Justice League Quarterly #10 (Spring 1993)

Booster Gold after spending some years on the Phantasm planet.

Maybe this will just become a Phantasm blog. There may only be five movies but I bet I could discuss them for at least a few months. Except I don't think I'm sensitive enough to discuss the scene in the graveyard where The Tall Man is all, "Look at my tits! You're totally gonna put your pee pee in my hoo-ha!" And then he's all, "Ha ha! I probably have a penis!" Canonically, I can't say whether the Tall Man has a pee pee or a hoo-ha because we've never seen it. But we have seen his tits so, well, you know. The Tall Man has tits.

I wonder if the Phantasm franchise has the record for having the most uncharismatic leads of any movie franchise ever? I hope I don't offend the Boy or Reggie by saying that! Hmm, maybe I shouldn't have singled them out after that comment, right? Um, also Angus Scrimm. Boy howdy! He's so ugly! I mean, he's supposed to be ugly and creepy unlike the protagonists Reggie and the Boy. Um, I mean Mike. Don't assume I'm actually the Tall Man because I like to call Mike "Boy" and I have tits.

This issue begins with Booster Gold waking up full of shame and self-loathing after having a dream about his mother. I would describe the dream but you can probably make out what kind of dream it was due to my use of the adjectives "shame" and "self-loathing". Are those adjectives? Anyway, as you might have thought, he was dreaming about being arrested in front of his mother after having committed all the horrible future crimes he chose to commit. Crying on the steps nearby is a woman cradling a child. Did Booster Gold have a wife and child? Or is that his sister and niece? Or were they part of the reason he was being arrested in the dream?! I know dreams usually aren't non-fiction. I recently had a dream where the Non-Certified Spouse had an online friend who made their own flavors of Moon Pies. She made one flavor especially for me: Murdered Baby's Soul. That was definitely fiction because now I go to sleep every night wondering what Murdered Baby's Soul tastes like.

Oh wait. She's not cradling a child. Nor is she on steps.

I blame the colorist's terrible color guide which must have read, "The sofa should be purple but bluier. The woman on the sofa should be purplier. The wall should be purple but different. Outside the window? More purple." How is my mind supposed to differentiate all of those purples and blues?! It's also possible my eyes glanced at the picture and my mind, detecting patterns that I'm used to seeing, just went, "Oh, okay. Booster Gold is being busted for beating his woman on the street while their child watched." I don't mean I'm used to seeing that because I've ever acted out anything like that! I just grew up at a time when everything on fucking television was Jerry Springer or Cops!

While Booster Gold's memories of his future make him weep the way Ted Kord weeps whenever Guy Gardner kicks him in the dick, some bald guy whose color separation guide was just "Yellow!" invents online gambling.

"Sos what yer sayin' is I jus' put all my bankin' infermation into this magic betting box and bada boom bada bing, I'm like super rich and shit?"

Seeing the screen that reads "Place Wager from Savings" should be everything a person needs to understand about gambling. Everybody knows gambling ruins lives but the main obstacle in the way of gambling ruining way, way more lives was that you had to make an effort to gamble. You had to plan a trip to someplace that allows it. You had to get off your ass to buy a scratch card. You had to go to the horse or greyhound track or, if you really wanted to get depressed and see how you've taken even the fun of going on a day trip out to watch animals get abused, the off-track betting parlor. But now with B.O.O.K.I.E., you can walk down to the corner, tap directly into your bank account, and feel the excitement of standing around waiting to see the results of the race! Or, if we're talking about reality, online casinos! Online poker! Apps that let you buy scratch-its and lottery tickets without getting your cheese-dust covered ass off of the sofa! It's bread and circuses all day, especially now that we've got Caligula in office here in America with his little pet Nazi gremlin, Tesla Wyrmtooth.

Luckily for the people about to lose all of their life savings to B.O.O.K.I.E., a young hero comes along to hack the system, bleed it dry, and report them to the feds! A roller blade wearing Nirvana fan who maybe isn't as good at hacking as he thought he was.

I take back my use of the word "luckily".

That's not a Justice League Teleporter Tube Toby has found himself trapped within. That's a B.O.O.K.I.E. automated kiosk with its security sensors tripped after he tried to hack it. Loser!

