CafeRene Thank you very much.

I'm not sure but I think the kids were the Newsboy Legion

Yeah, pretty much what I figured too.

Bit of the coolness mixed with a need to give us the Seven Soliders of Victory, to the point where they drag out Crimson Avenger and Speedy for no real reason. Watching the General was awesome, as was the stand taken by Shining Knight. I also liked the goofy culture clashing...but it would be great if Mr. Terrific took that damn "T" off his face.

Wait, so the secret Nazi serum to make the perfect Aryan soldiers turns the General into the Incredible Hulk with orthodontic issues?

It was unstable. BWAH! The secret agent should have let the Nazis keep their super serum, it sucked.

I think the best part was that all the heroes got their asses kicked and normal everyday people saved the day.

Anyone care to give a recap of Destroyer, even if it is in spoiler mode?

My first thought too, and the beginning rang all kinds of 'Captain America' bells. How long before Marvel threatens to sue?

Uh yeah, it does take 5 non-meta heroes to even begin to make up for Superman. But all you need is heart! That was almost an anime moment. And a totally anvilicious ending.

The General had a point. Nowadays it's all about power. Good ep. I liked the old Saturday matinee cliffhanger beginning. Good to see Amanda Waller again.

The Captain Nazi origin was very much like the original comics, so Marvel can't due any suing. Plus, at the time Captain Nazi was created, the character was still owned by Fawcett (as was Captain Marvel, etc.). I liked the whole newsreel feel and the addition of Spy Smasher. Who knew they'd find a way to slide these two characters in? Very cool.

I loved the Seven Solidiers of Victory 'homage' with the slight changes to fit the cartoon world. Nice to see Speedy too. The dispair in Green Arrow's voice when his sidekick and Crimson Avenger showed up was priceless.

Captain America got ripped off so much during the war anyway, I think DC could prove that Marvel didn't deffend its copyright.

Alway happy to see Schilinger. Loved Green Arrow and Speedy bitching at eachother.

The suing was referring more to the Hulk rippoff. That was pretty blatant. I mean the pants were even tattered almost identically. But I did like seeing Amanda Waller again and her pragmatism at the state of things.

Also, the Hulk was gray originally. I prefer to think of it as an homage, not a ripoff. A ripoff wouldn't be so obvious. Of course, they did a Hulk homage (sith Solomon Grundy) last season too.

I wouldn't say Grundy was a Hulk homage so much as a distinctly different character with a distinctly different origin, who first appeared in DC comics in 1944, a good 18 years before the Hulk fist appeared (in 1962). (NOT that I knew the years off the top of my head or anything; I had check Wikipedia to get those.)

Or were you saying the particular plot was a homage, not the character in general?

When he works with magic guy, fish dude, and space-faring metal man; it's not just a Hulk homage.

I think it's pretty telling that I picked up on that right away yet had to be told about the 7 Soldiers of Victory.

That's straight out of the General's comic appearances when he inhabited the body of the Shaggy Man.

Ok. Editorializing in brackets.

Previously on JLU: Luthor used Tala as a conduit to brign back Brainiac . . . but got Darkside instead, who blew up their ship and is now planning to destroy earth. He informs the league that "We have a little problem."

Luthor explains to a skeptical Superman that they survived the explosion thanks to a protective bubble from Sinestro's power ring. A resident of New Genesis came to check out the ship's explosion and was promptly clubbed unconcious and had his tech stolden, which got the Legion of Doom home.

The LoD refuses to be locked wehn the planet needs defending. Boomtubes start dropping Darkside's troops around the planet. Off-duty heros are told to suit up and the on-duty heros teleport to the invasion sights.

Superman and the other JLU folks still want to lock up the LoD. Batman steps in [as the only one there who has his head screwed on straight] and suggests they'll need all the help they can get. Sups and Lex snip at each other, including Sups' line "It's Lex flippin' Luthor," but they agree to worth togther.

Bats, Sups and Lex decide to go to the best protected mothership, where they expect Darkside to show: at the Daily Planet. Montage of various heros suiting up/teleporting to battle. Hawkgirl, Steel (Hank Heywood version) and Atomic skull teleport to Washington DC. Giganta, Flash and Grean Lantern teleport to Paris. Star Saphire, Shining Knight, Vigalante and Wonder Woman are at the Great Wall of China. Dr. Light, Grean Arrow, Black Cannary and Bizzaro are in Rome. Sinestro is in Tokyo. Howk, Dove, The Creeper, The Question [awesomely fighting evil . . . by hitting it with his car!] and Captain Atom are in some random well-lit city, possibly Metropolis. Toyman is in what might be Istanbul. Hawkman, Stargirl and STRIPE are in London. Killer Frost is in Venice.

