The Ten Dumbest Enemies of The Justice League Part 2: Someone's Dad

#2 – The Justice League versus a Family of Four

The JLA and JSA combine to fight the forces of a dad who is
OUT OF CONTROL, which I guess means the JLA and JSA
are interrupting someone's holiday dinner and wrestling a
half-finished bottle of brandy out of some guy's hands ...

My nerd-ual prowess is a thing of legend, inasmuch as I’ve maintained a raging nerd-boner for the annual Justice League/Justice Society crossovers since my childhood. I’m celebrating three decades of a medically verified nerd-priapism. I know I’m setting a new standard for this site, what with three erection-related jokes in the can already, but I can’t say it strongly enough: Earth-2 gets my dick hard.


There’s one for the referral logs, come on Google rankings, don’t let me down – I gotta be the number one search result across all markets for the phrase “the annual Justice Society and Justice League crossover gets my dick hard every time,” or my life will be for naught.

Seriously though, I’ve been mad for team-ups and crossovers since I was a little shaver – and in-between the rarefied events like Superman vs Muhammad Ali or New Teen Titans versus the X-Men, those few and far between endeavors which crossed the continuity streams (“…Ray”), the ever-lovin’, traditional, you can set your calendar by ‘em JSA/JLA crossovers were my goddamned favorite.

Some top-notch goddamn writing going on here ...

It doesn’t hurt that, if nothing else, the spectacle of those crossovers was usually spectacular – the JLA and JSA team up to save the Seven Soldiers of Victory, the JLA and JSA battle against the Legion of Super-Heroes, The All-Star Squadron fights alongside the heroes of two worlds to stop the nuclear madness of per Degaton, The multiverse-smashing threat of Darkseid, evil villains from a mysterious third Earth, the one time they fought an evil Flash that had a moustache. Classics, every one of them.

Sadly, when you’ve got twenty-two of the fellas under your belt, you’re bound to get the occasional barker.


More than one, to be fair, but in this case your humble editor is looking at 1984’s Justice League of America #231-232, wherein Kurt Busiek had the world’s greatest superheroes fight a superpowered sitcom family of a widowed dad, his two kids and their plucky aunt. Woo woo, pass the popcorn, here comes the excitement!

Would it be all right if I stayed behind?

I remember when I was pretty excited about Kurt Busiek as a writer, but then again I was a kid, I remember when I liked a lot of dumb things about comic books.

OOoh burn – no, of course, Kurt Busiek is not a bad writer – that’s a demonstrable fact, nevermind what you extract from his co-writer credit on the weekly Batman/Wonder Woman/Superman series Trinity, a comic book which is so bad that modern medical scientists have found microscopic evidence to prove that the each known Yersinia Pestis bacterium – the strain responsible for the Black Plague which devastated Europe in the Middle Ages - each clutched tiny atom-sized copies of the latest issue in their flagellum. It is so fuckin’ awful that copies of the book have spontaneously miniaturized, flown through time and attached themselves to the most notorious anaerobes in the history of the world (Not counting “Billy the Faculative Anaerobe”, gunslinger of the Bacterial West. Man, I feel dizzy. Where am I?)

See?

Right, so, JLA #231-232, a story engineered to cover the mandatory double-earth crossover for that year and also to explain what the world’s greatest heroes were busy doing while Martians performed intergalactic drive-bys on planet Earth in the immediately preceding issues.

Evidently, what happened to the world’s greatest superheroes – specifically, Superman, his hot-ass piece of a cousin Supergirl*, Wonder Woman and The Flash – was that they got distracted into this utterly useless bugfuck of a side-story by these eminently forgettable ciphers who conveniently appear out of nowhere to abduct these four heroes from their satellite headquarters.

*I had a crush on her when I was a kid, whaddya want from me? I’ve grown vulgar in my dotage.