Some goons pull up ready to crack Toby's skull but he's still in the system so he sends a message to their pagers to distract them while he hacks his way out and roller blades to freedom! The goons, being so reliant on orders from up above and so attached to their pagers like big stupid '90s idiots, fall for the ruse and immediately check their pagers once they start vibrating. Can you imagine how dumb people were in the '90s?! So fucking attached to a small piece of electronics that constantly demanded their attention! Fucking idiots.

Usually that would be me being self-deprecating but this time it's me being smug because I don't fucking have a smart phone and never will. All y'all look like pager checking criminal goons getting outsmarted by the worst dressed hacker in history!

Um, ha ha! Just kidding! I was just kidding! Really! Not about not owning a phone. That's true. But I don't think everybody is a pager checking goon. At least not in the 21st Century where you don't have to check your pager and then go find a phone and then call the person who paged you or maybe even page them to let you know you got the page while sending some stupid weird code y'all had made up instead of sending a phone number. And I don't think you could ever play games on your pager! Why would anybody ever want one?! I understand having a smart phone because you can play games or use apps or browse the Internet. Staying in contact with other people is like the 8th or 9th best thing to do with a phone. But that's all a pager was good for! Who wanted other people to have constant access to you?! That was the best part about living in an age without cell phones! You'd leave the house and theoretically cease to exist until you got back! Oh, it was glorious!

Anyway, Toby decides to hack his way into Justice League Headquarters to hide out from the goons chasing him. I think the only person currently awake inside is Booster Gold in a shame spiral.

I guess Booster's weeping woke everybody up.

I'm pretty sure you can see Fire's bush in the above panel!

Guy Gardner pantses the poor kid because he gives a fake name. Ice stops him before Guy gets arrested for whatever crime you can be arrested for just because you pulled some kid's pants down. Probably something like Overly Aggressive Manhandling of a Minor which might not be a felony but it would definitely get you shanked in prison if somebody heard that was what you were in for. "What? Sicko perv? No no no! You've got it wrong! I JUST PRANKED THE KID!" Then you'd get stabbed in the liver because "pranked" is probably prison slang for consensual surprise shower sex. You're probably wondering how that's consensual, right? Well, you know, most prisoners probably don't want to be thought of as rapists but still want to have some sexy fun times while in prison. So you get a group together who sign a consent form that at any time they have their butthole all nice and soaped up, it's an invitation for a surprise quickie. The surprise just makes it a fun game!

Toby was caught just after he sent out a BBS message on the Justice League computer system so Blue Beetle notices that the kid isn't a threat. The message was to some guy named Jack Marshall, a hacker wearing an anarchist t-shirt. I don't remember him at all. Was he from Bloodlines? No, this was probably a smidge too early for Bloodlines, right? Anyway, Jack explains that Toby has discovered a bunch of illegal shit being perpetrated by the B.O.O.K.IE machines (I was apparently punctuating it wrong earlier. I will not fix my previous mistakes!). So now the Justice League are involved because they can't turn their backs on something illegal taking place.

I bet Fire fucks Jack Marshall. He looks a like Jesse Custer if somebody other than Steve Dillon were drawing him but they were trying to approximate Dillon's look while also making him handsome.

If Fire isn't eating out this guy's asshole by the end of the story, I'll lose all respect for her.

Jack Marshall wears a blazer over a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He's slightly unshaven and his hair's about an inch longer than your grandmother would find respectable. No wait. Your great grandmother, probably. Great-great grandmother? Fucking shit, I just looked at a calendar and some adults were born in the 21st Century? I'll judge by the age my mother was when I was born (22!) to calculate when somebody who is 18 now's mother was born. That means their mother was born in 1985. So their grandmother would have been born in 1964. They certainly wouldn't have had a problem with long hair. Hell, my grandmother was born in 1921 and she never had a problem with my long hair. Hell, that beautiful, sweet lady thought Gene Simmons was a looker! For the record, I never thought anything but positive thoughts for that woman other than the day we were watching Donahue together and she looked at Gene Simmons and said, "That's a really handsome man." Fine, let me change my hair description of Jack Marshall. His hair looked like the kind of hair you'd find on any man or woman across the country in 1993 and I'm not sure how it's supposed to show how anarchic he is.

Jack Marshall explains away all the morally gray aspects of what he and Toby are doing with a couple of super definitive "no"s.

The B.O.O.K.IE machines are just corporate skimmers stealing your information to make money on it and also sometimes just stealing your money and also letting you gamble so that they can sort of legally steal your money as well. So it really is the Internet. Minus the games and porn. Although the B.O.O.K.IE booth looks like a nice little masturbation way station.