Bats, Sups and Lex arrive in Metropolis on the Daily Planet roof and start fighting parademons hoping to attract Darkside's attention. It works. Lex goes all crazy, ranting "You destroyed Brainiac! I'm gonna make you pay" while trying and failing misserably to beat up Darkside. Lex gets blasted off of the roof and Bats saves him. Darkside blathers about how he kicked Sups ass before and will do it again and then proceeds to use the DP globe to smash Sups through several floors of the DP building.

Meanwhile, In China, that group is fighting. Star Saphire gets knocked unconcious and saved from falling by Shining Knight. A somewhat portly middle-aged Chinese man tells what appears to be his wife "I have to go help"; she replies "I know." He instructs her to find shelter and she gazes adoringly at him as he runs toward the fighting, while everyone else runs away from it.

Steel (John Henry Irons version), in Tokyo along with Blue Devil, and informs Mr. Terrific back at the Watchtower that the big machines are Magmatappers. They're trying to create firepits, which would make Earth like Apokolips. Taking out these big machines is now the priority.

In Washington, Atomic Skull does a poor job of covering Hawkgirl's back, as she gets hit in a wing with a spear. Steel (Heywood) helps out[/does a blatant Captain America impression] by throwing a sheild, discus style, to cover her while she's down. She gets back up and rams her mace into the main power coupling [looks like it hurts]. Atomic Skull gets carries her away before it explodes.

In Paris, Flash suggest "why don't you just throw it into the sun?" to GL, who says he might be onto something, but he'll need a trench around it, which Flash quickly [how else?] creates. GL forms a catapult with his ring and hurls the Magmatapper at an invading ship, both of which explode nicely.

Breif shot of more fighting in the China group.

continued from previous post:


Darkside picks Sups out from under the rubble by the neck but is attacked by Bats and Lex before he can do any harm. Lex and Bats vs parademons and Suups vs Darkside. Metron shows up, just watching.

Back in China, Wonder Woman warns the middle-aged man (from earlier) to "get away from here! It's not safe." He says he's here to help and begins pummeling parademons on the Great Wall, greatly surprising WW. He then starts to fly. And then turns into a Chinese dragon. And then starts going through parademons. And then . . . it's J'onn! WW gives him a big hug which he returns.

Zantana and Volcana are in some mountainous place fighting evil. [Zantana turnd the parademons into doves, and then the doves into an energy blast that she hurls at the invading ship. Kinda cool.]

In Metropolis, Bats is out of weapons and Lex offers him his extra gun. Sups gets knocked down by Darkside, and Bats attacks Darkside, distracting him long enough to earn an Omega Beam shot his way. Bats avoids the Omega Beam. This impressses Darkside because no one else has ever managed that. [This is total bull. Bats is tops for a normal human, but he's still no more agile and fast than a normal human.] Darkside plans to turn the Beam on Lex, who opts to run away before getting fired upon. Sups re-engages Darkside, who beats him up.

Lex notices Metron sitting there, watching. No one else has noticed him. They have a conversation wherein Lex postulates that Metron should know how to beat Darkside. He does and agrees to take Lex where he wants to go.

Bats tries to help out Sups again, and gets thrown off. Sups gets up and gets mad. He speachifies about how Bats and the other JLUers will never give up. He smashes Darkside through a wall. He continues about how he feels like he lives in a world of cardboard and has to exert constant control so he doesn't hurt others. "But you can take it, can't you, big man? What we have here is a rare oppertunitiy for me to cut loose and show you just how powerful I really am." He smacks Darkside halfway across the city, through several buildings, and superspeeds over to catch him before he starts falling and wack him down to the ground, forming a large crater. Therein, Darkside pulls a trick out his sleeve called the Agongy Matrix, which leaves Sups writhing on the ground, helpless.

Metron has taken Lex to the Source Wall, behind which is the greatest secret of the Universe. Metron warns that only a 12th level intellect has any hope of survivng what Lex is about the experiences. Lex, which is typically charming arrogance replies "Then I'm over-qualified" and leaps in.

Darkside informs Sups: "your valor has touched my heart. Oh yes, there is still some small part of me that knows mercy." So he'll be nice and kill Sups quickly with his kyptonite knife and put Sups' heart on a pike in throne room.

But Lex is back. "As much as I'd enjoy seeing that, first you've got some bussiness with me." He's not in the standard villian-Lex wear of all season, but in a snazzy bussiness suit from his corporate mogul days. [Yaowzah!] "Sorry it took me so long; I had to go get my powersuit." Darkside finds it insane that lex woudl challenge him. But Lex isn't here to challange him, but to offer him "the only thing you want." The Anti-Life Equation, which looks like a shiny ball in Lex's hand. Darkside comes forward to take it and he and Lex dissapear in a shiny whirlwind as Bats drags Sups from the crater.