The trio in question are assorted members of The Champion Family, and for god’s sake don’t start getting worked up about that name, it’s fuckin’ pointless. Specifically, the Champions are Ian and Victoria Champion, the teenage son and tweener daughter of missing, mind-controlled, dimension-hopping scientist Joshua Champion. The siblings are unattended by parental supervision, but are cuddled under the protective wing of their aunt Meredith Champion, who looks like if Laura Ingalls Wilder hadn’t dressed like such a slut. She looks like Preppy Longstocking. Haha, I just made that up to make fun of the Eighties.

Yeah, that is something the younger generation is

always saying, "Later for that!" A finger on the
pulsebeat of the new wave, Kurt Busiek ...

Evidently, Dad Champion was a scientist studying alternate dimensions, into one of which he was sucked off-panel. While there, Dr.Champion was mind-controlled by some huge hot green mess of an alien conqueror, the Commander, and during that process Dr.Champion also gained superpowers so insufficiently defined that he was effectively omnipotent. Also his kids and his sister got superpowers too only I don’t remember how, and I don’t care.


Just so you’re up to speed, Ian wears a leather jacket with the collar turned up, a shock of hair over one eye, and he is an asshole. Victoria is basically a Doctor Who companion from 1966 and spends most of her time busting her brother’s balls with her inveterate nagging and pleading, “Oh, aren’t you worried about daddy, what about daddy, Ian you don’t mean you don’t care about daddy,” blah blah blah, I’m on Ian’s side. Meredith is a fuckin’ zero, I don’t even remember her having a personality. I think she was a ‘Nam vet who competed in UFC, either that or she knitted and had a lot of cats, whatever.

For the first time in his life, Superman wishes he had the power to super-choke a coupla bitches.

What makes this particular crossover so frustrating is … well, hold on, if I could summarize it in a single sentence, I wouldn’t be sliding in at just under a thousand words at this point. AMONG THE THINGS which make this particular crossover so frustrating is that the action largely focuses on the family Champion, who have no personalities. They are boring sauce on a yawn sandwich, deep-fried in who-gives-a-fuck oil. Worse than that, they largely take center stage of the story at the expense of the members of the JLA, and entirely at the expense of the JSA. The whole thing reads like an attempt at a pilot for an ongoing series featuring the Champion family, but even then I’m being generous.


Here’s how bad this story was, ready? Ready? Okay. In re-reading this comic, I found that it feels exactly like a giveaway anti-drug comic. This thing shoulda had the goddamn Protector in it.


The writing is ridiculously uneven in this thing, Busiek obviously had his heart set on indulging his trademark motif of granting small, human moments to the characters, and when he does that it’s actually quite good. I think we’ve learned, though, that Busiek only has two settings – intimate, emotionally affective character-based writing and inconceivably obtuse and pretentious gobs of cosmic-level hoo-hah that no living human can relate to without special medication (see as an example, gosh, lemme think here … oh yeah, Trinity).

It's a cute scene and everything, but it's also the most action-packed moment in the entire two-issue arc.

At the end of these two issues, we get an additional little slap in the face by way of the combined heroes of two worlds and the unfortunately still-living Champion clan bouncing around the confines of the known multiverse; within the last few pages, the protagonists chance upon the interdimensional prison where the Crime Syndicate of America are held captive. AND. THEN. SPEED. AWAY.


The Crime Syndicate of America, man … those were villains! And they ended up not even playing traffic cop in this story, they played the part of a familiar landmark. Green Lantern all telling lost superheroes “All right, well, go left at Earth-C, and keep going until you see the Justice League Satellite – if you see the Crime Syndicate in their imperishable green energy prison, you’ve gone too far…”

"...of this incredibly lame story."

Of course, this was also the last JLA/JSA crossover which took place on alternate Earths, so while I may be disappointed that it was such a fizzle of a story and neglected to take advantage in any fashion of the concept of infinitely variable alternate realities, at least I know that the Champions took off at the end of the issue to explore the multiverse and are, at least, now totally dead.


I will tell you this: The Champions were so goddamn lame that for thirty years I assumed wrongly that they were from Earth-Prime. JUST LIKE ULTRAA, MAN.