Thoughts on the Post Giffen/Dematteis Dan Jurgens Justice League run?

[Lee Stone]

It was pretty good, no clue why people think the 90s are bad.

I don't think the '90s really hit JLI/A hard until 1993/1994 with the combo of Judgment Day and Zero Hour.

[marshal88]

Destiny's Hand was good, but up until then I found his JLA a bit stiff.
Beetle, Fire, Ice and Guy lost a lot of personality and he hard time connecting with them.



I really liked his Panic in the Sky.
And I felt that it was a Justice League-worthy story.

I actually expected something along that line.

But he failed to raise up the JLI core members to that level, and instead tried to write like someone else which only weakened his characterizations.

It's probably good that he had Superman, Booster Gold and Maxima to fall back on. I just think that he personally didn't care for Beetle, Fire, Ice or Guy.
Which isn't surprising because any DC creator or reader would be hard pressed to care for them unless they actually read the Giffen/DeMatteis run.
While the Giffen/DeMatteis run was well received and had its fans, a lot of creators didn't like it and wrote it off as a parody.

panic in the sky lead directly to jurgen jla run and i liked it. it was back to the classic silver age feel with superman back into the jla fold after coie wrote him out of being a founding member, jurgens brought back some classic jla villains - starbreaker , dr destiny , etc. the first one - weapon master was a updated bronze age world's finest villain though the writer that succeeded jurgens , dan vado was just terrible and under him and gerald jones , the justice league franchise went down the toilet until morrison took over. it was vado terrible choice not to have superman rejoin after the doomsday ordeal.

[Timber Wolf-By-Night]

Destiny's Hand was good, but up until then I found his JLA a bit stiff.
Beetle, Fire, Ice and Guy lost a lot of personality and he hard time connecting with them.



I really liked his Panic in the Sky.
And I felt that it was a Justice League-worthy story.

I actually expected something along that line.

But he failed to raise up the JLI core members to that level, and instead tried to write like someone else which only weakened his characterizations.

It's probably good that he had Superman, Booster Gold and Maxima to fall back on. I just think that he personally didn't care for Beetle, Fire, Ice or Guy.
Which isn't surprising because any DC creator or reader would be hard pressed to care for them unless they actually read the Giffen/DeMatteis run.
While the Giffen/DeMatteis run was well received and had its fans, a lot of creators didn't like it and wrote it off as a parody.

Yeah, I remember "Panic in the Sky," and thought it was a fun storyline, as well. But if I remember correctly, there Jurgens was allowed to draw on characters from across the DCU and was not just limited to a small set group of characters nobody else was using or wanted to use, much less being denied use of any character because that character's current editor or writer hated his work. I remember reading an interview with Giffen a few years ago in which he said that the people behind the scenes at DC at the time really hated what he and DeMatteis were doing on the League franchise. Presumably they left them alone as long as it was selling as well and was receiving all the critical accolades as it was doing and getting.

Earlier I said that Jurgens's work on the League seemed like a "refutation" of Giffen and DeMatteis's work. As I recall, in-between the very last issue of Giffen and DeMatteis's run and the start of the new creative teams, DC did a Justice League special one-shot that set up the new status quos of Justice League America and the new retitled Justice League International (formerly JL Europe), the new JLI getting Gerard Jones (sigh) and Ron Randall as creative team and a somewhat reshuffled cast, and JLA getting...Jurgens as writer/artist, Martian Manhunter getting swapped out for Superman, and the core members of the Giffen era (Beetle, Booster, Fire, Ice, and Guy) staying along with Maxima joining up to impress Superman and...whatever the hell the plan was with Bloodwynd. (Unless there's an interview that says otherwise, I remain convinced to this day that Jurgens' original plans were junked and we got the "it's really J'onn Jonzz but there's also a real Bloodwynd" crap, OR Dan was making this **** up on the fly.) Maybe he wanted to capitalize on the Giffen/DeMatteis era's fans by keeping them, but that doesn't explain his terrible writing of them (and yes, he created Booster, and Giffen went out of his way to ignore all of Booster's suit's capabilities and just boil it down to "zaps stuff and makes force fields", but Jurgens did nothing to try to build Booster back up), including turning them into one-dimensional caricatures (worst being turning Ice into a petulant girl with a crush on Superman), and certainly not turning them into cannon fodder for Doomsday to decimate before the the Main Event with Superman. Hell, if the Death of Superman had taken place just a few years later, I'd expect Jurgens to have killed one of them off, if not more or even all of them. It all just screamed to me at the time of Jurgens either trying to "show" Giffen either how the League ought to be done, or saying "Yeah, screw you, dick, I'm going to destroy your toys with a hammer. How do you like THEM apples?"

[marshal88]

to be fair , ice under giffen wasn't all that different from the 'petulant girl with a crush on Superman'. she was all doey eyed innocent naive wallflower that latched onto gardner because she believed in his innocence. if you want to talk about someone destroying 'giffen toys', wasn't it dan didio editor that did the dirty and pissing all over giffen jli by turning maxwell lord evil and killing blue beetle as well as the martian manhunter

[achilles]

to be fair , ice under giffen wasn't all that different from the 'petulant girl with a crush on Superman'. she was all doey eyed innocent naive wallflower that latched onto gardner because she believed in his innocence. if you want to talk about someone destroying 'giffen toys', wasn't it dan didio editor that did the dirty and pissing all over giffen jli by turning maxwell lord evil and killing blue beetle as well as the martian manhunter

There were a couple of differences. The Giffen Ice was funny, like most of his others. Also, she was more sympathetic than Jurgens'.

