Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Fanfic Lady Looks Back (Currently looking at Defenders #1-91)

Ordway rocked, and his JSA fill-ins have proven that he still has it after all these years.

Roy certainly had his flaws as a writer, but I think that by this point he had overcome some of them (compare his female characters in Avengers to his female characters in All Star and Infinity) and I can live with the rest. It's not easy being the first writer to do certain things, it puts one's work under a microscope. I can certainly find plenty to criticize in his work from the late 80s on, but at this point he still had it. The first two-thirds or so of Infinity Inc. was kind of his last hurrah before he started going through the motions full-time.

I'll grant you that. RT was certainly ahead of the curve vs. many of his contemporaries. I found his work tantalizing with great ideas, but just not as well executed as I would hope for.

If you'd like to share your thoughts on Roy's Avengers work, particularly the first two years or so of his Silver Age run, your presence is more than welcome at the All Avengers Thread, Kent.

I remember really liking the Infintors appearance in All-Star Squadron, and the first twelve-part arc or whatever of the series was pretty good, but thinking it was kind of sporadic after that.

Perhaps even more than All-Star Squadron, it was pretty much destroyed by Crisis pulling the rug out of it's basic premise.

I haven't read much of his Avengers. I remember years ago, if I'd critique the Great Roy in front of Marvel Zombies, they'd always say, "Well, you obviously haven't read 'Even an Android Can Cry'" (or whatever its name was). Time and again, it was always pointed out as his high-water mark by his fans.

When I finally read it, all I could think was, "what an over-rated piece of crap!" Not bad for its era, of course, but hardly anything to rave about.

I'm sure I've read other Avengers stories by him, but they didn't remain in memory.

EDE, agreed re: Crisis.

Ideally, 80s JSA kids would have been the tail end of a second-generation; there should have been a whole batch of baby boomer super-heroes in the 60s and 70s, and the Infinitors should have had to earn their place challenging their older peers, not the Greatest Generation heroes (that generational conflict seemed out of place in the 80s, but would have worked perfectly in Vietnam era). They could have been the true heirs of the JSA, having sidestepped said generational conflict.

Obviously Roy was only interested in a modern-day counterpart to All-SS, but I wish he (or DC) had taken a wider angle lens and constructed a full Earth-2 timeline (with no Crisis to end it, of course).

Earth-2 could this have been a repository for whatever didn't work in the time-challenged, always-current Earth-1, including a 60s Earth-2 JLA, TT, Doom Patrol, etc.

I liked the infinitors. power wise they were a really good mix of skills and abilities. and they have oen of the only telepaths in the DCU.

i haven't read the books in a long time, so can't comment. but wish there was an edgy (ok not DCU edgy cause people lose arms and stuff) but an adult look at this powerful inheritors of a super hero legacy, as a team. like a mini-series or 'ultimate' infinity inc. .... elseworlds. somebody who would just take this group and make a big story outta them. i always thought this team had great world saving scale potential but it never really went there. kingdom come was close. but we never got to see them mature as a great team.

too bad they are half dead and the rest are either evil or messed up.

re: the other thread.

Is obsidian really back to normal, he's seems kinda simple minded. like a guard dog. and he's never in Ted (arrgh Tod?) form anymore. but i've missed the past six issues.

Really, Infinity Inc. is what the Justice League should have been. It just makes a whole lot more sense.

Of course when does the DCU ever make sense?

I loved the first story arc on Infinity Inc. Crisis derailed both this and All-Star Squadron. Destroying Earth 2 and shoehorning the characters all into one earth was a mistake in my opinion.

I never ever had a hard time figuring out what was happening...all it tookk was a couple word explanation in the beginning of the book, but that's an argument for another day.

Ordway's art was beautiful here, and Roy didn't do too bad with the story. Nothing groundbreaking, but solid in and of itself.

You've got to wonder how different things would've been if in 1956 DC decided to introduce the son of the original Flash or something.

You guys all make good points. I agree 100% with some but must beg to differ with others.

I'd love to see the kind of legacy story that Power Boy describes. It could have been written by Robinson/Goyer or Johns/Goyer back when Robinson and Johns were...y'know, good.

