This Gardner Fox JLA tale, while not as well-thought-out as the classic "Justice League's Impossible Adventure," nevertheless possesses a good myth-discourse which upgrades the standard "problem" of heroes overcoming villains to a "conundrum" about how that scenario can be validated.
The first page of the narrative proper begins with the heroes of the JLA celebrating their triumph over some stony-faced aliens. Batman opines that evildoers ought to realize that they have no chance against the forces of justice. J'onn J'onzz counters by saying that it's because such menaces exist that "they make us heroes." Just then, all of the heroes' bodies dissolve. An attack by one of those menaces?
No, all the heroes seen here are proxies for an alien being, the Tornado Champion-- who in some ways is using the Justice League of his comic-book universe much as the readers of the title do: to celebrate the virtues of goodness. The Champion had one exploit as "The Tornado Tyrant," menacing the planet Rann until being defeated by Adam Strange (also written by Fox in MYSTERY IN SPACE #61). He comes to admire the Justice League so much that he wants to emulate them exactly, and so he creates an exact duplicate of Planet Earth, except that he himself embodies the Justice Leaguers so that he can experience the inevitable triumph of good over evil.
However, Tornado-Fanboy doesn't overcome the evil in his own nature quite that easily. From "the ocean depths" (or maybe from the collective subconscious of the tornado-species), a duplicate Tornado-Being manifests, and this new Tyrant masters all of the Champion's ersatz Leaguers, mostly by either undermining their powers or turning them against one another. But before the Tyrant can eradicate the heroes, the Champion re-absorbs its component parts (using a "tornado-ship" like the one seen in the ADAM STRANGE story). He then decides that the only way he can formulate a counter strategy is by traveling to Earth to find out how the real heroes would cope. This means that he must, in essence, take the part of his villainous self, splitting off a part of his Champion-self to create a phony Tornado Tyrant to bedevil the real heroes.
Now, simplistic though all these complications may sound, Fox set himself a conundrum: to come up with a rationale as to WHY good should always be able to conquer evil. Six years later, a STAR TREK episode, "The Savage Curtain," tries to do something similar, though the conundrum there was to explain the difference between good and evil to an alien being. But how does one provide an answer for a foregone conclusion dictated by nothing but a literary trope?
And Fox's answer to his own conundrum-- is continuity.
So the Real Leaguers are defeated by the Fake Tyrant, just as the Fake heroes were defeated by the Real Tyrant. But unlike the imitation heroes, who only enjoy the simulacra of real lives, the real crusaders have gained a wealth of experience contending with menaces-- rather than, say, conjuring up faux enemies that can be vanquished easily.
Thus, while the heroes collect their thoughts, they apply a certain amount of ratiocinative deduction. They debate as to whether the Tyrant's proxies might have been seeking to eradicate centers of atomic power to cover some vulnerability, but then dismiss the idea as untenable. However, the reason Author Fox included that blind alley-clue was to lead the heroes to a correct conclusion, even though only the real-world readers know why it's correct. The Tornado Being is not created by radiation, but it does have a dual personality-- and Green Lantern, drawing on one of his previous adventures (actually written by Fox's colleague John Broome), chooses to use "anti-energy" on the Tyrant as he did on a previous enemy that was a split-personality resulting from an atomic mishap. This strategy works for the Earth-heroes and destroys the Fake Tyrant. Yet the same process can't work for the observing Tornado Champion. If he tries to create anti-energy to destroy his evil self, he'll destroy himself as well.
But the Champion still prevails, by using another form of continuity. Since his proxies can't create anti-energy, they transport the Real Tyrant into the universe from which anti-energy came: "the anti-matter universe"-- which I assume is also a bit of continuity Fox also derived from Broome's GREEN LANTERN, though Fox doesn't explicitly reference Broome's "world of Qward."
If this was Fox's intention-- omitted to save space or reduce confusion in his young audience-- this would be doubly impressive, because in Broome the anti-matter world is also one dominated by evil-- and thus sending the Tyrant there is like consigning the "devil" in one's own nature back to perdition.
I should note that in his Silver Age career Fox showed a penchant for stories in which he presented secondary scenarios in which characters "re-wrote" whatever initial scenarios Fox placed them in. I see this penchant as contributory to the way this Fox story solves the conundrum of "how can good always conquer evil:" by recognizing that this question itself is a literary trope, and that it can only be "solved" by invoking other tropes.
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