JLA Classified: New Maps of Hell

New, revised review

By Warren Ellis & Jackson Guice (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-0944-5

It’s been quite a while since we covered a good old-fashioned straightforward and no-strings-attached superhero blockbuster: one which any old punter can pick up with no worry over continuity or identification and where good guys and bad guys are clearly defined.

That’s due in large part to the fact that nobody makes many of those anymore, but at least it gives me the opportunity to take another look a tale I didn’t much like when it first came out in 2006, but which has definitely grown on me after a recent re-read.

Produced at a time when the Justice League of America was enjoying immense popularity and benefiting from a major reboot courtesy of Grant Morrison, the end-of-the-world epic – starring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Oracle and Martian Manhunter – originally ran in issues #10-15 of ancillary spin-off title JLA Classified (September 2005-February 2006) with gritty futurist super-scribe Warren Ellis upping the angst-quotient on a hoary old plot whilst hyper-realist illustrator Jackson Guice adds a terrifying veracity to events.

The drama begins as Clark Kent and wife Lois Lane stumble onto a dirty little secret. Assorted, and presumably unconnected, scientists and bean-counters at President Luthor‘s Lexcorp conglomerate have committed suicide in large numbers and the intrepid reporters suspect something very nasty is going on…

In Gotham City Batman learns the police have been turned away from an extremely unconventional crime-scene by Feds and a private security company, and he too begins to dig…

In the Bermuda triangle, a group of researchers are invited to the Amazon’s ancient library of knowledge only to die when the sky-floating island explodes in a horrendous detonation.

Wally West has terrible dreams of his beloved predecessor Barry Allen which lead him to a similar catastrophic conflagration, whilst Green Lantern Kyle Rayner ruminates on a primordial legend of the Corps’ origins until a wave of explosions rouses him to action.

In the ruins of each disaster the scattered, hard-pressed heroes find an ancient parchment of alien hieroglyphs and, when Superman recovers another page of the same from the shredded remnants of a plummeting space station, the call goes out to activate the League…

Tasking cyber-savant Oracle and aged Martian sole survivor J’onn J’onzz with digging up information, the team learn of an antediluvian scourge which wracked the red planet million’s of years past. A God/Devil which tested species’ right to survive and heralded its coming through a written code…

Luthor’s scientist’s had found such writings in remnants of ancient Sumeria and begun deciphering the text…

Mobilising to stop the summoning, the heroes confront Luthor in the White House but are too late. In Las Vegas the bowels of Hell vomit horrors into the streets and as the frantic team rushes to battle they are snatched up separated by the malign entity which has spent eons traversing the universe testing the worth of intelligent races and individually putting them to their sorest tests.

However the monstrous terror has never faced beings like the JLA before, or a mind like Batman’s, and soon its own darkest secret is exposed and its fatal weakness exploited to devastating effect…

With a painted cover gallery by Michael Stribling, this book offers simple, solid Fights ‘n’ Tights fun gilded with a sly and cynical post-modern edge: a sound example of contemporary action blockbuster comics at their best.
© 2005, 2006 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.