Jack Marshall says the name Rubenico, the man behind the B.O.O.K.IE stations, and Booster Gold loses his mind. He explains that in the future, the Rubenico Syndicate runs half the eastern seaboard. So ATM gambling gave a man enough power to control the east coast of America for 500 years. Why didn't I read this at 22 and go into online gambling?! I should have realized that this comic book I really didn't like buying was actually a deliverer of prophetic news. Oh, Cassandra, how did I not believe?!

Oh, I know how! Booster Gold goes on to explain how the other thing that ruled America in 2462 was college football. And he was the best there ever was at it. What kind of Al Bundy shitty ass brag is that? I understand that a lot of people take college football seriously. It's just that I don't take those people seriously. If college football commands everybody's attention in five hundred years, I'll probably kill myself. Except if I'm still alive in five hundred years it will probably mean death has been eradicated and I physically wouldn't be able to kill myself so I'd have to find contentment in just sneering at all the Huskers and Huskies fans who crossed my path. "My path" meaning wherever my 500 year old sack of melting organic material has been tossed by the side of the road.

Booster Gold explains how his mother got sick and he needed money to pay for her care and since college football doesn't pay anything unless you're playing for a corrupt school system, he had to begin throwing games for the Rubenico Syndicate's gambling ring. He was eventually arrested and shamed in front of his mother. He had become addicted to money and fame and it was his downfall. Which is why he traveled back to the past to start over at earning money and fame.

Fresh off the high of changing the future for a model and her sister, Booster's ready to go whole hog and really cause a major paradox.

How come everything in Booster's future of 2462 somehow had its beginnings in 1992? Weird!

Booster still hasn't coped with his addiction to money and fame which is why he still believes that Rubenico ruined his life instead of understanding who really made the choices that led to his ruined life. He's like Jack Torrance up at the Overlook still blaming everybody else and the alcohol for his rage problem. Except Booster Gold doesn't have an out of control boiler in the basement acting as the metaphor for his lust for power and money.

Why yes, I did just recently finish a re-read of The Shining. Why do you ask?

Booster Gold's about to ruin Jack and Toby's hacker plan to bring down Rubenico by crashing straight into the currently not that corrupt home office of the corporation behind the B.O.O.K.IE machines. Blue Beetle, Fire, and Ice rush off to stop him while Guy Gardner remains behind to make sure these anarchists don't piss on the coffee table or leave rings on the toilet seat.

Here's Beetle, Fire, and Ice hustling into an elevator because I thought it looked charmingly goofy and old timey.

The goons from earlier have followed a trail of Toby's roller blade tracks and 3-D Doritos crumbs straight to Justice League Headquarters. They just happened to have brought their SCUBA gear along because everybody knows about the underwater airlock that connects to Beetle's stupid bug ship. And what luck! The Bug flies off after Booster just as the goons are ready to dive into the river! But nothing ever comes of this so forget I mentioned it. It's just page filler and another chance to humiliate Guy Gardner! I'll take no part in that!

No, ladies. It's far more likely Booster will be the cause of the future he so badly wants to change. That's just how time would have to work in a world with actual backwards time travel.

I specify backwards time travel because nobody is concerned with forward time travel. That's already how naturally do it!

Booster breaks into Rubenico's penthouse suite over his office complex intending to kill him. He only ever uses the last name because Booster doesn't even know this guy's name. He had nothing to do with the college football cheating scandal of 2462! But Booster thinks killing him will destroy the Rubenico's entire family history and save Booster Gold from ruining his past sometime in the future. There's only one major problem with his plan.

You're going to have to kill little girl Rubenico too, buddy.

Blue Beetle tells Booster Gold that everything he did in his past is his fault and everybody lives happily ever after. Except for the little girl who looks at Booster in rage and is probably thinking, "I will dedicate all of my family's lives until the Rubenicos are no more to destroy this man, this Booster Gold!" So, see? He just created his shitty future with his shitty attempt at changing the future. Too many people have Back to the Future brain.

The story ends with Guy Gardner giving Toby a thumbs up for hacking the Justice League elevator and trapping Beetle inside yelling, "Jane! Stop this crazy thing!" I don't get the 1993 or earlier reference which also makes no sense because the "crazy thing" is already stopped.

Can you tell I lost interest in this story right about the time it surpassed the length of a regular comic book? That's why I hate Annuals and Quarterlies and Specials. My attention span was molded in the flames of 24 page comic books. After that, I either need a new comic book, a snack, a nap, or six hours of video games. I definitely don't need three more short stories in the same comic book as the 38 page story! Fuck my life.

