JLA:THE SILVER AGE TPB Review

[Brian Adkins]

The cover of Brave and the Bold #29 has our usual cast of 5 heroes fighting a funky looking yellow robot. Spoiler:the other two "part-timers" show up but aren't on the cover. Poor Aquaman gets no respect again as he's the only one being held in the robot's grip and needs a sledgehammer to pound on it. Not that it couldn't be seen as smart, just that he is very strong but it doesn't show here. Maybe he pulled the sledgehammer from a "magical place" like Prince Adam used to do with his sword to change into He-Man.

The opening splash page shows the team -and Batman!-being held against their will to their chairs as the villain tells us that he has the 4 most destructive weapons ever devised and traveled 10,000 years from the future to do battle with them!

In a bottom text it calls them the "Super-Seven!"

Next page,we find out that our villain Xotar is an arch-criminal from the year 11,960 and has a cavern filled with "super-scientific instruments" and is being besieged by the "inter-solar" police! He claims to have 4 weapons to fight the police but knows they have counter-weapons for 3 of them. Only 1 of the weapons will defeat them but he doesn't know which one! Okay,let all of that sink in for a minute.

We see the police outside and they seem to have a gun of some kind melting the cavern door. Xotar says all he needs is a minute to elude capture because he'll just use his mighty robot that is also a time machine! ...um,if you have a time machine and don't know which weapon could beat you why not just go back in time and find out? I'm just sayin'!

Xotar decides to jump 10,000 years into the past to fight the JLA because if they can't touch him the police can't! Logic!

Now we find out that Xotar is confident in defeating the JLA because of a very old book that has writing from Wonder Woman with several words marked out except for " ...one of the four weapons used by Xotar....to defeat the Justice League of America..." He says history has already recorded his journey to the past even though he hasn't experienced it yet. This is why time travel stories can get confusing.

Xotar starts to ponder which of his weapons will be used by him to defeat the JLA:the "microscopitor?" or the "de-evolutionizer" he stole from the interstellar space laboratory? the third weapon he stole from the ancient ruins of an Andromeda world? What? no catchy name? He has a hunch it might be the 4th one that he found in deep space that was made for a mad dictator of Aldebaran to try and conquer a galaxy! No name for it either. So far Xotar is just shown to be a thief not an inventor or scientist.

The time travel robot used to be called Ilaric,master robot of Illirium,the robot planet! "A perfect mechanical brain in an indestructible body." After Ilaric solved time traveling to past ages ,Xotar tricked it after it built the time machine in its own body by cutting the control wires from its "neutronic brain" and it now obeys him. So he's not a total idiot. Who else wants to see the robot planet? Maybe it's like Cybertron from the Transformers?

Cut to 1960 where Snapper Carr is ice skating on a frozen pond,and Xotar grabs him with a robotic claw! Snapper sends out the alarm and here comes our heroes!

The text wonders why Superman hasn't responded? I'd say it's because he's "Super-busy."

Everyone ends up at their "secret sanctuary" and Xotar's voice comes from Snapper's lips challenging the JLA to fight him one at a time! John wonders smartly ,"Why bother? Let's all go after him!" But a yellow,"gravitic" beam holds them to their chairs. Xotar says he's sure Flash will figure a way loose so challenges him first! And gives him a riddle! Why? I don't know. "When the ghost walks at Hesperus on the second day of the moonless month,I am waiting to do battle!"

Flash vibrates faster than the speed of light to frees himself and runs off to fight!

No one knows where Xotar is or what he might do to the others if they don't fight so I guess that makes sense.