This is not my standard review of a "near myth" work, since I'm not going to dissect in detail the stories collected here, which appeared in a couple of JUSTICE LEAGUE titles in or around the period when Grant Morrison transformed the title. Most stories in the collection were written by Mark Waid, who in my view has always been a sort of dull version of whoever he chose to emulate, be it Kurt Busiek with KINGDOM COME or Morrison with his follow-up JLA stories. Thus Waid is significant only as a negative reflection of Morrison, and, for that matter, the JLA writer whom Morrison most challenged during his run: original Silver Age scribe Gardner Fox.
In this mythcomics post I recapitulated the history of the dominant writing-strategies of Silver Age DC Comics vs. Silver Age Marvel Comics thusly:
The JUSTICE LEAGUE comics title of the 1960s has never received a lot of respect even among Silver Age comics-fandom, and one reason may be that the early comic, for several years written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Mike Sekowsky, is perceived as being too "old school." Most team-features in both the Golden and the Silver Ages followed what I'll call a "plot-based model," in which "character moments" are kept to a minimum, as the author concentrates on the events of the plot, usually showing how the members of the team work to overcome some common enemy. The plot-model seems like an easy row to hoe, as indicated by countless spoofs of the model, but DC Comics pursued it almost exclusively, even when Marvel Comics in the 1960s advanced a "character-based model" that over time become the dominant paradigm.
Calling those strategies "the plot-based model" and "the character-based model" was a bit of an oversimplification, though many fans over the years have used similar terminology. Certainly the raconteurs who wrote superhero comics in the early Silver Age did not intend to follow such rigorous models; they were in large part "riffing," trying to find profitable ways to re-invent superheroes for a post-Comics Code readership. DC Comics started its efforts with re-imagined revivals of its most successful costumed characters from the 1940s. But Marvel, the rebranded version of the entity variously called "Timely" and "Atlas," had fewer such major successes, so that the key Marvel creative personnel had to create more original characters. DC initiated the Silver Age with single-character features like The Flash, Green Lantern, and (arguably) the Martian Manhunter, and then launched a team of said heroes in the Justice League. Marvel's superhero line was not initiated until roughly five years after DC's example, and it began with a quasi-emulation of JUSTICE LEAGUE, a team book made up of all-original characters, and only within the next year did the company launch such single-character superhero features as Hulk, Ant-Man and Thor.
While no reader's experience of the elusive "sense of wonder" in SF/fantasy is paradigmatic, team-books arguably oblige the creators to increase the quantity of SF/fantasy concepts in order to provide multiple threats for multiple protagonists. Thus it's my experience that the first Silver Age team-books, the JUSTICE LEAGUE of Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky and the FANTASTIC FOUR of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, offered the greatest opportunities for stimulating the readers' sense of wonder. Lee and Kirby certainly did not neglect the "plot-based model" of superhero scripting in conceiving of their menaces, whether they were strong concepts like Galactus or weak ones like the Enfant Terrible. Fox, for his part, concentrated on plot more when he conceived of foes for the Justice League, but there are interesting if minor character-moments even in the earliest JLA stories.
I've sometimes expressed to other fans that in terms of raw creativity I deemed Fox's JUSTICE LEAGUE the equal of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, and the reaction I got was usually a negative one. What I believe those fans were favoring in the Marvel team-title was the fact that Stan Lee perfected a strategy of building on his concepts so that they began to seem like part of a larger tapestry of interconnected wonders. Most of Fox's concepts were confined to whatever story they first appeared in, and so they had less cumulative effect than, say, the recurring concepts appearing in DC's single-character features (Green Lantern's "Guardians of the Universe," for example).
Raw creativity, of course, is just one element in communicating the sense of wonder from author to reader; an element that gives the reader the impression of "richness and profusion of images," as referenced in this essay. Based on my formulations there, said profusion provides the potential for the development of fantastic content into the even richer forms of myth, but the actuality of mythicity stems from articulating the raw material into organized patterns of conceptual thought.
As noted above, Lee and Kirby had their share of so-so concepts, but FANTASTIC FOUR became a testing-ground for all of their best"sense of wonder" ideas. In contrast, what keeps Fox's JLA concepts from attaining their greatest possible development is the fact that each of them was largely isolated from all the others.
Grant Morrison's JUSTICE LEAGUE is a vision of what the Fox-cosmos might have looked like if many of the one-off concepts had been given the same inter-referentiality seen in the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR comics. In contrast, Mark Waid's JLA feels like a regression to Fox's least inspired concepts. Waid trundles out abstruse concepts with potential, all right. In the titular story of the collection TOWER OF BABEL, the Leaguers are put through a series of transformations just as weird as any Fox ever devised. Said transformations are brought about when Batman's enemy Ra's Al Ghul implements strategies Batman himself devised to nullify the abilities of his fellow heroes in case any of them were suborned by evildoers. But even though Waid devotes considerable space to the character-conflicts that evolve as a result of this predicament, he doesn't really invest the proceedings with an independent "sense of wonder," as Morrison did with comparable concepts. In many ways Waid resembles Fox at his least inspired, when he simply churned out this or that concept to meet a deadline, and so failed to make those particular concepts emotionally resonant. Thus "Tower of Babel" is not much better, in terms of evoking the sense of wonder, than an inferior Fox-tale like the 1966 weird transformation tale "The Plague That Struck the Justice League."
Ironically, even though in his JUSTICE LEAGUE stories Morrison eschewed the soap opera dramatics that one often associated with the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, he came closer to the emotional resonance Gardner Fox successfully executed in stories like "The Justice league's Impossible Adventure." Thus Waid fails both the tests of good drama and sense-of-wonder in his lack of inspired work.
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