The Infinity Inc. Problem

[Timber Wolf-By-Night]

Of course, there is one more way to handle the JSA/II problem, which DC has sort of used before. The JSA starts in WW II, many survive, their kids get started as Infinity, Inc. around 1970.

Then, around 1972, before Superman and Batman come on the scene (I'm assuming Wonder Woman was in the JSA), there is a Crisis. A Very Powerful Entity gathers together a bunch of superheroes (including most of the JSA and II), some of their spouses, and a whole lot of their most important villains - for reasons that are Very Important To The Plot -and puts them to work, or to the test, or whatever.

At some point in the conflict, the vast majority of these characters wind up trapped in timeless void (or a magical amulet, or an enchanted bottle, or whatever) where they are essentially in suspended animation. But not all the characters - Wonder Woman gets left behind, and maybe a few others. (It would be interesting, for example, if the GA Wildcat and his son are left behind; in the current day he's died, but his grandson is active as a superhero. Or maybe the Martian Manhunter came to Earth in the 1950's, long before Superman and Batman became superheroes, and continues to this day. Choose carefully.)

And no one is able to find the lost heroes, or even demonstrate that they have not been utterly destroyed. (But the world still remembers them. None of this "everybody forgot they ever existed/now suddenly everybody remembers!", which is one of my least favorite comic book tropes ever, for a number of reasons that I won't go into here).

At some point in the current era, probably after Superman and Batman have started up and the JLA has been founded, they are found! And/or released. And/or returned. It'll be a Really Big Story. And then they can continue their lives - with the JSA heroes a good deal older than the JLA heroes, and Infinity, Inc. in full swing.

It's hard to do this in a way that doesn't come across as conspicuously (rather than just ordinarily) contrived. And in may opinion you wind up with far too many characters with the "fish our of water" time-jump aspect, which can get a little redundant. But it can work.

Marvel did something like this, with a bunch of previous-era heroes trapped in an urn. But I wasn't reading them at the time, and - despite my Google Search talents (he said modestly) - I haven't been able to find it. Can someone enlighten me? Was it in mainstream Marvel continuity, and are the characters still running around today?

Marvel didn't do anything like this. You're thinking of Dynamite Press's "Project: Superpowers," which was spearheaded by Alex Ross. A whole bunch of Golden Age heroes, now in the public domain, from defunct publishers like Holyoke, Nedor, and more, were imprisoned within Pandora's Box for decades by the hero formerly known as the Fighting Yank, who was somehow convinced that removing the heroes from the world would also remove evil. Ross did the covers and provided select pieces of interior art, got his writing partner Krueger involved, but it petered out before they got to whatever conclusion they (maybe) had in mind. Then DF got various other writers to try to relaunch it, but they each had their own very different ideas of how to do that (and kept narrowing the focus onto a ever-shrinking roster of heroes). Ultimately, though, Ross was just telling yet another variation of the only story he ever does, "The present/future sucks, and everything was better in the past before some moron started changing things."

[Shamrock Holmes]

I like your ideas, but how would you explain Black Canary in this scenario?
Wildcat actually has a better explanation for still being around (the 9 lives thing).

Well, she already has the advantage of being a generation younger. Likewise, she's mainly used as a mentor -- ala most of the on-screen material from Young Justice -- then her being older isn't as much of an issue, likewise she's taken at least one dip in a Lazarus Pit (that's how she got her Canary Cry back) which should shave a few years off.

[Lee Stone]

"The present/future sucks, and everything was better in the past before some moron started changing things."

The longer I’m a comic reader, the more this rings true.
If a longtime reader had told me this in the ‘80s, I would’ve thought they were crazy and dismissed it.
I imagine that many readers today will feel this way in about 30 to 40 years if they’re still reading.

[Doctor Bifrost]

Marvel didn't do anything like this. You're thinking of Dynamite Press's "Project: Superpowers,"...

Thank you so much! I knew I remembered it, but I could not get the details to surface! And I had it conflated with Marvel's The Twelve, too.

[Lee Stone]

One of the sad things about Infinity Inc is that it was one of the successful titles during DC's early experiment with the Direct Market, lasting 53 issues, and is forever doomed to limbo because DC can't figure out what to do with them.

[CaptCleghorn]

One of the sad things about Infinity Inc is that it was one of the successful titles during DC's early experiment with the Direct Market, lasting 53 issues, and is forever doomed to limbo because DC can't figure out what to do with them.

DC had a formula, but when COIE took the JSA off the board, Infinity, Inc. lost its unique nature and became Teen Titans light.

[M L A]

I think it's less they can't figure out what to do with them and more that they simply don't care enough about them to do anything.

They had already killed Beth and Yolanda in the early 90s, Hector and Lyta got claimed by Sandman (and they flip flop on whether Vertigo is "canon" to DC or not all the time), Jade got killed in the mid 00s to give Kyle some manpain, I think Northwind died in JSA (after never being used besides that after II ended), and Rick wasn't treated very kindly in the Hourman solo but had a great comeback with Johns' JSA. Despite the unflattering storylines Obsidian received, he ended up relatively okay (not dead, got a boyfriend, villainy storylines treated more as stuff out of his control), and Atom Smasher ended up being treated the best out of all of them (despite becoming a war criminal).