Cut to later, where a newscast informs that the legions ran away after Darkside was defeated. Sups is ticked that Lex saved the world [rivalry much?]. Bats doubts either Lex or Darkside is dead. Supermand: "But we saw it this time." Flash: "You saw it last time too." The group concensus is that they'll be back. WW wants to lock up all the other LoD villians. Atomic skull thinks that's a bum deal and Bats agrees: "Five minute head start." Giganta takes the first few seconds of her head start to kiss Flash.

As they all walk out of the MetroTower, J'onn calls his Special Middle-Aged Chinese Lady Friend to tell her that he loves her and should be home in time for dinner. Sups says the head start means Bats is "getting soft" in his old age. Bats: "Don't you have a tall building to go leap." Last line goes to Wonder Woman: "And the adventure continues."

Auxilary heros run down the stairs in waves, some sorted by association on the show (Hawk and Dove; STRIPE and Stargirl; Vigalante and Shining Knight; Black Canary and Green Arrow). Flash and J'onn run down as GL and Hawkgirl fly right after them. Bats, Sups and WW run down at the end, Bats in the middle; the other two fly off to the side as Bats runs straight at the camera. Roll credits.

Well if Marvel sued DC could countersue on Squadron Supreme.

Both companies have a long, long history of making thinly veiled doppelgangers of each others character in their respective universes, and 99 percent of the time it's winked at as homage, in fact in many cases the various artists and editors talk it out formally or informally with each other beforehand, or a creator who introduced a character while working for Marvel (and legally or no is considered by their peers to "own" the character) goes ahead and makes a really similar character when working for DC, or vice versa.

Sometimes these are parodies or spoofs, but often they're really pretty respectful, acknowledgements that these various characters are icons that the people working in the industry loved as kids. Each company knows their existence is pretty synergistic with the other, and that they share a common pool of talent, getting into knife fights with each other all the time is pretty pointless. At the end of the day, the amount of suing is pretty minimal, at least in modern times. Back when there were more comic companies and the characters were newer and less iconically set in the public imagination, the IP infringement meant more, nowdays you'd have to go to some pretty extreme lengths to get sued, I mean, just about any Superman ripoff character is essentially cultural/literary commentary on Superman more than anything else (What if Superman were a woman, what if he were black, what if he were a criminal, what if he were a cultural conservative, what if he was gay and his lover was Batman, etc etc etc)

It should be noted that the companies aren't so sanguine about such matters outside the fairly small comic world. Once you start getting into movie rights, or video game appearances, toy merchandising, all those places where the IPs intersect with big, non-comic money, the lawyers are a bit more cranky.

The Shiar Imperial Guard was always my favorite Marvel homage to DC characters.

What's the parallel?

The Shiar Imperial Guard was a take-off of the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Other than being set in space and thus reasonably including more aliens than earth-based hero groups, what's the similarity? I'm not all that familiar with Legion of Superheros, but the impression that I do have of them isn't at all similar to the Imperial Guard.

In comics continuty, Wade Elling was suffering from a terminal illness (cancer, I believe). He transferred his consciousness into the Shaggy Man, a synthetic construct that was nigh-unbeatable. How bad was it? The JLA had to build their own Shaggy Man to combat the first one. Once his mind was transferred, Elling shaved off all the hair on his new body, since he was a miltary guy. The first time he fought the JLA, the General was transported to a faraway asteroid. The second time, he was recruited to join the Injustice Society. I think he's trapped in the Ghost Zone or something. My memory of the Morrison JLA is sketchy at best.

I was sort of pleasantly surprised to see the Spysmasher. I wrote something just the other week commenting on him probably being the most obscure comic book superhero to be given the live action treatment.

While they're not very similar in tone or style, nearly all the members of the Shiar Imperial Guard had powers derivative of one of the LSH. Gladiator, for instance, filled the Superboy role, while later addition Glom was akin to Matter-Eater Lad (though Glom ate energy, instead). Wikipedia has a full list of members and their counterparts.

Ah, powers. That would explain it. I was trying to think of similarities in personality, role in the comics, etc -- stylistic/tone things. Thanks.

I nearly died when Green Arrow was going through his bravado speech about how the general was really in for it now because here came the big guns! and oh man, was he in trouble, because here they were! "...The Crimson Avenger and my sidekick." HA!

This was on the preachy side, but I was really happy to have Justin take a larger role. He kind of kicked butt in a noble way.

Today he's rather obscure, but in the 1940's, Spysmasher was an immensely popular character. The overall simple but dynamic look of the character, and his mission, (to beat the tar out of enemy spies) was very compelling to young boys. To wartime Hollywood, Spysmasher looked like a sure hit.

