Quimby and force him to make an antidote. He was shown earlier palming a small vial of yellow liquid so I'm pretty sure he already has an antidote. He just wants to see the Justice League shit themselves.


Or he just wants to kill them by directly injecting a deadly solution into their veins.

The story continues like an episode of The Twilight Zone with everybody getting more and more paranoid. None of them even try to come up with a plan to maybe keep each of them separated. They just wander around the lab kissing monkeys and accusing each other of being the future killer. You'd think they'd use Booster Gold's force field to isolate each other, or Guy's ring, or a bunch of ice walls. Anything that would give them at least a few moments to realize who's infected and then concentrate on containing that person. Unless The Flash is infected. If The Flash is infected, they're already dead.

Before the virus even begins to affect anybody, they start fighting with each other. Ice and Fire attack each other, probably due to some grudges based on living as roommates for so long. Then Booster gets hit by stray fire and starts attacking. Flash tries to stop the fight and slips on some ice which makes him slide into Guy who punches Flash out with a light construct. It's a huge mess and in that moment, Ira Quimby makes a run for it! He winds up in a secret lab where he's protected by a forcefield. He wasn't trying to make an antidote at all! He just needed a chance to get away and be safe from the killers.

But it doesn't last because, again, he's not as smart as he thinks he should be after rubbing a stone all over himself and then lying in the sun.


See how easily he uses the term "voyeurism"? He definitely experimented with making monkeys rip women's clothes off.

After the force field breaks down, Blue Beetle makes a dangerous assumption. We don't find out about the assumption until later but what it is is this: he doesn't feel any rage coming on as the hour nears its end so he assumes that means he hasn't been infected. Did he not watch the monkey kill its family earlier when IQ was showing them how the virus works? The monkey was fine right until the clock ticked over to an hour and then it went berserk. Anyway, the assumption is made and luckily Beetle is right but what he also assumes is that every single one of his friends somehow realized the same thing. Ted fixes Ira's forcefield to create five individual forcefields to contain the rest of the Justice League and their agreement to be contained says to Ted that none of them are infected either. You know, because if they'd felt the rage coming on, they'd refuse to get in a force field so that they could kill the others. Which, again, seems like some crazy assumptions being thrown around by somebody who believes in science!

You know how sometimes you do or say something and you just know you're going to feel like a real fucking loser moron just before you say or do that thing and then the thing is said or done and you shame spiral into oblivion about it? Yeah, I'm not talking about Ted anymore. That's how I feel right now because, once again, I've allowed myself to argue against comic book logic. I read the thing where Blue Beetle makes the assumption and I know it's a fucking comic book and I realize that it works for the plot and I know everything's going to work out so that the plot highlights Blue Beetle's smarts and yet I still dig in my heels and try to argue about how stupid it is. Because that's all I have. I'm a petty little idiot man-child who finds the worst kind of joy in tearing apart the plots of people just trying to write fun little stories to distract us from the mortal terrors all around us. I might as well stare into an ice cream cone and disparage it for not melting correctly as I eat it. Maybe I should try reading this again but enjoying it this time? Just a second!

Okay, let's see. Bea's racist. Monkeys try to strip Tora naked. Ira douses everybody in Monkey Rage Mist. A monkey tears its family apart. Another monkey commits suicide. Everybody bickers and argues. Ira jizzes in his hazmat suit while watching the League fall apart. Ira shits himself when his force field falls apart. Blue Beetle makes a crucial error in logic that luckily saves the day so nobody points out his crucial logic error and everybody just treats Beetle as a hero instead of the two-bit engineer he really is, a character who has no super powers but still somehow held the interest of enough comic book nerds to support an ongoing monthly title for two years and then become a member of the greatest super hero group ever as if he's on par with Superman, Batman, or Wonder Woman?! Dammit! Now I'm angry! At least I wasn't angry after reading the first time! I was just slightly bewildered by the end! But now I want to punch a murder monkey in the dick!


Anyway, where were we?