The next story stars Wally West and, I'm assuming, the human resources department of Justice League Europe.

Fucking pig.

The Flash winds up at a police convention because it's 1992, peak pro-cop era (it's the top of the mountain on a graph where the left descends back into a century of people hating cops and the right descends into hopefully a century or more of people, once again, hating cops). He's supposed to be giving a guest talk about who the fuck knows what. He's just a guy who accidentally got super powers. What does he know about policing? Is he going to give a lecture on how to beat a perp to within an inch of his life? On the best ways to obscure your body camera while you fist bump a Nazi? How to not worry about killing anybody at anytime because the District Attorney of every city is in the pocket of the police union and they'd never put a cop on trial (unless the incident was too public and then they'd be all, "Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Please keep providing witnesses for my non-police involved shooting trials!")? On the way in the building, one of the cops asks him if he'll investigate a death threat against the District Attorney and instead of saying, "Fuck the District Attorney," like a good citizen, he says, "Sure, I'll check it out in the morning." Little does he know, the morning will be too late!

While on the glass elevator up to his room, he happens to witness the assassination just outside the hotel. Or starts to witness it because he lives life so quickly that it looks like everything moves at slow motion to him which would be a really difficult way to live. He sees a muzzle flash in slow motion but what can he do? He's a prisoner of real time because he's in an elevator! Not like he'd ever smash through the glass side of the elevator to save a life. A normal window? Sure! He's done that dozens of times. But this is a classy joint's glass elevator! I guess he's just going to have to watch the DA's brains splatter across the face of his cop escort in super slow motion. I wonder what it's like to vomit at super speed?

Gross. He sweats super fast too.

Flash decides not to smash through the window because he thinks it'll cut him to ribbons. He can't vibrate through the glass because he lost that power after Crisis or Zero Hour or something. So now he can just sweat and watch the guy die. At least, that's what I'd do. Wally decides to spin like a tornado and blow the glass outward so that it cuts the people below him to ribbons while he runs around the shrapnel and then shoves the DA out of the way so fast that he's killed instantly from the shock of it.

The bullet got this close. How hard and fast does Wally have to push the man for the bullet to miss him? Fatally hard, no?

There I am arguing with comic book physics again! It's especially bad since I don't even know the real world physics of something like this and Mythbusters went off the air years ago. Wally has to outrun the bullet and then push the DA out of the way while still running that fast. He'd explode right through the guy, wouldn't he? It'd be The Boys all over again!

I suppose this conundrum of The Flash interacting with regular people at supersonic speeds was the reason for all the Speed Force shit. Just a cozy explanation for why super speedsters aren't harmed by the friction caused by their speed but especially why people they carry who have no super powered defenses against it can survive a superspeed trip down the road or across the ocean. I don't know anything about "the Speed Force" because I think it was invented while I wasn't reading comic books. At least it was invented while I wasn't reading The Flash comic books and I've always not been reading The Flash!

That was the whole story. What happens if The Flash gets stuck in an elevator? We all knew the answer was going to be he smashes his way out but I guess Mark Waid had to make it seem like it was a bit tougher than that. Good job, I guess.

The 3rd story stars Fire and Ice trapped in Bestwig, a new and imaginary nation formed after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, after a modeling job gone wrong. Their luggage was lost and the promoter didn't pay them so now they're stuck with no money and no clothes and no friends and no knowledge of the language of Bestwig. I know what you're thinking: "No clothes! Scan a picture, asshole!"

Well, they have almost no clothes.

I personally don't think Ice should be allowed to show so much lower belly because I have a schedule to keep this morning and I don't think I can move anything around to find time for a quick one off at the wrist.

Instead of getting the cash they need by fucking some rando like Fire almost does but realizes she'd never hear the end of it from Ice, the two sign up for a beauty contest judged by Great Old Ones where the prize is getting to fuck the Great Old Ones. They don't know that's the prize when they sign up for the contest or else Ice probably would have just let Fire fuck that rando. Ice wins but when she hears the prize, she decides she doesn't really want it. Not because she's a prude but because to mate with the Great Old Ones, a human must be shredded and ingested. So the whole thing goes Bea's tits up and Ice and Fire realize they need to figure out a new plan. I think that plan should be Fire flies them home with her ability to, you know, fly. But Fire thinks maybe the next plan is a wet t-shirt contest at a seedy bar. Unfortunately, the story ends before that can happen. Imagine how rock hard Ice's nipples would be as the water froze to her t-shirt and torso!

