The Infinity Inc. Problem

[John Venus]

My idea would to split them into two generations. Generation one would be the World War 2 generation with Alan Scott, Ted Knight, Kent Nelson Dr. Fate, Charles McNider Dr Mid-nite, Johnny Thunder, Hawkman & Hawkgirl, Ma Hunkel Red Tornadoe and basically all the Golden Age characters that fit in the era they were created in alongside all the original Freedom Fighters, Seven Soldiers and all of them collectively known as the Squardron Supreme. Just like the comics, the team disbands in the mid-50's due to the communist witch hunt.

Then there would be the second generation which was active 20 years before Superman debuted and operated for 10 years before disbanding. The new JSA would include Jay Garrick, Ted Grant, Dinah- all the guys whom you want to believably be old but still active in the present day alongside legacy heroes like Rick Tyler and Jesse Chambers who could be nebulously be described as the descendants of the originals. Hector Hall has enough weird stuff going on that his longevity could easily be explained through magic. Lyta's origin could be simplified, remove her blood ties to Diana and have her be an exiled Amazon whose heritage is kept a secret from the world. Pieter Cross or Beth Chapel could be the new Dr. Mid-Nite, thankfully they don't share a blood connection with the original. Michael Holt could be a part of this generation. as the tech guy. Connecting the two generations together would be Alan Scott who has the best explanation for his longevity and his inactive period between the first and second generation could be explained in a number of ways from losing his powers not his immortality or trapped in another dimension.

Then you could debut the third generation with Power Girl, Mr. Terrific (Michael Holt), Dinah Laurel Lance. Dr. Mid-night (Beth Chapel), Jade, Obsidian, Atom Smasher, Star-girl (Courtney), Wild cat (Yolanda), the android Hourman, Rick & Jesse's kid, Hector & Lyta's kid and any other character you would like to see.

[CaptCleghorn]

That is what is wrong with comics fandom. "Write the story I wanted to read." Moore's Swamp Thing is not what anybody asked for.

There's a big difference between explaning what we'd like to see and demanding to the exclusion of everything else. Generally, the frequent and repetitive JSA threads include a variety of ideas and specific detailed interests. It's the opposite of what's wrong with fandom. Robinson's Earth 2 book was less than welcomed because of the age and the newness of the characters. But it generally got good reviews from the JSA crowd. That doesn't mean we can't have lively and intelligent discussion on Alan Scott's sexuality and have different thought about what that should be.

I see the "It won't sell" comments as a problem. We are the world's foremost authorities on what we want to see, but as to how that would sell, we don't know. DC Comics doesn't know for sure either, although they probably have a better idea than we do.

[CaptCleghorn]

But about their supporting cast and kids: Inza, Tom Bronson, Jade, Obsidian, Molly, Joan, Hector, etc


Isn’t Zatanna’s current backstory that Zatara wasn’t born in the 1920s, but recent enough to father Zatanna and die a middle age man?

Supporting cast is an issue for the JSA as well. A few of them have their own explanations. Inza and Shiera do anyway. For the rest, a time jump can would either give the JSAers a +1 Johnny Thunder at the UnAmerican Acivitiy Hearing) or when the JSA reappears, jusy have the supporting casts be found at that point. There really weren't that many characters who played an important role in the hero's life AND needed to be there in the 1940s.

[Otto Gruenwald]

Just don't talk about it. They're the JSA kids. That's good enough. Maybe they had them after they got out of the ragnarok trap? Maybe they had them while in the ragnarok trap? You can play with the sliding timescale to make it fit.

Ideally, they should be having kids of their own now to fit in with the Jakeem Thunder and Stargirl generation.

[The no face guy]

I'm sure a creative writer could fix the JSA timeline so that they are still part of world war 2, without turning them into 100 year old geezers & somehow keep the Infinity Inc members, in their 20's.

The challenge is to find that creative writer who wants to write Infinity Inc, and gets the green light from DC. There was an Infinity inc 12 issue mini series about 13 years ago or so, but it barely had any of the original members in it, so it shouldn't have been called Infinity Inc, in my opinion.

[Flash Gordon]

Supporting cast is an issue for the JSA as well. A few of them have their own explanations. Inza and Shiera do anyway. For the rest, a time jump can would either give the JSAers a +1 Johnny Thunder at the UnAmerican Acivitiy Hearing) or when the JSA reappears, jusy have the supporting casts be found at that point. There really weren't that many characters who played an important role in the hero's life AND needed to be there in the 1940s.

That's how I'd play it. The supporting casts would be people they meet in whatever their present is.

For Hawkman it doesn't matter cause his narrative is all about reincarnation. He'll pick up wherever he is.

Seeing Alan Scott try and rebuild a life in 2020 could be interesting. Just using him as an example, since I'd personally just go with Jade to represent his legacy.

[sifighter]

Wouldn't it just be simple enough if it was like Johnny Thunder said in rebirth/Doomsday Clock. That he made the JSA disappear for a time which froze them in the ages they were in and was just nice enough to use his genie to bring their families with them as he did it.