I agree with Rocky that the next generation of heroes taking on the mantle of their parents makes a lot more sense than the JLA.

I disagree with Eryk and Dev about the effects of Crisis. I wouldn't say it destroyed the book. Temporarily wounded it with too many Crisis crossovers and the abysmal "JSA trapped in the Ragnarok cycle" compromise that Roy struck with DC, but I feel that the book did start to get back on its feet down the line. What I think really hurt it was Todd McFarlane's departure. You can feel the energy and the drive leaking out of the book in subsequent issues. If only McFarlane had at least stuck around through the conclusion of the "Hector goes evil" subplot, I think Infinity Inc would be better regarded.

Kent's view on generations also clashes with my view. I see nothing wrong with bringing the generation gap into the mix. I could relate to it, because my conflicts growing up were less with family members of my parents' generation than with family members of my grandparents' generation. That's why I've never been thrilled with the media's near-deification of my grandparents generation -- they weren't ALL the greatest!

Keep the comments coming, guys. This is good stuff.

Ha ha ha ha. I love "Even An Android Can Cry", but I can sorta see how it and Roy's other Silver Age stories might not impress those who, unlike me, are not fully invested in the minutiae of the Avengers mythos. To each their own.

more make believe stuff:

so if ... they were put in continuity at the Crisis moment, (aged) they could even be like 'uncles and aunts' to Superman and Wonder Woman's generation.... our current JLA (which the JSA - Alan Scott's era seems to be now)

maybe even a team of just 'watchmen' type crime fighters cause big style super heroics went out of style for a time. Since they were outlawed during Mcarthey era politics.

kinda like the ones the kept the flame alive without getting major popularity. so even if they never got their 'save the world' stories at least they would play a part in history until the JLA came along to return the hero to mass popularity.

idk. as it is now, (they are slightly older than the donna and dick's titans? but younger than the JLA ..even Zatanna ... who should be their age. or she is their age but she's just cooler??)

i'd like to see them at least have some comraderie or something. is Atom Smasher friends with Jade? at all?

yet Lyta and Hector are dead (right? can't keep up myself!) and they seemed to be the core.


there must be at least a thanksgiving or christmas special in all of this somewhere for DC.

I personally didn't say destroyed, I used the term derailed for oth Infinity and All-Star Squadron. I talked about them destroying Earth 2, which I felt was a mistake.

Infinity did get a boost from Todd's art, and the intro of Mr. Bones and Helix. After a while though, it just started to loose steam and was cancelled shortly thereafter.

It's also interesting that the '60s super-hero parody "The Inferior Five" was based on the concept of children of World War II-era heroes attempting to take on their parents' roles, with limited success, is, in concept so close to Infinity, Inc., yet was published 17 years earlier. Dumb Bunny in particular, Athena Tremor, daughter or Princess Power, is certainly not that big a leap from Fury, Hippolyta Trevor, daughter (as originally conceived) of Wonder Woman.

Which brings up another point: I thought the Miss America retcon for Wonder Woman's place in the JSA was probably the best solution available at the time. In the first few years following the Crisis, they were left with huge holes that they had to patch up and, that we ended up with a lot of attempts to fix things, some of which worked and some didn't, but without those fixes, DC probably would have just scrapped the JSA (and by extension, Infinity) and the Legion completely.

Sorry, Dev. It's hard to keep all the details straight when one is trying to answer several posts at once. And I agree with you about Earth-2. Earth-2 was awesome and should never have been destroyed.

Rocky, very good point about how, despite the questionable quality of some of those fixes, they were absolutely necessary given the circumstances. That said, I still think that they could have come up with something better than the JSA trapped in the Ragnarok cycle. For some reason I can't explain, that one in particular has always grated with me.

I suppose they have been a lot more vague about the age of the former Infinitors. Believably, Jade and Obsidian's powers could keep them young. They're vague about how old Rick is, except that he is one of the more experienced heroes in the All-Stars title. Atom-Smasher seems the only one who is still portrayed as relatively young. The others are dead or rarely appear.