[Crazy Diamond]

to be fair , ice under giffen wasn't all that different from the 'petulant girl with a crush on Superman'. she was all doey eyed innocent naive wallflower that latched onto gardner because she believed in his innocence. if you want to talk about someone destroying 'giffen toys', wasn't it dan didio editor that did the dirty and pissing all over giffen jli by turning maxwell lord evil and killing blue beetle as well as the martian manhunter

DC had tried making Maxwell Lord evil once in the Gerard Jones JLA run shortly before Morrison took over. According to Dan Didio, he chose Maxwell Lord because he wanted a villain who no one would expect but who was also obscure enough at the same time. The problem of course is that Maxwell Lord was a neutral character in a genre where that wasn't very common so turning him into a one-note villain instead of a former corporate raider trying to change his ways took away what made that character unique.

Ice wasn't a doey eyed wallflower under Giffen. She was experienced due to her time on the Global Guardians and instead of just shitting on a guy who had been through a lot of trauma (though that never got acknowledged at the time) she tried to look under the surface. Even then there were times where she would get mad at Guy and I think they even broke up at one point. The thing with Jurgens is that he just seemed to read like five pages of Ice (and Fire and Guy too) and then write from that so their characters got flattened. At least Blue Beetle and Booster Gold got to save the day once in awhile.

I never understood the hate for the Giffen/Dematteis League but as someone who was reading plenty of manga at the time the focus on their day to day stuff along with the action wasn't unusual to me. Then again I read that run years after it was done.

[Timber Wolf-By-Night]

The hate for Giffen & DeMatteis's era, I believe, was ultimately down to their work flying in the face of many different expectations of what the Justice League fundamentaly "was supposed to be." From the deliberate "bwah-hah-hah" tone of comedy and poking some savage fun at some super-hero (and Silver Age) tropes (between his work on the League and that on the LSH, if Giffen thought some storyline, character, idea, ANYTHING, was dumb or stupid, he'd mock it mercilessly within the story and make it clear he DGAF who got butthurt about it), particularly in the face of everybody else trying to do "serious" superhero stories; to the cast/membership that started out as a viable alternative to the "classic" lineup in terms of members with a mix of experience, power levels, name recognition, and some untapped potential, but ultimately became the "core" membership of Beetle, Booster, Fire, Ice, Guy, and J'onn trying to keep them in check plus a few different randos (in part because people kept yanking some of that first group of members away, and later because others refused to let Giffen & DeMatteis even touch their characters); to the fact that while it wasn't what the Powers that Be liked or even wanted, fans were eating it up, and DC really couldn't just dismiss the sales.

What the Powers that Be (and more than a few fans) wanted was stories that were more serious in tone, a team of Name Brand characters with Serious Starpower facing Serious Threats with a much greater degree of competence and professionalism, and new concepts and characters that weren't parodies of older characters. And instead they were getting "Bwah-hah-hah!" stories about Kooey Kooey Kooey, General Glory, G'nort, Manga Khan, the Scarlet Skier, Bialya, and a line-up consisting of stars of cancelled titles, former members of the Global Guardians and the Champions of Angor (itself a nearly two-decades-old pastiche of Marvel characters), whatever characters they could get within their editors' control or could create themselves, and J'onn J'onzz. (This applies mostly to the American branch, but Justice League Europe wasn't immune, either.)

[caj]

The hate for Giffen & DeMatteis's era, I believe, was ultimately down to their work flying in the face of many different expectations of what the Justice League fundamentaly "was supposed to be." From the deliberate "bwah-hah-hah" tone of comedy and poking some savage fun at some super-hero (and Silver Age) tropes (between his work on the League and that on the LSH, if Giffen thought some storyline, character, idea, ANYTHING, was dumb or stupid, he'd mock it mercilessly within the story and make it clear he DGAF who got butthurt about it), particularly in the face of everybody else trying to do "serious" superhero stories; to the cast/membership that started out as a viable alternative to the "classic" lineup in terms of members with a mix of experience, power levels, name recognition, and some untapped potential, but ultimately became the "core" membership of Beetle, Booster, Fire, Ice, Guy, and J'onn trying to keep them in check plus a few different randos (in part because people kept yanking some of that first group of members away, and later because others refused to let Giffen & DeMatteis even touch their characters); to the fact that while it wasn't what the Powers that Be liked or even wanted, fans were eating it up, and DC really couldn't just dismiss the sales.

What the Powers that Be (and more than a few fans) wanted was stories that were more serious in tone, a team of Name Brand characters with Serious Starpower facing Serious Threats with a much greater degree of competence and professionalism, and new concepts and characters that weren't parodies of older characters. And instead they were getting "Bwah-hah-hah!" stories about Kooey Kooey Kooey, General Glory, G'nort, Manga Khan, the Scarlet Skier, Bialya, and a line-up consisting of stars of cancelled titles, former members of the Global Guardians and the Champions of Angor (itself a nearly two-decades-old pastiche of Marvel characters), whatever characters they could get within their editors' control or could create themselves, and J'onn J'onzz. (This applies mostly to the American branch, but Justice League Europe wasn't immune, either.)

Giffen wanted the Big Guns in his JLA when he started but none of the editors would let him use them. He was finally gifted with Batman but only on a part-time basis.

It wasn't until the 8th issue "Moving Day" that Giffen and DeMatteis realized they could use humor with these characters and make it a comical book. And man did it sell.

JL Europe became the more serious book with the Extremists and Starro. And I will admit that as much as I loved the book, issues 41-51 were rather silly and it was starting to get old.