The Justice league should look like it did in JLU

[mathew101281]

The problem with the “Big 7” version of the league is that all the members are split between their individual franchises and the league. We all know that the character’s solo books have dibs on any character arch and development items, so any character development is probably going to be done outside of the League book. This can work for a while but you can only stop so many alien invasions before the concept of seeing The big players together starts to get stale.
But when you have characters that don’t have their own books on the team, it gives creators the opportunity to do meaningful character work in the league title. I feel the league is more interesting when the big 7 have a lesser role and you have characters like Fire and Ice, Vixen, etc. on the team. In short JLU and the Giffen era comics are the best renditions of the League as a concept.

[HandofPrometheus]

I agree. I find the big 7 approach boring. Even the Satellite Era had a lot of members to bounce off of.

[Captain Nostalgia]

I agree to. The satellite era had a rotating cast of quite a few members to mix things up. (Green Arrow, Black Canary, Hawkman/Hawkwoman, the Atom, Zatanna, Red Tornado, Firestorm ect.)

I think they should roll with 14 members so you don't get Superman/Batman, Aquaman in every issue.

[achilles]

While I thought this thread was going to be about using simplified line work for the comic...er...I agree with the actual OP. It is getting boring a bit when they hit you with the big 7. I've just seen it too much by now. And it is a book that get other characters going again, or just give them a boost, so why not do it that way? I mean more characters who are popular is better than less, right?

[Frontier]

I understand the point of having characters without solo's populate the team but it feels like writers can barely write the Big 7 format effectively so we want to add onto that? Most writers can barely write passable team books these days.

[achilles]

I understand the point of having characters without solo's populate the team but it feels like writers can barely write the Big 7 format effectively so we want to add onto that? Most writers can barely write passable team books these days.

Well, I agree, but taken to it's logical extent, that reasoning would have to conclude that DC should in fact shut down as none of their writers can write much of anything well, which I also agree with, but probably wouldn't go quite that far. I keep holding out hope that someone there will impress me again. And the last time DC has really impressed me was when Darwyn Cooke and Dwayne McDuffie were still around to help.

Let's face it, it does take a combination of skill and creativity that isn't all that easy to find. But even though it does seem dark, I hold out hope that DC will somehow pull it out at 4th and 99, behind by 1000, and with one second on the clock. I mean, how hard can it be?

[John Venus]

5-7 is usually considered the ideal number of characters for a team book.

Maybe not have the team as an army but have a core team that are always in HQ (like Elongated Man and Sue Dibney) who call upon members from various corners of the DCU as they are needed. Everybody who has never had a book will be the primary characters but with the occasional appearance of Superman, Batman and WW to help bolster the title.

[SecretWarrior]

Unlike the comics, JLU had a weekly format, so you didn’t have to wait months to see the character or characters you were interested in. If there were several League titles each focused on sub teams within a larger watchtower league, you could more easily emulate the effect without the attrition you’d get from falsely advertising that someone is a cast member, only to have them not appear most of the series or not play a significant role. Sub team rosters could be rotated or updated every year or every few months. That’s pretty much how the GL and X-Men books have worked.

Also, JLU gave the founders more responsibility for decision making, which I liked, meaning they were important even when not featured.

Based on the team book titles at both DC and Marvel, I’d say the sweet spot is 4-6 characters before personalities become generic or characters fall by the wayside. So I’d ask each subteam writer to keep their cells within that range.

[The Kid]

They don’t need a huge cast but a more varied one. Even in the old Avengers comics, the heart of the drama revolves around the characters who didn’t have their own book like Scarlet Witch, Vision, and Hawkeye. I’d like them to mix it up with maybe 2 or 3 A Listers and then B Listers who don’t have their own book since then the writer could do more character work in the book instead of being limited to action sequences and solely following the solo books

[John Venus]

I dislike JLU, so I don't think I want to see anything like that.

Character progression can happen in Justice League if the editors of the other titles the characters appear in coordinate properly with the Justice League writers and editors. Granted, they usually don't seem to be able to do this, but ideally they should be able to. So we're presented with the question of how to argue for or against this JLU format option. With what should be able to be done vs what is likely to be done based on history. I prefer to look at things from the former perspective, because the latter is making allowances for incompetence and poor planning (yes, I know a lot of the people involved are likely underpaid and overworked, so that accounts for a lot of the problems regarding managing these books).

