Thursday, May 8, 2008

Justice League of America #165 - April 1979

sgA great cover by Jose Luis Garcia Lopez (is there any other kind?)

The Story: "A Mother of Magic!" by Gerry Conway, Dick Dillin, and Frank McLaughlin. Continued from last issue, a group of magicians, led by a man named The Highlord, claims that Zatanna's mother Sindella will die in a few hours.

When she does, Zatanna will take her place as the Highlord's slave in this dimension!

As you can imagine, the JLA doesn't take too well to this, and they engage in a battle against the Highlord and his magical minions.

But with their most powerful member, Superman, being vulnerable to magic, the fight is stacked against them, and they are quickly picked off one by one.

At one point only Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl are left, but when Hawkgirl is a victim of a sneak attack, it enrages the Amazing Amazon:
sg
Meanwhile, we find Red Tornado tending to a recuperating Green Arrow(who was hurt fighting Allegro), and Reddy does some research to find evidence to suggest that at some point humanity split into two separate species, Homo Sapien, and Homo Magus!

Reddy and Green Arrow follow the JLA to this other dimension, where they let the others know that Homo Magus have an ingrained attraction for Homo Sapiens, which explains why the hordes the JLA has been fighting are not real people! Sindella uses her remaining life energies to help the JLA defeat the hordes, but it drains her energies so much that she dies in the attempt.

Roll Call: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Elongated Man, Red Tornado, Hawkgirl, Zatanna

Notable Moments: There's a lot of magical gobbledy-gook in this issue, forgive me if my synopsis doesn't quite make a lot of sense. Though the whole "ingrained attraction" earns some laughs, as a comely wench drapes herself all over Green Arrow, much to Black Canary's annoyance.

When I was a kid, I went to a mall with my Dad and they were having one of those "sidewalk sales", and one of the dealers was selling boxes and boxes of comics. My Dad told me I could get two or three books, so I feverishly went through nearly all of them to find what I thought would be the best ones.

I remember pulling this book out of the box, and the cover looked sooo cool, it almost made the final cut. This was before I discovered comics stores, so any issue of JLA(or any comic, for that matter) I missed on the newsstand seemed like a rare artifact on par with the Lost Ark.

The issue didn't hold up once I did read it, but what could?

Anyway, tomorrow:
sg

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