Blue Beetle pretends to be infected with the virus so he can chase Ira around the complex until Ira admits that he had already created an antidote. Still nobody worries about all the monkeys hanging around the complex who also have a 1 in 6 chance of turning murderous. Sure, if I were Booster Gold or Guy Gardner, I wouldn't be worried. But Ira and Ted definitely couldn't defeat a rampaging monkey. Oh, forget about the monkeys! Why must I always get distracted by things Mark Waid has decided aren't important to the story! The monkeys not currently murdering anybody probably proved immune weeks ago during Ira's experiments! See? If I truly want to, I can always find a reason to excuse the narrative rather than tear it down. It's all about attitude!

Ira finally attempts to jab Beetle with the antidote but Beetle just takes it and goes back to release his friends, none of whom were infected. They all take a jab of the antidote so they won't be carriers when they go back into the real world but then all die of cancer months later while Bill Gates maniacally rubs his hands together and laughs the secret laugh of the world's evil overlords! Or maybe they all just go home and live happily ever after while a monkey dangerously shakes some vial full of Ira Quimby's patented End-of-the-World Pox.


Bad monkey! Put Ira's Jizz-in-a-jar down!

The second story stars Crimson Fox and her twin sister, Crimson Fox. It's a murder mystery revolving around people who look like they've committed suicide but have, in fact, been murdered mysteriously! It's up to Crimson Fox and the other Crimson Fox to figure out what is going on in a story Kevin Dooley and Andy Smith like to call, "Churches of Homos!" No wait, that can't be right. The actual title "Cherchez L'Homme" badly translates to "Search for the Man." I only say "badly translates" because I used Google translate and translation isn't meant to be literal. It's probably supposed to be more like "Manhunt", right?


Oh no! Crimson Fox has been infected with Ira's Tear Women Clothes Off Virus!

You wouldn't believe the panel that follows the panel I scanned and which I imagined in my own head! It doesn't turn me on that they're twin sisters. That's actually kind of gross. But it's a comic book and also an imaginary panel that I invented in my head so I can totally believe that they're actually clones and not sisters. That's less gross, right?

Crimson Fox decides to investigate and discovers that a high-powered woman running some company I'm not even bothering to try to remember even for the few seconds it takes to put down the comic book and write this has been using some good-looking man to murder women connected to her company and making the murders look like suicide. Fox stakes out the company and eventually sees a woman leaving with a good-looking man. She thinks, "A-ha! A woman leaving the company with a man! This is a thing that never happens! This must be the man I am hunting!" I know that's not the best detective work but think of it this way: if you know you're in a murder mystery that's only about ten pages long, the first suspect you lay eyes on has to be the killer! There isn't any time for red herrings in a story this short.


Sacred blues!

With Crimson Fox now under the thrall of the murderer, it's up to Crimson Fox to save Crimson Fox! I would differentiate the Crimson Foxes except this entire story is translated from French so both Crimson Foxes speak exactly the same. They're only discernible when they speak English because one is fluent and the other has a strong French accent. One other way to know which is which is the length of their hair but I can't stop focusing on their boobies so that's no help.

By the way, is "Andy Smith", the artist on this story, a pen name of "Bart Sears"? Because this shit looks exactly like Bart Sears' shit. The inker is "Asylum Studios". Could that be Bart Sears?!

Crimson Fox figures out all the clues left by the murderer to discover where he's been hiding out because he really wants a hero to discover him. Because, as I pointed out earlier, the first suspect is always the murderer in a story this short. And yet even in these few pages, Andy Helfer managed to throw in a red herring of sorts! Because the man forcing the women to kill themselves with his pheromone power was actually the woman running that company whom Crimson Fox interviewed at the start! What an efficient use of so few pages!


Needing a man proved her downfall! She should have been happy with Crimson Fox!

What I like about this story is that the clues she left at the killings were important to her plan unlike Batman's villains who leave clues because, I suppose, they just get off on getting their asses beat. But this woman was trying to find a hero smart enough and strong enough to discover her wicked murder spree and then to control him with her pheromones so she could stop dating loser after loser. It was a pretty good plan! Although the plan was super sexist. Not because she murdered women while putting the plan into motion but because she assumed the hero that would stop her would be male. Ha ha! Feminism just kicked your ass, murderer!

The third story stars Power Girl not drawn by Bart Sears so I might actually find her attractive. That's a huge plus!