I have a feeling that if the book has a 100 character cast, or something ridiculous, I'm not going to care about any of them, and if I don't care about them, I don't care about anything they're doing. I've found that for me to have an enjoyable reading experience, it can't just be about "the adventure and the threat." That is really important, but I need to be able to care about the characters, too. If you flood the book with so many characters then they get boiled down to their costumes, their feats, their powers, and maybe very basic and generic personalities. Also, I find the characters' idiosyncrasies get boosted to ridiculous levels, because they need to quickly and simply get established as the funny guy, the mean guy, the girly girl, the tomboy, the guy who is all about duty, and so on. The characters often become two dimensional in formats like this. While I feel JLU did suffer from this to a degree, it was able to be mitigated some by the stellar voice direction of Andrea Romano and the excellent voice casting, which is something a comic book won't be able to facilitate.

Also, filling the Justice League with random characters diminishes the prestige of the Justice League.

The joy of watching JLU is that you didn't know which combination of characters were going to take the center stage. You still had the foundation laid by the original seven but the expanded cast allowed a wider variety of story telling.

The problem with boiling it down to seven core characters is that inevitably the A-listers are taken off the board when something happens in their own titles. We've seen that happen with previous JLA rosters. Also, I believe more than seven characters have earned 'League Cred'.

Like, TheKid said, you can have 2-3 A-listers but the heart of the drama needs to be with characters who can't support their own ongoing.

[Frontier]

Are there even that many good team books anymore? That aren't written by Al Ewing?

[Zero Hunter]

The thing about team book is it takes a really good writer to do them with a certain set of skills. You have to be able to balance a big cast while still making every character have their own voice. Guys like Bendis suck at team books and always have. The big problem is most of the writers who are really great at team books are not the superstar A listers so they get overlooked.

[Aahz]

Unlike the comics, JLU had a weekly format, so you didn’t have to wait months to see the character or characters you were interested in.

An episode of JLU was also usually a complete story, in comics story arcs last usually longer.

If there were several League titles each focused on sub teams within a larger watchtower league, you could more easily emulate the effect without the attrition you’d get from falsely advertising that someone is a cast member, only to have them not appear most of the series or not play a significant role. Sub team rosters could be rotated or updated every year or every few months. That’s pretty much how the GL and X-Men books have worked.

That doesn't really work. DC has since flashpoint repeatedly published additional justice League books beside the main Big 6 JL. Appart from Justice Dark all get cancelled pretty fast.

[Aahz]

It depends on what you mean by "League Cred". Not many have that, in my mind. Most of the founding JL members are cornerstones of long running developed and fairly deep mythologies, which, in turn, are cornerstones of the DC Universe. DC has an ass load of old characters, but the great majority of them aren't nearly so developed or consistent.

If you stick with a JL incarnation that is mainly made up of the Big 6, there are really not a lot of characters/mantels that kind of stick out as "lesser" characters/mantels when you put them on the team. IMO you really need a character who is quite powerful, experienced and that has decently long successful publication history and cool classic look.


And If you go with a JL line up that is not centred around the Big 6, the JL simply doesn't feel like the team of the biggest heros, and that's kind of the appeal of this team.

[SecretWarrior]

That doesn't really work. DC has since flashpoint repeatedly published additional justice League books beside the main Big 6 JL. Appart from Justice Dark all get cancelled pretty fast.

I think that's because the spin-off titles are usually treated as separate teams altogether rather than as sub-teams of the larger Justice League. For example, while the Justice League was an independent organization, JLA was run by Waller through Steve Trevor, and JLI was a UN team. I'm talking about all of the books sharing a common base (the Watchtower), so the sub-teams can still interact with characters who don't star in their particular title. It's like how during the Sinestro Corps War, GL and GLC focused on different characters and locations in that conflict, but everyone was on the same team and had the same base of operations. Also, some sub-teams could just be limited series running alongside the main title. That's how the X-Men books work.