[Stingo]

Fate, Spectre, and Green Lantern all have reasonable explanations for long lives. Hawkman and Wildcat have the reincarnation thing going on. I may have miised someone, but the other JSAers are pretty much guys in costumes with scientific help (GL is magic). Now I'd love to see guys like an old Wes Dodds (and Dian?) using decades of detective skills and Ted Knight playing a role like he did in Robinson's Starman series. But without a time jump, most of these folks are going to be dead. DC tried to age them into the grave in Zero Hour, but that proved to be unpopular. And since Zero Hour was 25 years ago, the age problem has not only gotten worse, but beyond the point of non-comic booky scientific/magical tweaking.

This has been a problem ever since the Ian Karkull plot was derived to "fix" the aging problem. This isn't a math problem where one calculates the best way to plot the return. It's a mix of how much will people like or dislike this and will it sell books. I have what I'd like to see. Would that work? Going by the variety of opinions seen in these threads, who knows. Opinions certainly differ.

The good news is the problem is as bad as it's going to get. The JSA characters are too old to do anything at their age and would pretty much all be dead if it wasn't for the various methods to keep them alive. Depending on whether the characters have magic or some device helping them, that will work 20, 30, or 100 years down the line. If the characters has died by 2020, they'll still be dead in the future as well.

The idea that this is a "problem" is subjective. It's comic books. Suspension of disbelief. I love that the JSA has a history that extends to an earlier time when telephone booths were the rule and the height of fashion was a fedora and a guy smoking a Lucky Strike. Just my five cents (and you know what they say about five cents and a cup of coffee...)

[The Cool Thatguy]

The JSA have plenty of villains who could be used to handwave the problem.

Per Degaton banished them to different eras where they started families, and a crisis brings them together again.

Boom, solved.

Or hell, maybe the government was afraid of all the heroes heating up the Cold War, and pressured some to go into stasis. Bad guy keeps them there until modern era, etc.

The JSA has plenty of excellent characters. I'd hate to lose that, and have missed it since Nu52

[Will Evans]

Which character do you keep?

Either Peter Cross or Beth Chapel?

Al Rothstein or Grant Emerson?

Tom Bronson or Yolanda Montez?

Rick Tyler or the Android?

Hector Hall or Northwind?

[CaptCleghorn]

The idea that this is a "problem" is subjective. It's comic books. Suspension of disbelief. I love that the JSA has a history that extends to an earlier time when telephone booths were the rule and the height of fashion was a fedora and a guy smoking a Lucky Strike. Just my five cents (and you know what they say about five cents and a cup of coffee...)

Of course. There is no way I can or would want to convince anyone that I care a lot about this stuff and how to make it work for cool stories. The term "problem" is very subjective and its importance will differ wildly depending on who you ask about it.

[achilles]

Wouldn't it just be simple enough if it was like Johnny Thunder said in rebirth/Doomsday Clock. That he made the JSA disappear for a time which froze them in the ages they were in and was just nice enough to use his genie to bring their families with them as he did it.

So, basically the same explanation for anything a comic book writer doesn't want you to think about too closely, "a wizard did it"...

[scary harpy]

Which character do you keep?

Either Peter Cross or Beth Chapel?

Al Rothstein or Grant Emerson?

Tom Bronson or Yolanda Montez?

Rick Tyler or the Android?

Hector Hall or Northwind?

Maybe Yolanda could become La Gara? (The cat-heroine that Infinity Inc. advertised but never materialized. Or was it La Garra?)

[Doctor Bifrost]

I know which answer I'd like to see: The JSA exist in a timeline of their own. Call it Earth-2. They started there during WW II, and now it's it in the 1960's or 1970's there, and their kids are in their 20's. However, in this alternate timeline which had superheroes going back to 1938, history and technology have developed somewhat differently, so the writers can include whatever level of technology they choose. (But they should try to be clever and consistent about it.)

There were many, many things I liked about Crisis on Infinite Earths, but "solving" the Earth-2 problem was not one of them. I didn't think it was a problem. Roy Thomas was told that he would still have Earth-2 for his All-Star Squadron (which basically included the JLA) and Infinity, Inc., but the publisher and/or editors changed their mind at the last moment - or later - after which point Roy scrambled (like the trouper he is) to "make things work." (And admittedly, that's how we got the "Golden Age Fury," and the Infinity, Inc. Fury as her daughter, which I absolutely loved, and miss to this day. Although they did an ill-advised character assassination on the GA Fury in a Wonder Woman miniseries and subsequent Wonder Woman comics."For which I have a truly remarkable head canon, which this post is too small to contain," to paraphrase Pierre de Fermat.)

Personally, after CoIE, I would have liked to see three timelines, somewhat altered by the Crisis and difficult (but not impossible) to travel between: An Earth-2, with the GA JSA in WW II-era stories (maybe extending into the 1950's), and their children in Infinity, Inc. thirty years later. Earth-1, but the JLA have gotten somewhat older - married with young kids - and the Titans and other next-generation heroes are more primary. And Earth-New, in which Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman are just starting out in 1986, with the JLA soon to be founded.

And no more Crises for decades to come. Add new parallel Earths - like Earth-S - rarely and judiciously.

We would just today be coming to a point where the next Crisis might be useful narratively.

[Doctor Bifrost]

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?