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It is pretty amazing.

Hawkman's archaeological dig team is slaughtered by giant scorpions and he is impaled by a poisonous one.

Elongated Man and Flash recovered more quickly but got off no easier.


The Flash was gored from behind by a rhino man!

Elongated Man's was especially gruesome. He was pecked by a hundred birds, formerly men, with cuts all over and then he falls into a steam press at the laundry place he was investigating and the owner closes it on him pressing Elongated Man flat with steam. ouch.

(btw ... i think the bird men got the short end of the stick in the transformation ... Whale Man ... Lion Man ... Panther Lady ... and like regular birds wtf not even bird men)

We almost lost Wonder Woman, she was knocked out by a whale man and nearly drowned ... but Supes rescued her and gave her mouth to mouth. Opinions vary as to whether this was a good thing or not.

In fact, Aqua Man Zatanna and Supes go to get revenge but they get off real lucky because the animal men devolve further into animals. Aqua Man takes down the whale man pretty handily and Firestorm gets lots of panel time.

oh I almost forgot, after all that Hawkman decided it wasn't such a good idea to take separate vacations and he and Shayera reconciled!

That's not all, there is way more, way!

And Shayera is having NONE of it. none. Don't tell her to "lean in". You'll a face full'a mace.

There are good summaries here ...

http://jlasatellite.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/justice-league-of-america-222-jan-1984.html

Does anyone remember this gem?



IIRC, It was a pretty cool Outsiders Justice League mash up (with a few amazing pages of the Teen Titans drawn by George Perez and full of action!)

PB gives a pretty good summary of the story a few posts above.

There's another one here -

http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/JLA:_Beasts

The page PB links to above also includes one of the gory (by 80s Comics Code Authority standards) scenes that most people remember the story for - the sympathetic Beastmen hero character having his head manually ripped off by the villain so that the poor guy's blood drips down his arm. (Love how angry those four JLAers look on that last page though! You tell him Supes!)

This page includes some of the panels that disturbed me so greatly as a kid -

http://jlasatellite.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/justice-league-of-america-221-dec-1983.html

- A wealthy, respectable lady practically orgasming as some poor guy is ripped apart in front of her, spraying her with his blood.

- Elongated Man ambushed and burned and slashed by the birds and their allies.

- And the most disturbing panel of all, poor Rick the archaeology student getting gutted just off panel while his blood drips down his out-stretched arm in the foreground. And just when you think Hawkman's arrived to save those last three on the next page, he gets graphically impaled through the back by one of the scorpion men too, with the implication being that those last three students get killed too. This was not the sort of JLA tale I was used to as a kid!

Nowadays, at Dan Didio's DC Comics, that sort of story would be too tame for even an All-Ages book.

O M G. I forgot about that blood lusty lady in the horrible green dress ... that disturbed me way more than the actual violence.

Not to mention "look what it's doing to Rick" implies it is doing more than just chomping him apart. Poor Rick. Rick needs a come back.


It was written well, (and drawn great) I think the suspense and the tension were super high, which is what people try to achieve with gore or violence but seem to always miss.


Poor Rowl, that was gruesome.

It is almost a Teen Titans issue. But written much better and much more suspensful.

I love Zatanna's angry look! She looks a bit like Grumpy Cat!

It was a delight/terror ... watching her bravely go in disguise into the (literal) Lion's den.

Thanks for the summaries and spoilers, Blacula, Peebz and thothkins!



This was one of those I remembered too. That whole gladiatorial arena thing was just terrible. I was very disturbed by the innocents being forced to fight.

I also remember wishing very hard that the League had taken all of those rich spectators to jail. The nerve of them, enjoying the sight of people getting slaughtered! Was that story point ever closed off?

I also remember Aquaman shutting off the whale-man's mind. That was amazing!

I remember that now too. That was just terrible! When I first read this issue I was only a few years younger than those kids would have been. And those deaths were very bloody and violent.

It was rare for me to want the good guys to win so badly!

Do you think Hawkman was fired after that?

