I pulled out from my bookcase JLA: The Greatest Stories Ever Told which was released to coincide with Indentity Crisis as it reprinted Justice League #166-168 which inspired it. But secret identities were a running theme of the collection. The only classic Fox/Sekowsky story offered was #19 "The Super-Exiles of Earth!" This was selected to represent the League's true Silver Age. But was it the greatest? Everyone will have their own opinion, especially if we disregard the JLA/JSA team-ups. I certainly could not pick one "greatest story" from #1-63! But here are the good, bad and silly views on this very entertaining tale!

  • The gist of the story has the Justice League, some in costume, some not, being attacked by more powerful versions of themselves; a Super Justice League if you will.
  • While our heroes are knocked out, trapped or temporarily incapacitated, their evil twins go on a robbing spree at the same time. When they gather, at most a few hours later, they find themselves wanted for crimes and warrants out for their arrest.
  • Unwilling to flee or battle the police, the team surrenders. This is important because they go out to stop their doppelgangers. The Flash even says, "We'll show them we're no quitters --even if the odds are stacked against us!" Until they're confronted by the police, then quit, leaving the Super JLA free and unopposed.
  • Even as child reading this when it was reprinted in #112, I thought that was odd. They all had places outside the jurisdictions to plan their strategy. The Fortress of Solitude, Paradise Island, Atlantis, even a sub-atomic universe or two and Oa. Add to that, Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen's wealth, there were other options than being locked up.
  • When brought before a judge, the team, represented by Jean Loring, comes up with the brillant plan of offering to be exiled from Earth until they can prove their innocence, which they can't from space and still the Super JLA are left free and unopposed.
  • The JLA, or, let's be honest, Superman builds a spaceship, probably on their dime.
  • As they embark, they see Snapper Carr from the gangplank and thnk that he believes they're guilty but our boy Snapper wants to see if he can find the true culprit. Which he doesn't. At all. He reappears in the last two panels of the story.
  • Still Snapper's prescence rattles them so much that they don't notice their civilian identities have a front row seat of their exile!!
  • It turns out that their true foe is Doctor Destiny who created the Super JLA out of the dreams of the real JLA with his materioptikon, forever linking him with dreams from this point forward.
  • Doctor Destiny was one of the most persistent foes of the JLA, as noted by Commander Benson, though not the sharpest dresser!
  • As the JLA's spaceship flies past Saturn (with no one offering to drop J'onn J'onzz off at Mars! Just saying!), the team realizes they dreamt of super versions of themselves just before this started, and how they could forget they dreamt about a Super JLA, then encounter a Super JLA is not explained.
  • There was also the macguffin of a hereto unknown "mysterious letter" with no words that they received before they had their dreams. Luckily Bat-Hoarder still has in on him and Bingo a pseudo-explanation.
  • Of course, this may make them rethink the whole "Having  a public address" thing!
  • In order to return to Earth, the JLA must reveal their secret identities to each other as they were exiled in their super-personas only. Iffy legality there but okay.
  • As they don their multi-color civilian suits (an orange suit, a purple suit) they must introduce themselves to each other though no one asks Wonder Woman her name!
  • Bruce rocks his ascot and Clark was the only one to bring a hat!
  • Aquaman is forced to remain in their second, invisible spaceship as he had no civilain identity. Apparently they just assume his mother named him "Aquaman"!
  • Forced to publically reveal their true faces to the world to battle the Super JLA, the team is dismayed to find out that strategem doesn't help them in the least as they get their civvies handed to them!
  • Super Superman knows magic, suspending poor Clark upside down in a most comic position, probably to just humiliate him! And he lost his hat!
  • After being buried alive, the team pools their will power and escape. Flipping through their back issues, they discover a way to scramble their doubles' brain signals so they can't control their actions and lets Sekowsky get drawing the Martian Manhunter doing a headstand out of his system.
  • Their foes neutralized, Superman telescopically scans the letter, still in their first spaceship, and somehow deduces that Doctor Destiny was behind it all. Was there a return address? Was there a header that read, Doctor John Elmer Samuel Destiny, Master of Dreams, Super Genius and Podiatrist, Appointments Only ?
  • Superman then uses his handy amnesium to make themselves and the WORLD forget their true identities and that he owes Green Arrow $20 and that's its his turn for monitor duty this weekend.

As I said, it's a fun read but not without its flaws. But the Greatest Silver Age JLA Story? What do you think?

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  • The first 22 issues of JLA are among my all-time favorite comics. JLA #19 was fun because we so seldom saw the JLA in their "real" identities except for a few panels on occasion at the beginning of the story. But it wasn't the Greatest, in my estimation. Many of those early stories were not only interesting adventures, but they left you with a moral that could be really compelling, especially for a kid.

