That is one crowded cover!The Story: "Crisis in Eternity!" by E.Nelson Bridwell, Martin Pasko, Dick Dillin, and Frank McLaughlin. Members of the JLA, JSA, and heroes from Earth-S are rounded up by someone who looks a lot like the Greek god Mercury(!) to stop a plot hatched by the evil King Kull.
Superman and the Earth-2 Wonder Woman head to Earth-2 where they take on Ibac, Blockbuster, and...The Penguin? Oh, the horror!
As they take on the Blockbuster, Ibac and the Penguin build a device--ordered to by Kull--that creates a cloud that floats over the island of Atlantis and tries to sink it back into the sea!
Luckily Superman uses his super-breath to freeze the cloud into a block of ice, which he the hurtles into space. Unfortunately, though an earthquake hits, dropping it back into the sea from whence it came.
Kull is mad his plot has been foiled, but promises even greater doom for Earths 1 and S. To be continued!
Roll Call: Superman, Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Hawkman
Notable Moments: Hawkgirl guest-stars again, as does a bunch of Fawcett heroes, like Bulletgirl, Bulletman, Ibis, Mr.Scarlet, Pinky(!), and Spy Smasher. Was Dick Dillin getting too far ahead on his deadlines?
I read this issue twice through in preparation for this post, and still couldn't figure out all that is going on. There's so many characters, so many locales that at some point I gave up and went right to the Answer Man column.
3 comments:
Oh, how I remember seeing the blurb about Earth-S(hazam) at the end of the last issue. I hit the 7-11 twice a week looking for #135. It never appeared. I got #136 and #137 when they showed up, but I never knew how the story began!
26 years later, when I decided to fill in the holes in my JLA collection, and found #135 on eBay almost immediately. Like you, rob!, I found the issue quite confusing. The issue suffered from the necessity to introduce so many characters -- plus present some action in Kull's abbreviated attack on Earth-Two. And the art was inconsistent (perhaps due in part to the switch to plastic printing plates). But some things were just weird...
Among the weirdness:
1. Mercury "recruited" Green Arrow, but left Black Canary behind?
2. Mercury brought the Batmobile along? Does the Crime Champions' hide-out between Earth-One and Earth-Two have a garage?
3. Laws of physics are different on Earth-Two?
Actually, I wonder if that last bit was a dig at the writers and editors of All-Star Comics, which presented an Earth-Two and JSA that looked less and less like what we had seen in JLA over the years. Superman actually said, "Like I said -- there's a lot of stuff on this world I can't fully comprehend!" Hmmm.
Man, up to this point this was totally my least favorite JLA-JSA team-up. The characters chosen were dull, the action non-existant, and the situations totally unoriginal. Who didn't guess that Johnny Thunder was going to rescue Billy Batson and company??? Bah!
This whole story really needed to be done the next year, when the Giant format would have given everybody enough room to breathe!
I always liked Nelson Bridwell's encyclopedic knowledge of comics history, and his witty letter columns in the Superman books of the mid-late '70s, but he just wasn't cut out for writing the JLA. I think he tried a little too hard to be Gardner Fox doing the 'everybody separate into small teams' thing. His choice of heroes was a bit odd, as well, to the point where we have only one official JLAer(Hawkman...since Hawkgirl was only a guest star at this point) appearing in the second part of the story!
Plus, the 'Batman's jaw turns to stone' thing was a stupid way to treat the Golden Age version of the character, after fans waited this longto finally see him in one of these team-ups!
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