Thanks Treppie, great recap. I wonder what happened to Lex, but I guess we'll never know.

Thank you so much for the recap.



Try to explain to a four year old that that is NOT Hulk.

Me: No, see, the Hulk is green and talks funny. This guy is greyish and uses complete sentances.

Four Year Old: Oh. Ok!

Great idea. I'll have to try that if he sees it when I watch it again.

He left the room after a few minutes because he wasn't interested in it. I wonder if he's really my son....

Better hope he never runs across the grey Hulk.

So did I. Or at least halfway through, once the preaching began in earnest. Okay, animator guys, so you disagree with the Bush administration's policies. I get it. I'm not fond of the guy myself but I'd really love it if movies and TV and music would either find something new to say about him or talk about something else.

There's a grey Hulk? I totally didn't know that. (Never really followed the Hulk.)

Hulk was initially gray, but the colorists couldn't get the shade consistent so they switched to green. Later, the gray was brought back as a "smart" version of Hulk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The General is a Hulk rip-off because they are both brutish characters with torn clothing. Because we all know that never happens.

And the Hulk is a very original creation, too. The idea of a scientist living two lives, one as an inhuman beast controlled by anger and the other tortured by what he's become, well, that's just unheard of.

*Big Grin*

Well said, well said indeed.

I was chatting with Mike McAvennie (writer/former editor at DC) at the NY Comic Con (pics here), and the subject of this show came up when he mentioned that he wrote a story in the JLU comic. He basically said that CN isn't making more of it because a) they have enough episodes for syndication, and b) they're more interested in developing their own properties (as opposed to DC's). From there, we started talking about the rumors of an LSH series.

*blink*

*blink*

...and? Don't leave us hangin'!

OT: That NYCC was insane.

And not the good kind of insane. If anybody here is interested in a meet-up for Wizard World Philly, let me go.

Question: In comics, did Skeets act as a warm-up man for Booster, like in that one JLU episode? I saw this (second picture), and I just heard Skeets' voice from the toon.

Well, there's some news of it here (along with some character designs). I asked McAvennie about the rumors, and he pretty much just said "yeah, they're thinking about it", and that if it went through, Superboy would be part of the series. I told him that I'd love to see a Legion animated series, because the LSH deserves some exposure after all these decades. He agreed, mentioning that he was the LSH editor for 6 years (at which point I finally realized where I knew his name from). I geeked out a little bit when he told me that he was the one who brought in Abnett & Lanning.

Now that I'm seeing those pics, I'm not really loving that art style, though. I assumed that it was meant as a JLU replacement, not Teen Titans.

RE: NYCC, I missed out on Saturday's insanity (I got there around 6), and Sunday was fine, so I actually had a pretty good time. I didn't get to see the cool Saturday panels, but I saw a screening of Art School Confidential and a rough cut of the first 30 minutes of A Scanner Darkly, so that was cool. Hopefully they'll be able to rent more than just the basement of the Javits Center next year.

Yeah it was. I thought I was being smart by getting there around 8:30 on Saturday morning. It's a good thing I did because my nearly 3 hour wait in line could have been a lot worse. Oh well...but in the end I had a good time.

Oh, and I got a chance to meet Geoff Johns late on Saturday. I told him how much I enjoyed his upcoming JLU Hawkman ep. I was surprised to hear that he hadn't seen it yet. It's interesting that the writers have to wait to see the eps along with us. Anyway, I told him I think he'd be very happy with it. IMHO, it's one of the strongest eps of the season.

The LSH series hasn't yet been officially announced, but it's pretty much a done deal (at least a pilot). Several sites have already reported the casting news of Andy Milder as Lightning Lad, for instance.

And Michael Grabois' LSH blog has frequent updates on the status of the series. He has linked to the blog of an actor who has been cast as Timber Wolf (though I think that guy's posts had to be taken down) and who even had pictures of the LSH-themed cake the cast got when they first met together. The showrunner is supposedly Allan Heinberg, current writer of Young Avengers and producer or something on The O.C. (not sure if that's a good thing). The prop designer is a guy who previously worked on Teen Titans.

The pic linked above by areacode212 was recently referred to by Bruce Timm (who is not involved in the LSH series) as "a very early development design", so hopefully the final design won't suck so hard.

Ooh, it's official!

Flash and Substance just aired on YTV tonight. I'd say this was definately one of the best episodes of the series. The villains were great, Flash kicked ass, and the reporter was hillarious.

I believe the whole thing with the general was inspired by a story where a crazy general gets his mind put into the body of the Shaggy Man.

It sounds lame but was actually a pretty good story. Gotta love Grant Morrison.