See?! If it wasn't for Ralph's weird stretchy neck ruining the mood, I'd be totally hard right now!

I'm just kidding! Ralph's weird neck sort of helps my boner!

No, no! I'm just kidding! I'm not a huge sex pervert like I pretend to be! If you think I'm disgusting, just remember, "Grunion Guy (or whoever claims to be the author of this) isn't really disgusting! They're just pretending to be disgusting because they find it funny to pretend to be disgusting! Although Kurt Vonnegut warns that we should be careful who we pretend to be because we generally are the thing we're pretending we're pretending not to be. So is Tess (or whoever claims to be the author of this) really a huge pervert? Probably not!" Just try to remember the "Probably not!" part of that and forget the other stuff where I cast doubt on the thing I was trying to prove I wasn't. Because I'm not just a huge pervert; I'm also a gigantic self-saboteur!

After Power Girl destroys the kitchen and nearly kills Ralph, Wally makes a bet with her that she can't go two days without losing her temper. They shake. Ralph suggests they rethink the bet. Power Girl yells, "NO!" Um, did she just lose? I guess she didn't just lose. Maybe to lose she has to destroy something and not just yell at innocent bystanders with disgustingly long necks.

Anyway, Kara loses the bet because everybody writing these Justice League stories have decided she's a one note joke like Guy Gardner being an arrogant prick and Wally West being a sex pest. Some writer tried to fix her by having Doctor Light point out it was the chemicals in the diet sodas she drinks for no reason fucking up her brain chemicals but I don't think most writers wanted it fixed. Just like nobody wants to fix Guy Gardner by having everybody realize he's suffering from traumatic brain injuries and that he should maybe get some help. I don't know if Wally's sex pest problem can be fixed. I guess just stop writing him that way? Which somebody eventually does, I guess?

The final story isn't about the Global Guardians so there's a high chance that I won't "accidentally" drop this issue in the paper shredder now. It's about Booster Gold. I'm not going to immediately have an accident but I'm also not not going to read this over a running shredder.

Booster Gold has a run-in with a homeless boy who steals his wallet and whom Booster Gold basically blasts on his ass with one of his future bolts to stop him. Also the boy is actually a girl. You can tell because this issue already had a story where a woman was masquerading as a man and also I was sexually attracted to the homeless person so I knew it couldn't be a guy because I'm almost certainly not super gay.

Booster Gold somehow recognizes this young lady because in the future, she has a huge career being a model who poses for the pictures that get stuck in empty picture frames being sold. Was she that good at it that she basically cornered the empty picture frame market for 400 years?! Booster also knows all about her life because she's super famous for other reasons too, I guess. He decides to help her out because he's memorized her Wikipedia page and he knows that she's run away from home and if she doesn't get back home, she's going to wind up doing pornography while her sister dies of cancer of the I Miss My Sister glands.

Later, he introduces her to the rest of the Justice League!


What a bunch of pervs! She's only fifteen! Stop admitting that you're sexually attracted to her, you pedoes!

We only have Booster Gold's word that she's currently fifteen so why don't we all pretend she's a nice round 24. If he had access to Skeets, I'd believe he knew how old she was in 1992. But he doesn't and he's from the 25th Century so how the fuck would he know how old she is?! Also she's fucking fictional so who cares? They could say she's eight right her and, well, that would be really fucking weird. Never mind.

How much money is this issue worth? It's got to be a lot since it has a page where you see the "O" faces of four separate members of Justice League America! I wonder what Martian semen smells like?

Booster Gold changes the future by making sure the pornographer doesn't get his pedo mitts on Geralyn and she goes back home and her sister survives and now Booster Gold has the hots for two super young women from the 21st century. What a weird fucking story!


The pedo porn guy is Bill Maher in a tiny French mustache disguise. Seems accurate.

Justice League Quarterly #9 Rating: I could have lived without ever reading it again. But how would I have known that without doing it, you know? Other than the huge stack of evidence which I call Justice League Quarterly #1-8, I guess. I would say "Live and learn" but I imagine if I live to be 90, I'm going to revisit this terrible shit yet again! God I hope I don't live that long!

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