Hmm, maybe I can rearrange my schedule a little.

The final story stars Ted Kord on a blind date while Booster, Fire, and Wally stalk him. It's charming and fun and silly and the kind of comic book story I actually prefer. Sometimes I wonder why I read super hero comic books at all? I should simply stick to Love and Rockets and Elfquest and Box Office Poison and Strangers in Paradise and Cerebus. I much prefer the drama of daily life and complicated relationships and naked elves and jealous friends and lesbians kissing. But here I am reading hundreds and hundreds of super hero comic books. Has anybody ever thought, "I hate my life"? Is that an original thought I just had? I probably shouldn't even joke about that seeing as how I have a not-zero total of friends who have killed themselves. Sometimes it's funny to be all, "I wish I could die!" And then I think of Mark and Larry and Philip and my Uncle Dan and I get super sad. What's even sadder is that I'm probably forgetting some people!

Ted's date is super cute and she has a super fun job!

The date doesn't work out for a variety of reasons, one of which is that Ted's date's ex proposes to her at the end of it. But that's okay because Ted winds up going home with the waitress. Also Booster gets his comeuppance for being a terrible friend and spying on Ted just to make fun of him when Booster's car is totaled due to Wally smashing into it at super speed. Also Fire gets a date too. I think.

Does this mean she's happy this guy bought her drinks all night or disgusted?

Seriously, I'm really bad at signals. One time the girl I had a huge crush on in junior high passed me a note that said something about me being weird. I don't remember what I wrote on the note in response when I passed it back. But then she passed the note back and it said, "I love you anyways." And I just completely shut down and freaked out and, well, that never went anywhere. Also, I know that wasn't a signal but a blatant communication so I guess I'm terrible at all of it. Just everything that has to do with romantic shit. Surprise!

Justice League Quarterly #10 Rating: I did it! I'm through with these Quarterlies! I never have to read another 80 page comic book in my life! Um, what. The director just commented in my ear piece. Green Lantern Corps Quarterly? Are you sure?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

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!

Justice League Quarterly #8 (Autumn 1992)

A white man in a suit is to blame? Was that supposed to be difficult? Or simply rhetorical?

Every member of the team must be matching up with their equivalent on the other team. And if that's the case (which it is because that's how comic books work and I know all about comic books and how they work having read Scott McCloud's seminal work, Comic Books and How They Work), I'd be completely fucking offended if I was Lizard Cyclops. "Oh? A challenging match-up for me is Blue Beetle? Get the fuck out of here! A challenging match for Blue Beetle could be a toddler with a Chatter Telephone."

Some of you might be too young to know what a Chatter Telephone is but you'll know when I say one thing: Skinamarink. It's the image that made you think, "That fucking movie looks so creepy!" And then you went to see the movie and you were all, "WTF?! That silly phone was hardly in it at all! Also: WTF?!"

The advert on the inside cover of this issue is for Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest and it's absolutely fucking disgusting.

Can people stop fiddling about with farm animals? Leave the poor critters alone!

I don't know what Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest has to do with fucking barnyard animals but I just went on eBay to purchase a copy because it sounds fun!

The issue begins with Maxwell Lord firing most of the members of the Conglomerate by stamping out their faces on a picture of the group with his trusty "⊘" stamp. It's his most used stamp! I wish I had one for family photo albums with family members I no longer speak with because while they say they love me, they still vote Republican. It's simpler than using my mother's method which I discovered on a trip back home a few years: cutting people's faces out of the pictures and then acting like she doesn't know what happened when I decide to flip through the album until I finally realize that all the missing faces are attached to people my mother now despises and then grow deathly quiet and begin to worry that she might have something mentally wrong with her and if she's dangerous so later that night I block the door with a standing fan so that I don't wind up reverse-Psychoed by her.

Also, Maxwell Lord's clock has a weird way of displaying 10:27 AM.

Maybe artist Rod Whigham should have attended more than just art classes?

