Sunday, April 27, 2008

Justice League of America #154 - May 1978

sgHere's a rarity--a JLA cover drawn by Mike Kaluta!

The Story: "I'll Kill You In Your Dreams!" by Gerry Conway, Dick Dillin, and Frank McLaughlin. The villainous, now-with-extra-creepy Dr. Destiny sets off a plan to kill the Justice League!

Meanwhile, we find some of our JLAers (in their civilian identities) checking out the new Gotham Starscraper Hotel, complete with TV coverage by anchorman Clark Kent.

Even though Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance are still having words over Queen's earlier chauvinist behavior (in JLA #151), they set aside their differences to have a nice "night off" at the new hotel.

This place has everything! Robot chambermaids, an artificial waterfall, even anti-gravity discs in the disco:
sg
...wait, wait, wait--I call shenanigans. I know that Ollie and Dinah wouldn't think twice about this (hell, they'd probably go ahead and do it on one of them), but I'd say the average Gothamite would find trying to dance on a tiny disc, floating dozens of feet in the air a terrifying experience. Sometimes WayneTech R&D goes too far.

Ok, anyway, all the JLAers that night end up with horrifying nightmares, envisioning their deaths, their loss of abilities, or the deaths of their friends. Dr. Destiny watches this, amused.

Then all of those very things happen or almost happen! But the JLA figures out the only person who could do this to them is, of course, old Skeletor here. He explains his new horrifying visage, and what his plan was.

Unfortunately for him, the JLA was one step ahead of him. The Atom shrunk down and took control of the Materioptkion(whew!), and used it against Destiny, making him think he saw the JLA die! Without it, he's pretty helpess, and one good shot from Black Canary does the trick. Back to Arkham, buddy!

Roll Call: Superman, Batman, Flash, Green Arrow, Atom, Black Canary

Notable Moments: The new look for Dr. Destiny was way cool, much more visually dynamic.

As far as I know, the Gotham Starscraper was never shown again. I wonder if Wayne Enterprises took a bath on it, after the pile of lawsuits no doubt generated by the anti-gravity dancing discs...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That is a really cool cover by Kaluta.

I'm laughing at your comments about dancing on the anti-grav discs. Funny how they didn't even think about safety requirements.

Unknown said...

It's funny, you see stuff like that anti-gravity dancing discs and wonder why Earth 1 wasn't about 50 years ahead of "our" world technologically speaking. If you can get those AGDD, then some sort of help for disabled people should have been not far removed. Maybe OSHEA stepped in or Bruce sold the technology to Stark Industries.

Doc Savage said...

Things live those anti-grav discs kill stories for me. Takes it too far from reality and wrecks my suspension of disbelief. Also just poor writing as no one bothered to extrapolate the far-reaching consequences of this new tech apparently being available and ready for use. This is the kind of stuff that ruins the Iron Man/Avengers movies and SHiELD TV show as well.

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