    The first article I ever wrote for CBG, almost 20 years ago now, was called, "Everything I Need to Know I Learned from the JLA" and talked about a bunch of those comics and the lesson they learned and passed along to us.

    In "When Gravity Went Wild!" in JLA #5, for instance, the JLA (and readers) learned not to judge a new member too hastily when they accuse GA of being a traitor.

    In "Last Case of the Justice League" in JLA #12, Dr. Light sent all of the team members to worlds that kept them powerless. Each was specialized to that hero. So when Superman and Batman traded costumes, Superman easily escaped from the world designed to stop Batman. We each can thrive--or fail--if the circumstances are just right.

    In "Riddle of the Robot Justice League" in JLA #13, Aquaman felt useless and just cheered on his teammates. But they used his cheers as the inspiration for how to defeat their robotic foes.

    In my favorite moral, "Journey to the Micro-World" in JLA #18, the team was brainwashed into believing anything they heard. So when they each were told they couldn't escape from the cell where they were imprisoned, they proved it true. But Batman demanded that nobody tell him he couldn't do it--and he did what Superman, GL and all the others couldn't do, simply because nobody had been negative and told him he couldn't do it.

    And, of course, the first two Crisis stories in #21 and #22 opened up an entirely new concept full of exotic heroes in an entirely different world that had existed for awhile and we hadn't known about it! 

    Personally, I think JLA #11, "One Hour to Doomsday!", actually the second part of a two-part story (although I didn't realize it) is the best. That's probably biased because it was the first issue I ever bought. I was fascinated by how they all managed to trade identities to get around the demons magic (which had to call them by name) and replicate that hero's powers. Pretty darn clever.

    I'd put any of those over #19, especially for that amnesium twist that was needed at the end. That's never the sign of a well-plotted story. But as a supplement to some other great stories (including #14, "Menace of the 'Atom' Bomb, another favorite), it's a good part of that run. And how can you beat those cool titles? Classic DC.

    -- MSA

  • Of course, that "Greatest JLA Stories" wasn't exactly a treasure trove.  Sure, I can give you some winners - but the ones they picked mostly underwhelmed me.  The Secret Society of Super-Villains?  The BEST?  C'mon now!  NO STEVE ENGLEHART STORIES???  C'MON NOW!!!  The post-Crisis Justice League with BatDick?  COME ON NOW!!!

     

    I can pick you several stories I'd have put in Greatest JLA... but I'm not sure that, save for the Grant Morrison story, they hit ANY of them.

     

    x<]:o){

  • Hey, I’m always open to any discussion about the Fox/Sekowsky Justice League.

     

    Admittedly, there were some conventions in those stories that didn’t bear up under close scrutiny.  The one that always made me look the other way was how so often Fox and Sekeowsky would depict the Batman or the Green Arrow doing some bit of business while standing on the wings of their respective aircraft (while not in a VTOL mode).  Practically speaking, the two-hundred-knot slipstream should have blown them off into open air.

     

    So I can’t argue with anyone who wants to take potshots at those sorts of things.  But, at the same time, they were quaint little touches, like the dividing into sub-teams or answering mail calls, that gave the series its character.

     

    As far as “The Super-Exiles of Earth” goes, clearly, it was meant to be a gimmick tale---“Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to see the Justice Leaguers go into action in their civilian identities!”  And truth to tell, it was fun and the fun of it overrode many of the story’s flaws, some of which you pointed out, Philip.

     

    Let’s start with the things I liked:

     

    ■  As he so often did, Gardner Fox maintained a continuity with the Leaguers’ parent series.  In this case, by having lady lawyer Jean Loring, from The Atom, act as the JLA’s defense attorney.  Now, Fox could have just tossed in a throwaway character in that rôle and it wouldn’t have changed anything.  But by using Jean, Fox folded the JLA title into the rest of the DC universe.  It was just a nice thing to see.

     

    ■  I liked the idea that the Justice Leaguers willingly submitted to the law.  Certainly, the law enforcement officers, even equipped with helicopters and tommy guns, posed no significant obstacle to the JLAers, with their many powers.  And, as you pointed out, Philip, they could have retreated outside the jurisdiction of the authorities.

     

    But they didn’t.  As Mr. Silver Age pointed out, there were often lessons in life to be taken from the Justice League tales.  (His article on such, that he mentioned, is my favourite chapter of his book, Baby Boomer Comics.)  In the case of “The Super-Exiles”, the moral is that no-one should consider himself above the law.  Due process applies to everyone.