Okay, Max didn't fire any of the Conglomerate because he has nothing to do with them. They're run by his ex-wife Claire ("Are you a virgin, Claire? Why don't you just answer the question, Claire?" (You might think I'm quoting The Breakfast Club but I'm actually quoting Timothy Olyphant in Go!)). Maxwell Lord has simply offered the heroes better jobs through various shell companies he owns until they've all quit. He did this because he hates his ex-wife and he can't just let her have her own thing now that she divorced him for being a gigantic prick mind-controlled by a narcissistic satellite. Also, he dreamed up a huge arena event where the Justice League were to engage in a cage match with The Conglomerate and Max Lord liked the idea of wasting everybody's time by ruining the event. There's something seriously wrong with this guy. It wouldn't surprise me if he wound up murdering somebody some day!

Since Claire has lost all of her heroes, she quickly puts out some Craigslist want ads and gets several super hero applicants and a serial killer.

If you can't tell which one is the serial killer, might I advise you to delete all of your dating apps?

Claire's about to call the whole thing off when she gets one last applicant: The Plagiarizer! I mean, Norman the Doorman! He can open portals to parallel dimensions, particularly a faux Marvel dimension, and hire heroes from that world! Like the guys on the cover who may have caused you to think, "Haven't I seen these guys before? Is that Wolverine with a bow? Is that, um, the fast one? And the fire one with boobs?" If only Scott McCloud had a chapter in Comic Books and How They Work on recognizing Marvel parodies!

"Gentlemen"?! What a weird way to begin negotiations when at least three of them are presenting as women!

I might be off on how many are presenting as women because I'm too woke to see gender. My main chat up line is, "If you have a vagina, may I put my pee pee into it? And if not, you must have a butthole, no?" Sometimes it works and then they expect me to piss in their vagina and I have to be all, "No, no! That was slang for my ding dong!" And then they're all, "Oh! I've never tried a Hostess snack cake in my cake hole!" And then I have to run out and buy some Ding Dongs to shove inside them and by that time, I'm really not interested in orgasming. I'm just hungry.

What I'm trying to say is, yes, I've eaten a ding dong out of a bung hole.

The charity event where some superheroes bash some other superheroes for loads of money begins the next night at 7:60 PM on the dot.

I didn't think Ice was legally allowed to ride ice slides around! I guess if they're already stealing Marvel ideas with the guest heroes, why not go full Huck Finn?

The Flash begins making fun of The Conglomerate and their powers and Blue Beetle joins in because his super power must be a lack of self-awareness. But to their surprise, Claire introduces the new Conglomerate: Flamestar! Iceman! Spider-man! Mr. Fantastic! Hawkeye but also Wolverine! Quicksilver! And, um, Metamorpho! Blue Beetle shits his pants which makes the fourth time this issue. I just didn't mention the other three times because I was embarrassed for him.

"The Crawlies" must be how they say "The Skitters" in the Midwest.

Blue Beetle and Elongated Man lose the first battle because Blue Beetle doesn't have any powers but Cyclopean Spider-man has the proportionate strength of a scarab and destroys their flying disc. Blue Beetle thinks about making a stink but doesn't want to call attention to his lack of powers so he's all, "Um, good job! Well done! I was just about to do that same thing!"

Next up, Quicksilver versus The Flash in a power walking competition.

Shouldn't this be taking place in a mall?

While Quicksilver and Flash speed walk around the stadium, the other members of their groups shoot baseballs at them out of shoulder launchers. That doesn't seem too dangerous! Imagine speed walking at the speed of sound when you're suddenly smashed in the face by a hard rubber ball coming from the opposite direction at, well, any speed at all, really! One of these assholes is about to die.

It was Wally! He's dead now!

Quicksilver vibrates in that special way that causes the space between his atoms to become so large that other, more tightly packed atoms can pass right through. I know, it doesn't sound feasible, does it? You'd think that both objects would have to vibrate for that to work. I'm no scientist but I think I just found a flaw in the physics in this comic book! But then again, being that I just admitted to not being a scientist, you might be able to see the flaw in my reasoning. But do I even need to run any experiments to prove that something vibrating super fast wouldn't allow something not vibrating super fast (or, let's get wild here, is also vibrating super fast!) to pass right through it? Can't I just motion at the world around me and at the entire remembered history of mankind and say, "When has something that's usually solid ever passed through something else that's usually solid? And remained intact, I mean! Because, sure, birds have passed through jet engines but that's not exactly what we're talking about here, jerkface!" I suppose the theory is that gases and liquids can pass through gaps in solid material so if the solid material's gaps were wide enough (oh man I'm getting horny), solid material could also pass through solid material! Although it's easier to make your own gaps in solid material if you need to pass solid material through it which is why civilization invented doors and windows.

