JLA/Avengers


By Kurt Busiek & George Pérez, coloured by Tom Smith & lettered by Richard Starkings (DC/Marvel)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1957-4

Fair Warning: this review deals with the very bedrock of superhero comics. If you’re not utterly au fait with the continuity minutiae of Marvel and DC Comics, this review won’t make much sense, and might well cause migraines or dizziness and could well prevent you from operating gigantic universe-bending machineries.

If you’d rather read something else I’ll quite understand and will hopefully see you tomorrow…

From the moment a kid first sees his second superhero the only thing he/she wants is to see how the new costumed crusader stacks up against the first. From the earliest days of the industry we’ve wanted our idols to meet, associate, battle together – and if you follow the Timely/Marvel model, that means against each other – far more than we want to see them trounce their arch-enemy one more time.

For many years that immature “who’s strongest/fastest/toughest?” preoccupation could only be addressed within individual company boundaries, but once publishers at DC and Marvel realised the sales potential of inter-continuity crossover clashes in the 1970s a veritable torrent of “impossible” superhero mash-ups (of generally excellent artistic quality but mired in inescapably mediocre plots) followed, all generally suffering from the protective partisanship of their legal owners.

After all, who wanted their pantheon to come off second-best in any confrontation?

When a much-touted and eagerly anticipated meeting of the Avengers and Justice League of America famously foundered due to irreconcilable creative differences between the sponsoring publishers, the crossover practise was shelved for years until cooler heads, a general sales decline and the far less hide-bound attitudes of smaller new companies (such as Valiant and Image) who simply found a negotiated way to make these temporary mergers work amicably and effectively, revitalised the whole concept and practise…

Which is a shame as Busiek is one of the most skilled writers in the business, easily ably to inject telling personal emotion and poignant character revelation into the driest plot – but here there’s simply not enough room…

Gathering together the deluxe 4-issue miniseries from 2003-2004, this powers-packed tome opens with a joint Introduction from the co-instigators of the Silver Age of Comics, Julie Schwartz and Stan Lee, after which the non-stop creative chaos begins with ‘A Journey into Mystery’ as the obsessive monster Krona smashes his way into the Cosmos we’ll call Marvel.

The cosmic intruder is a renegade Guardian of his own Universe, driven insane by an insatiable hunger to learn the origin of Reality. His previous rabid inquiries had already introduced evil into his own once-innocent continuum, shortened its sidereal lifespan and reduced an incomparable multiverse to a few straggling survivor dimensions, but now his impassioned search has brought him to a previously unreachable and unsuspected parallel realm only to encounter a being almost his equal…

En Dwi Gast, a puissant conniving being dedicated to games of chance, contests of power and duels of skill, is an Elder of the Universe and one of the most powerful creatures in this existence, but even The Grandmaster is helpless before Krona’s fanatical assault and manic inquisition. Nevertheless the wily immortal manages to inveigle Krona into a diverting little side-bet…

A month later, the world’s greatest champions in two vastly differing dimensions find themselves battling incomprehensible threats from beyond their reality. Investigations indicate that invaders from an alternate Earth are inexplicably appearing and causing devastating damage.

It also seems that the too-incompatible realms are colliding…

Offering a solution, the Grandmaster appears to the Justice League of Americaand sets them off in search of twelve objects of sublime power (six from each Earth) that will end the crisis. On Marvel Earth the morally ambiguous New God Metron tasks the Avengers with the same goal and soon the duped heroes are all engaged in furious and escalating clashes across two worlds, culminating in a shattering confrontation on Earth-DC…

In a place beyond physics and geography, the size-shifting Atom has hitched a ride with the unsuspecting Grandmaster and becomes privy to a private conversation with the New Genesisian God of Knowledge.

However, even after discovering the real nature of the crisis and the true threat involved, the hapless hero is unable to reach either fooled friends or foes to warn them…

‘A Contest of Champions’ open with the JLA and Avengers at war above Metropolis whilst the cooler heads of Batman and Captain America have both deduced that something is not kosher. The two surreptitiously declare a truce and leave their unnaturally enraged comrades to their futile battles and continued competition for the dozen arcane objects of power, and instead track down the Atom in the Grandmaster’s non-dimensional lair.

The deeper plan is revealed: the Grandmaster’s game is rigged and the prize Krona is vying for is possession of Galactus: a being from the reality that preceded the Big Bang…

Meanwhile the massed armies of heroes have finished their savagely fought duels. The Grandmaster’s side has been victorious…

…Which means nothing to Krona who simply blasts the Elder, cruelly claiming and dismantling the prized Galactus as nothing more than a new research tool. However the renegade Guardian has been duped: En Dwi Gast was after the twelve objects all along and uses them to reorder the realities and the once-incompatible Earths…

In a world of constant turmoil and ‘Strange Adventures’, the JLA and Avengers are now old allies, frequently pairing to battle overwhelming menaces in union, but Captain America can’t shake the feeling that something is not right. On anther Earth Batman has the same notion, as blips in reality and temporal hiccups shift heroes and even replace them with dead or departed predecessors. It’s soon clear that Existence is in big trouble and when Superman and Iron Man travel into space they observe huge metaphysical hands catastrophically mashing the two Earths together…

With chaos rising and all life threatened, the constantly changing teams are led by the inscrutably unfathomable Phantom Stranger to a place beyond where the dying Grandmaster – who has once again underestimated the merciless, self-destructive and utterly determined Krona – warns them of the imminent end of all since the Guardian is quite prepared to take the universe apart to find out how it began…

As both worlds shudder and shatter, all the heroes of the earths mobilise to save lives, allowing ‘The Brave… and the Bold’ JLA and Avengers to pursue Krona into the void for one last battle to preserve and restore the universes, but even here a double game is being played: Metron and the Grandmaster have one last surprise in store for when the status quo is inevitably restored…

With guest-shots from just about everybody created by the two comicbook companies over seven decades, there’s a awful lot of crowded, blistering action but not a lot of room for character or plot, but even so most action fans will find something to rave over. Moreover, for art lovers this book is a sublime treat, with some of Pérez’s most spectacular illustration, ably augmented by a stunning cover gallery at the back featuring all four of his stellar wraparound covers.

It’s fair to say that I’m not a great fun of such profit-led pairings, but there’s still enough of the fan-boy in me to viscerally thrill at armies of costumed stalwarts bashing the bezonkers out of each other and, even if the story is forced and patently menu-led (one from company A, one from Company B, over and over again…), there are still some nice fanatic-friendly touches and witty in-jokes whilst inarguably the artwork – every millimetre stuffed with manic detail and wry, deferential tributes and touches – is amongst the very best George Pérez has ever produced.

If you like this sort of thing this is certainly one of the best of its ilk…

© 2003, 2004, 2008 DC Comics and Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.