     

    Unfortunately, the plot undid much of that lesson when it had the Leaguers shade the law by “breaking jail” and going into action in their civilian identities.  Yes, the law sometimes hinges on technicalities, but trying to pass of their civilian selves as separate individuals wouldn’t have flown in any court.  It would have repaired much of the damage if Fox had included a line of dialogue from one of the JLAers to the effect of “When this is over, we’ll turn ourselves over to the law and take the consequences of leaving exile.”

     

    ■  I enjoyed the sequence in which the Justice League members, now in mufti, have to introduce themselves to each other, despite the fact that they have known each other for years.  I wish that part had gone on for longer than a few panels.  Something like Bruce Wayne saying, “Oliver Queen!  We’ve met at several charity functions, but I had no idea you were the Green Arrow!”

     

    ■  As for Aquaman, no he wasn’t born “Aquaman”, but he didn’t maintain a civilian identity, like the others.  So it rather made sense that he was excluded from breaking exile.  Yeah, they probably could have given him a spare suit and he could have gone into action as Arthur Curry.  But I’m guessing Gardner Fox was happy to have an excuse not to have to shoehorn in a waterbound setting to include him.  Fox was already running out of fresh ideas to do that.

     

    ■  As for not dropping J’onn J’onzz off on Mars, while they were out in space, I wrote a Deck Log entry a few years back on why the Manhunter didn’t take advantage of his space-capable JLA buddies to get back to Mars.  It was posted on the old, now-unreadable board, but eventually, I’ll get to reprinting it here as an archive entry. 

     

    More directly as to why the League didn’t return the Manhunter to Mars in this tale, it’s rather a moot point.  By the time of “The Super-Exiles”, J’onn J’onzz could use Dr. Erdel’s robot brain to travel back and forth to Mars whenever he wanted (n.b., “The Mystery of the Martian Marauders”, Detective Comics # 301 [Mar., 1962]).

     

     

    Now for the bad, besides the flaws that you pointed out, Philip:

     

    ■  You’re right; Snapper Carr didn’t make much of a showing in this tale.  He shows up for one panel, determining to uncover the villain behind the mess his pals are in, and then we don’t see him again until the last two panels, during the smiles-all-around ending.  The story would have worked better if---instead of Superman pulling a rabbit out of his microscopic vision and determining that Doctor Destiny was back of all their woes---the script had shown Snapper doing the detective work to figure out that Destiny was the hidden mastermind.

     

    ■  I don’t have a problem with the JLAers erasing their mutual knowledge of their secret identities from their own minds---there’s no justifiable reason why they should share that knowledge---and obviously, we can’t have the rest of the world knowing who they are when they go home and hang up their capes and masks.  But I found two significant problems with the solution:

     

    One, it was sloppy.  Superman was going to wipe out the world’s knowledge  of their secret identities with that chunk of amnesium that he keeps in his Fortress.  Well, yeah, I know he’s Superman and all, but it strikes me that using amnesium to do the job would lack a certain . . . precision.  It would be difficult for even Superman to be so precise in a global application of the stuff that he would erase just the public’s knowledge of their identities and not of other things.  And what about the folks who already knew a hero’s secret identity, with his blessing, such as Alfred or Pieface.  And, theoretically, Pete Ross should have forgotten that he knew Superman was Clark Kent.

     

    Green Lantern’s power ring would have done the job much more handily.  All G.L. would have had to do was order the ring to affect only those people who learnt their identities in the last twenty-four hours.

     

    But there’s another problem.  The story doesn’t specify exactly how much time elapsed between their defeat of their evil super-selves and the wrap-up, in which Superman says he’s going to take care of that pesky identity-revealing problem.  But there was certainly enough time---at least, the time it took them to go to the pen where Doc Destiny was locked up and have it out with him---for the newspapers and the radio and television to report the knowledge of the secret identities.

     

    Sure, Superman or Green Lantern could wipe out the public’s memories of their identities, but what are they going to do about all the special editions of the Daily Planet with the headline “SUPERMAN IS CLARK KENT!”?  Or all the video tapes of television news broadcasters announcing “This just in---the Green Lantern is actually famed test pilot Hal Jordan . . . .”

     

     

    As I said, the fun of seeing the heroes go into action as their civilian selves kind of plugged all of those plot holes.  But, as fun as it was, I wouldn’t call “The Super-Exiles of Earth” one of the JLA’s greatest adventures.

  • I agree that it was a fun story but it's amazing what you can see when you go through it page by page!

    I liked that it had all the members in it. And I always like it when we see the team sitting around discussing things out. You get a real sense of comradeship and that they genuinely get along and trust each other, beyond the keeping their true identities secret thing!

    I never thought about Alfred, Pieface and Pete Ross. Would it also have included the Teen Titans? Superman would have kept his knowledge of Batman's identity and vice versa, but what about the Flash and Green Lantern? Would they have shared with the other members that they know each others' secret i.d.s?

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