To think that Mr Bones is probably the best treated Infinitor overall, even if Johns did drop the DEO subplot after Goyer left. Got used in Chase, Manhunter, Batwoman, and Supergirl. But I think Bendis found him so we'll see how that goes lol.

[Will Evans]

I think it's less they can't figure out what to do with them and more that they simply don't care enough about them to do anything.

They had already killed Beth and Yolanda in the early 90s, Hector and Lyta got claimed by Sandman (and they flip flop on whether Vertigo is "canon" to DC or not all the time), Jade got killed in the mid 00s to give Kyle some manpain, I think Northwind died in JSA (after never being used besides that after II ended), and Rick wasn't treated very kindly in the Hourman solo but had a great comeback with Johns' JSA. Despite the unflattering storylines Obsidian received, he ended up relatively okay (not dead, got a boyfriend, villainy storylines treated more as stuff out of his control), and Atom Smasher ended up being treated the best out of all of them (despite becoming a war criminal).

To think that Mr Bones is probably the best treated Infinitor overall, even if Johns did drop the DEO subplot after Goyer left. Got used in Chase, Manhunter, Batwoman, and Supergirl. But I think Bendis found him so we'll see how that goes lol.

Northwind never died. He joined Black Adam during that arc. And later joined Hawkman and Magog’s group who supported Gog.

Hector and Lyta later died because of the Spectre. But their souls retired to live with Daniel in the Dreaming. During Inifinite Crisis every team had at least one person die. So I can’t blame the writers for Hector and Lyta getting the short straws, since they were going to reboot Dr Fate come One Year Later anyway.

[Sutekh]

Northwind never died. He joined Black Adam during that arc. And later joined Hawkman and Magog’s group who supported Gog.

IIRC, his homeland, Feithera, got massacred tho, and the survivors moved to Qurac or Bialya or something, and then got massacred *again.*

Sometimes coming from a made-up place like Tamaran or whatever the name of was of that magical place Tora Olafsdottir came from does not pay, 'cause the next writer to come along with blow it all up to establish the street cred of some schmuck villain of the week nobody ever heard of, and nobody will remember the name of next month.

It is amazing that these places can survive for centuries, or even millenia, until they show up on the page, and then they blow up every couple of years.

[Lee Stone]

IIRC, his homeland, Feithera, got massacred tho, and the survivors moved to Qurac or Bialya or something, and then got massacred *again.*

Sometimes coming from a made-up place like Tamaran or whatever the name of was of that magical place Tora Olafsdottir came from does not pay, 'cause the next writer to come along with blow it all up to establish the street cred of some schmuck villain of the week nobody ever heard of, and nobody will remember the name of next month.

It is amazing that these places can survive for centuries, or even millenia, until they show up on the page, and then they blow up every couple of years.

It's like how nothing ever happens on Rann, Thanagar or Tamaran unless they're shown.
10 years can go by with no troubles...

[DrNewGod]

IIRC, his homeland, Feithera, got massacred tho, and the survivors moved to Qurac or Bialya or something, and then got massacred *again.* ... It is amazing that these places can survive for centuries, or even millenia, until they show up on the page, and then they blow up every couple of years.

That could be said of the entire DCU.

The solution I'd most prefer would be to leave both the JSA and InfInc in the past of an Earth 2. Writers could visit them in their heyday with "untold stories," and present day tales could be told using new characters, some legacies and (mostly, I'd prefer) unique creations. IMO, the time is right for characters that probably wouldn't work in the mainstream DCU, that recognizes not only the need for diversity, but also how complex a notion justice is. In other words, characters a lot more like the JSA's original roster back in 1940 and earlier, but more widely representative.

Of course, that's not going to happen. Even if DC were willing to embrace an approach to E2 that lends itself to periodic miniseries or an anthology book, like with the GL franchise, these forums suggest that the fanbase is much too divided to embrace it. Further, since there's no way DC is going to stick to any ban on the E2 crowd crossing over with the main continuity, it's only a matter of time until the "how old are they anway?" issue resurfaces.

For that reason, I've come to an opinion that what kckada proposed is about as good a solution as we can possibly get.

...The proposed solution was that the JSA was trapped in stasis for an undetermined period of time. The length of time would simply be increased each year. This is similar to how Captain America can be linked to WW2, but is now eternally in his 30s. The period of time he was suspended in an iceburg is fluid. This was also how DC brought back the Marvel Family in the 70s -- even though they were around in the Golden Age and hadn't been seen since.

So, it could be written that after being freed from stasis -- most of the JSA went into semi-retirement and started having kids. So the only time that would be relevant is when they were released from stasis -- and that would always be about 20 years ago. So they could be trapped in stasis 50 years or more. While that seems a long period of time, keep in mind that Mon-El was trapped in the Phantom Zone for 1,000 years.