I think leading an archaeological dig in which all your students get slaughtered is a pretty severe offense.

Maybe he saved the last 3 standing (I like to think he did), and so they only put him on probation

Director of Antiquities: You're fired Hall! On your way out send in Kent Nelson Sr and that Rex Mason fellow, will you? It will be nice to know nothing can go wrong again.

"Move over Wonder Woman, I'm the leader!"






Shayera ...

So Fire and Ice are due to show up in JL 3000, alongside Beetle and Booster...

Sigh, forget that. Let's look at this picture to remind us of happier times!

The early JLI era!

It's an odd pic. Drawn with the cast of the first dozen issues that I liked. But drawn when it had already shifted too much into Bwah ha ha territory, hence the interesting poses.

And by the time Captain Atom and Rocket Red had joined, several of these members had left - Doctor Light, Captain Marvel, Doctor Fate, IIRC. Plus I don't think Big Barda showed up in costume during that era.

Do I dare admit this?

After I made a lot of noise several months ago in the "So When does the JLA Get Good?" thread about how the JLA are not the Avengers, how they should always be about the most powerful characters, and how the concept doesn't even *work* for a monthly series...

Well, I've recently started having a look back at one of the most reviled eras of JLA -- Post-"Breakdowns," Post-Zero Hour, Pre-Grant Morrison...yes, I'm talking about the dreaded "Extreme Justice" era...and...and...I dismissed it and the time, but now I...I...I...like it.

It started out strictly for research purposes, okay?

Please don't judge me too harshly.

Whhooo, now that's a hard sell! I mean, the art alone.....

Well i just looked it up and saw it had Booster and Amazing Man and Plastique and I'm intrigued...

Lardy, funny you should say that about the art. I mean, it's all a matter of individual taste, but I find mediocre 90s art, with its bad imitations of the Image founders, a lesser evil than mediocre 80s art (where DC was dominated by bad Joe Staton imitations and Marvel was dominated by bad Al Milgrom imitations.)

Set, glad you're intrigued.

Here's where I stand at the moment of the three JLA titles of this era:

"Extreme Justice" -- I like all the early-to-mid 90s cliches in both art and story (though that wasn't entirely the case back in the day.) Besides, this team has my beloved Maxima, it restores Ronnie Raymond as Firestorm, it tries to restore Blue Beetle's credibility, and it tries to undo the whole Monarch mess that was created a few years earlier (basically, Captain Atom is a clone and Monarch is the real Nathaniel Adam.) And as Set already mentioned, there's also Plastique, Amazing Man, and Booster Gold.

"Justice League America" -- Here, the art (by Chuck Wojtkiewicz) is the most attractive aspect; it's cleaner and smoother than most superhero art of that era. The big problem is Gerard Jones's scripts, which can't seem to decide whether they want to continue the light-heartedness of the JLI or the ham-handed bombast more typical of Marvel and Image. Also, Jones never lets go of one of his worst habits on his previous book, JLE -- he obviously has no faith in these B-, C-, and D-Listers ability to carry the book on their own, that he keeps dragging in guest stars to do the "heavy lifting." Having said all that, it is kinda nice to see some characters I like (i.e. Fire, Obsidian, Nuklon, Power Girl, Metamorpho) even if Jones mischaracterizes them to a one.

"Justice League Task Force" -- I gave up on this one after one issue. Ironically, the writer is the talented and distinctive Christopher Priest! But I have to admit that, while Priest is often great at writing superhero solo books, he just refuses to give even a speck of gravitas to superhero teams (remember, in an early issue of Priest's justifiably celebrated Black Panther run, he struck a rare sour note when he went out of his way to treat Firestar as a joke when the Busiek-era Avengers guest-starred? That really bothered me.)

From the solicitation for Bendis's first Justice League issue:


Well, blow me down.

Let's hope Naomi eats 'er spinach.

Arf, arf.

I'm shocked. I just never thought Brutus would turn against me like that. Et tu, Brute?

Special guest star Popeye will be the League's new secret member!