Anyway, Wally either isn't smart enough or isn't talented enough to vibrate correctly and gets beaned in the head with a baseball. Unless it's beamed. Maybe it's both. He doesn't die because he was hit in one of his non-critical body parts.

Blue Beetle was the one to blast Wally in the head so it might actually have been intentional. It's caused the Justice League to lose the second event and Max Lord to accuse Claire of cheating somehow. This is how you know somebody has cheated. They believe that the only way somebody else could have beaten them is if they cheated as well. But then they can't come right out and state that claim so they have to whine in the media every day for four years looking like a bitch-ass baby. Then a bunch of fuckshit losers believe their propaganda while screaming about free speech because some thirteen year old online said they shouldn't use the word "retard" supported them while pretending to believe it was for free speech but actually they just wanted to call people retards without being seen for the assholes they were. Then when their "team" somehow won because half of the country are either too stupid to live or fascist dickwagons, they cheer the ending of free speech for the people they don't like even though they were all, "Free speech for everybody!" Man, I fucking hate the freedom lovers. They're the ones who never actually understand freedom and just want the freedom to end the freedom of other people. Suck a boar's tit, you fucking imbeciles and bullies. Find some joy. Read a book. Eat a fucking vegetable.

Back at Justice League Headquarters, Hal Jordan drops by to watch the event with Oberon. Oberon claims the Marvel Like-a-Looks have been cheating like crazy but I don't know where he gets that. Who wrote the rules for this fucking thing? So it's cheating if you vibrate while speed walking or smash the floating disc of a rival? It's cheating to actually use all of the super powers at your disposal? Did Blue Beetle add that rule to the games?

While watching the game, Hal Jordan seems to recognize one of the members of the other team and he seems pretty shocked by it.

Or maybe this guy's dick just flopped out on the live feed.

Being an expert in all things Qwardian unless he's an expert on all things Earth-3 because who can fucking follow DC history when you're reading old books and you have to keep asking, "Wait? Is this Post Zero-Hour? Is this Pre-Crisis? Is this before or after John Byrne said Superman couldn't breathe in space? Did I just make that up? Are we all just making everything up as we go along? Is civilization just a bunch of slippery rocks on the cereal box?!", Hal Jordan recognizes The Conglomerate for what they really are: Qwardians! Or Earth-3ians! He tells Oberon they're new members of what had been known as the Crime Syndicate. Oh, that's why I brought up Hal being an expert on Qwardians because none of The Conglomerate are recognizably members of the Crime Syndicate like Owl Man or coke-snorting Ultraman or Johnny Superfast or Superwonderwoman or Cock Ring. He just realizes they're Qwardians following in the footsteps of the Earth-3 Crime Syndicate who are from Qward I mean. In other words, they're super duper evil and probably about to kill the Justice League.

Once Hal realizes who these jerks are, he flies off to warn the Justice League that they're in a real life or death battle. But at the same time, the Little Crime Syndicate drops the act and begins trying to kill the Justice League. So while Hal doesn't need to warn them, he probably can save their asses since he's the only real member of the Justice League in this fight. You know what I mean. Booster Gold? Blue Beetle? Fire? Ice? Those are all Giffen/DeMatteis era members of the Justice League. Hardly serious heroes! Oh, plus I forgot Elongated Man because why would I want to remember him? The only real power members on the team are Power Girl and Wally West and they're too inexperienced and full of diet soda to be truly awesome.

This is for all the perverts who have a squish kink.

Realizing the Justice League can't beat The Crime Conglomerate, Max Lord enlists the help of Norman the Doorman to send the Conglomerate back to Earth-Qward. So he makes a door and Green Lantern (with the help of friendship! Like Sailor Moon!) pushes them all back through the door and it's over. Everybody thinks it was a fun match and Claire's corporate sponsors are thrilled by the publicity. Fuck. That means The Conglomerate will probably show up again in one of these fucking Quarterlies. And I don't mean a cool version like this Crime Syndicate version! They'll probably be back to their boring roster of Big Silent Guy and Vibe's Less Popular Cousin and Gypsy. Ugh!

The 1st back-up story stars Power Girl and Flash. That probably means it'll be eight pages of Wally West begging Power Girl to touch his dick. Unless it's seven pages of that and one page of Power Girl screaming, "Fine!" and then ripping it off.