I've said this before, but I really think that a major opportunity missed after Crisis was giving all of the DCU a real-time continuity. It didn't happen, of course, mainly because they don't want the "Big Three" to be too old to be believable--except that Superman is an alien and Wonder Woman is an Amazon. They could both believably remain youthful for decades. Yet another reason why I don't particularly like Batman!

Batman + Lazarus Pit = not a problem!

Wrote this one after I logged off last night, cut and pasted it just now:

INFINITY INC. #2 - “A Gauntlet Hurled”

Credits: Roy Thomas, co-plotter, scripter, and editor - Dann Thomas, co-plotter - Jerry Ordway, penciller - Mike Machlan, inker

Plot: Power Girl and Huntress break up a fight between the youngsters and some civilians at a fast-food place, and they all go off together. At the JSA brownstone, Brainwave turns out to be an illusion disguising...Brainwave Junior! Who has information on the evil Ultra-Humanite, but petulantly walks away without disclosing it. Star-Spangled Kid takes Brainwave Junior to Power Girl’s apartment, where the other youngsters have gathered, and proposes that they all form a new team – Infinity Inc. Just then, the Ultra-Humanite launches a psionic attack from limbo, knocking several of the youngsters out cold and influencing Jade, Obsidian, Fury, Silver Scarab, Northwind, and Nuklon into entering a capsule that takes them back in time to 1942. Brainwave Junior recovers in time to hitch a ride into the past, but is deposited separately from the others.

Thoughts: The extended sequence set in the fast-food place where the fully-costumed youngsters get harassed when all they wanna do is enjoy their burgers and fries is one of my favorite Infinity Inc moments – funny, scary, and sad all at once. We also get bite-sized origins of Power Girl and Huntress, beautifully and economically rendered by Ordway. PG and Huntress are also the main focus of the first letter to be published in the Infinity Inc letter-column, the work of one Gary Thompson of Dearborn, MI, whose insights into and ideas for Kara and Helena are much better than what we’ve ultimate seen of those characters. Another day, I’ll post excerpts from this letter.

INFINITY INC. #3 - “Solomon Grundy Goes Hollywood”

Credits: Roy Thomas, co-plotter, scripter, editor - Dann Thomas, co-plotter - Jerry Ordway, penciller - Mike Machlan, inker

Plot: Power Girl, Huntress, and Star-Spangled Kid regain consciousness just before the youngsters return from their time-travel adventure (recapped here; full story in previously published issues of All Star Squadron.) Star-Spangled Kid shares his origin and elaborates on his plans for Infinity Inc, including a move to Los Angeles, where everybody heads to, only to end up getting in a tussle with man-monster Solomon Grundy. JSA-ers Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Robin, Hawkman, and Atom are ambushed and apparently drowned, all part of a plan by...Superman??

Thoughts: After an awkward start to establish exactly where the first appearance of Infinity Inc took place (Roy, Roy, Roy, you don’t have to cross every T and dot every I) the story picks up considerably. Ordway draws an awesome Solomon Grundy, and setting the battle to the accompaniment of the nursery rhyme from which Grundy got his name (in an old-fashioned font, no less) was very clever. There’s also the scene where Lyta and Hector sneak off for some romance only to be rudely interrupted by Grundy – like its Baxter sisters LSH and NTT, this was a surprisingly sexy superhero book.

I don't have that many issues of Infinity Inc., but I have to thank it for one thing.

Marcie Cooper.

I kinda love when characters have their own little worlds built into their origins.

Northwind supposedly comes from a secret race of Feitherans or something, that could serve as fodder for a new little subculture, exotic setting or source of new character ideas (assuming they aren't brought into a scene just to get blown up!). Edit: Nevermind, just checked the Wiki, blowed up, built a new city, then it got blowed up to. Typical!

Ice, from the Justice League, also had a secret land of ice people somewhere, and Gorilla City is still hanging around, as a possible source of new ideas.

Shame. Feitheira was cool, especially when Jerry Ordway drew it.

I'm pretty sure Feitheira is from a Golden Age Hawkman story that Roy was able to showcase his immense knowledge of Golden Age history with by introducing Northwind.

Just like any planet or city in comics, it'll get blown up from time to time, but it will always make a comeback.