The annual team-ups between the Silver Age Justice League and their storied "Earth-2" counterparts -- the legendary Justice Society of America -- were often among the very best comics published in any given calendar year.

Fan anticipation for these yearly events had been keen ever since the very first of these, in which the two teams had joined forces in order to thwart the nefarious doings of a cabal of villains from both earths... and the letters with which they inundated the offices of DC Comics made the writers and editors fully aware of that fact. Therefore, the storytelling "stakes" were concomitantly raised with every passing yearly dust-up. After Earths "1" and "2" had been menaced, for instance, the existence of an "Earth-3" -- one in which there were no super-heroes, and super-villains ruled -- was brought into play.

The year after that, a gigantic menace from an "anti-matter universe" threatened not only the existence of the twin worlds... but the universe in its entirety. And so on, and so forth; As I've stated: the "chips" stacked on the center of the storytelling "table" were piled a little higher with each successive year.

Well... one can only carry this sort of thing so far, after all, before the most lethal sort of self-parody finally begins to settle into the proceedings (a lesson the competing Marvel Comics never quite took in, by the way, as witness their vast and [ultimately] absurd panoply of "cosmic beings": Galactus... the Grandmaster ... Ego ["the Living Planet"]... the Collector... the In- Betweener... after the first two, it's all pretty much a downhill slide, really.)... and so, at some point, the decision was (wisely) reached to make the battleground for the next JLA/JSA thing the human heart, rather than some alien topsoil.

The two-part crossover event begun in JUSTICE LEAGUE #64 heralded the return of "the Red Tornado" -- ostensibly (in a nice bit of retroactive two-stepping, storywise) a former member of the Earth-2 Justice Society. (In actual point of fact, however: there was no super-heroic "Red Tornado," per se, who was ever a member of said team back during its 40's heyday. There was an occasional "comic relief"-style character by that name -- a fat, middle-aged woman who wore a stove pot atop her head -- who made a quick cameo appearance in their first published adventure... but that was the extent of things. Up until now at any rate.) He seemed a bit... well, miffed, really, to have been overlooked in the intervening years.

As things turned out, however: the returning "Red Tornado" was nothing more than a clever ruse on the part of that year's super-villain menace, in order to lure the Justice Society to their combined doom. However -- by the story's end -- the android haad renounced its malign heritage, and decided to dedicate its "life" to things super-heroic, instead.

The readership responded to this shameless exercise in heartstring-pulling with wild acclaim... and, so -- the year immediately following -- the editors raised the emotional stakes higher, once again.

Before we arrive at that juncture, however... there was the sad plight of (promise me you won't... you know... stare at me when you read this next bit) "the Mind- Grabber Kid"... and the Creeper.

The former was an adolescent super-hero wannabe, who -- after being upstaged in the foiling of a common, garden- variety bank robbery by the televised broadcast of the Justice League in team action -- used his nascent telepathic abilities to lure powerful and good-hearted (if startling naive, certainly) aliens to Earth, under the pretext that the JLA was, in actually, a repressive super-regime of planetary proportions.

Somehow, DC's Creeper -- a capering, pun-happy lunatic whose own title was (sadly) slated for imminent cancellation -- got dragged into this unusually lighthearted JLA "romp," as well [see cover, above]. The results were fully as satisfying as anything filmed under the auspices of veteran "silent era" two-reeler king, Mack Sennett.

Now: back to the heavy emotional weather, harbinged earlier.

The next JLA/JSA clasping of interdimensional hands -- involving, as it did, the annihilation of all life on Earth-2 by a rogue star-being calling himself "Aquarius" [see cover, above] -- led to the untimely death of one of the JSA's own: Larry Lance, the reporter husband of super-heroine the Black Canary. He sacrificed himself in order that she might live, in an evocative scene well-written by then-series scribe Dennis O'Neil, and masterfully executed (you should pardon the expression) by penciler Dick Dillin.

The heart-stricken heroine, at the story's end, migrated with the rest of the Justice Leaguers to Earth-One, in order to make a new life for herself... and (in so doing) promptly became a "fan favorite" member of the team.

None of the foregoing, however, should be taken as indicative that the JUSTICE LEAGUE title had completely given itself over to sorry soap operatics, in place of rousing and satisfying adventure fiction. An illustrative case in point was the now-classic three-parter running from issues #96 to #98, involving the arrival to Earth of the interstellar entity known only as: Starbreaker [see the Neal Adams cover reproduction, below].

Starbreaker was precisely what the lurid cover copy proclaimed him to be: a "cosmic vampire" who -- rather than battening upon ordinary blood, or other bodily viscera -- sated himself on the primal, collective emotional "death-cries" of entire civilizations as their worlds ended. Since the number of suitably densely-populated planets was at something of a premium, at any given point... Starbreaker "nudged" things in the (for him) proper direction, as necessary.

His attempts to so arrange our world's hasty shuffling from the cosmic stage, naturally, placed him squarely in conflict with the combined might of the Justice League's roster, from Aquaman to Zatanna; the resultant battle -- complete with a retelling of the team's origin -- was one of the most lauded JLA stories of the original series' entire run.

... however: it was superceded (both in readership acclaim at the time and fan estimation in later years) by what has come -- to many -- to very nearly define the quintessential JUSTICE LEAGUE story, well-told: issues #100 through #102.

Involving nothing less than the complete rosters of every super-hero and/or heroine ever to call themselves a member of either team (it was another JLA/JSA crossover, as it so happens), the two dozen-plus characters find themselves sent on a quest through both time and space by a pan- galactic entity calling itself "Oracle" in search of yet a third team: the absent-for -decades "Seven Soldiers of Victory." [see accompanying cover, below]

Bringing every last of JLA "business" so beloved by the readership of the day into play throughout -- the splintering of the larger teams into smaller pairings of two or three heroes; every character allowed to demonstrate what made him (or her) special in the eyes of their respective supporters in the readership; and the stressing of Team Dynamics and Unity over pointless "but-it's-showing-their-characters" squabbling while there's serious cosmos-saving to be attended to -- the resultant climax focused on the necessary sacrifice of one of the thronged heroes, in order To Keep Bad Things From Happening on a universal scale.

Said sacrifice was made -- in all poignant nobility -- by none other than the android Red Torndao, mentioned at the beginning of this essay. The resultant sequence wherein the massed heroes realize that he's already left their midst in order to give his own "life," while the rest of them were still debating who ought to be the sacrificial torch-bearer -- was handled with craft and sensitivity, and is still remembered and discussed by aficianados of the form today.

The Silver Age JUSTICE LEAGUE
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