Power Girl and The Flash attend some kind of society gala in London. I don't know what it's for. I read what it was for but then I turned the page and now I've forgotten what it's for and I'm not spending any extra time reading this comic book by turning back to the previous page. It's a good thing I don't mind living in ignorance about almost every aspect of life. Personally, I wish I was ignorant of even more than I currently am ignorant. Why couldn't I do as Robert Frost told me and stayed gold? Why did I have to lose my virginity to that hussy?! That hussy was Linnea Quigley and "losing my virginity" was jerking off to her dancing naked on a grave in Return of the Living Dead. I lost my virginity a lot when I got that movie on video tape. When I technically did lose my virginity, the women I was with were always, "Why do you only last exactly 48 seconds every time?" Because I had to learn to nut before the scene was over so I didn't have to stop and rewind! Duh!

"Sir. My tits are down here."

Some Vincent Price looking motherfucker with a stick the size of Big Ben up his backside give Wally a tongue lashing as they enter the party. He hates America and its superheroes and believes the Justice League has just brought trouble to London the way the Titans brought trouble to New York. He's not wrong so I think he might be the protagonist of this story.

Before the party really gets swinging, some woman named Rook in a bird costume drops through the glass ceiling with her five robot birdmen. See? Vincent Price was right! I hope he gives them an overly long glare and a really savage tut after this.

Rook slaps some brain scramblers onto the heads of Flash and Power Girl leaving them helpless like a baby.

Power Girl's words! I think that aphorism is ableist!

Babies are only helpless because we put them in cribs and diapers. If they weren't restrained in those ways, they could poop as they rolled or crawled around and they stick everything in their mouth so they'd eventually eat something nutritious. I suppose they'd be helpless if a herd of boars came charging through but what are the chances of that when you leave your baby in the yard to fend for itself? Like 10 percent?

Luckily some twat named Peter Cannon has also been invited to this party. He's actually the superhero Thunderbolt. I know what you're thinking: Who? You know, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt! Yeah, that's all I know about him too. I bet only huge comic book nerds bought his comic books. I don't know why he's suddenly starring in a Justice League book. I guess DC wanted more than just huge nerds to buy his comic books! This story should have been called, "Hey, Comic Book Fans! There's a Hero Named Thunderbolt! He's Super Cool! You Should Read His Comic Books!" Instead they named it "Ballroom Blitz" because that name hadn't been overused by 1992 at all!

Thunderbolt also gets a scrambler jammed on his head but he doesn't immediately start shitting all over babies and their flaws. Power Girl warns him the jammer cuts out super powers but he's all, "But I don't have any super powers!" And every reader who was beginning to think Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt was kind of cool just let out a long, "Awwww! Boring!"

He's lying. If that were true, he'd be Green Lantern instead of Hal Jordan.

I don't know why Peter Cannon has cum all over his face in those panels. Maybe that's what happens when you fully exert your will. Your face has an orgasm.

Power Girl and Flash, being without any will what-so-ever, could not take the jammers off themselves. So Thunderbolt removes their jammers so that they can save the day, having super powers and all. I don't even know why anybody without super powers would bother with a costume. Stupid Thunderbolt. Moronic Blue Beetle. Idiotic Batman.

Rook gets away because she's probably going to be one of Thunderbolt's arch enemies in his new monthly comic debuting next month! Fuck! I was tricked into reading a fucking advertisement! Do I even dare to read the next two stories?! What if I get tricked again? I'll be the laughingstock of the Internet! Better to just not believe anything at all and become a super cynical piece of shit who argues about everything with anybody I can find!

In the third story, Fire spends eight pages trying to get Max laid. She finally resorts to setting him up with his first wife and it goes well. Or poorly. I don't know. It doesn't fucking matter. It was a pre-Breakdowns flashback! Who the fuck cares about Maxwell Lord to care enough about his sex life anyway?

The last story stars the Global Guardians so I just re-read the Maxwell Lord getting laid story. It wasn't that good but it was probably better than another Global Guardians story. Why do the Justice League Quarterly team keep trying to make the Global Guardians happen?! Things were going so well when they'd lost three members but now all their members have come back to life! They're moving backwards! Maybe the Mermaid hasn't come back to life. I don't remember. But then again that might be what this story I'm definitely not going to read is about. Guess we'll never know!

Justice League Quarterly #8 Rating: Jesus fucking Christ I can't believe I keep reading these things! Just two more. Keep repeating to yourself: Just two more. Just two more. It's almost over, buddy! We're gonna get through this!

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?"