As I was listening to the “new” Black Eyed Peas album E.N.D. on Spotify the other day (I quite enjoy “I Gotta Feeling”), I randomly started to think about comics. Like music, they’re in part entertainment. The other, and more important, part is art. In entertainment you’re bound to come across things, that you know are really simple and not quite your taste, but nonetheless so compelling that you can’t put it away. (I believe the term I’m looking for is guilty pleasure.)
You know, maybe it’s some form of nostalgic attachment, that drives you to check it out in the first place. Maybe it’s the hype that gets you. Maybe it’s a creator. Maybe you want to feel proven right, when you see that’s it’s really not that deep. Whatever it is, you’re most probably going at it from a cynical angle. Which you drop pretty quickly, when you see that Roy Harper gets induced into the JLA. Or when you see a giant T-Rex Venom. Hell, when you see Venom for the first time!
And that reminded me why the JLA is my favorite superhero-team: They have rules. They have politics. They’re a franchise. Of course, the DCU is more of a fantasy world so not every principle we know is directly applicable. The first thing we should be aware of is that the League is privately owned by Superman, Batman and Wonder-Woman. There is is no Board of Directors or a CEO that keeps things in check. Well, there is a Chairman position, but Black Canary can tell you that it doesn’t mean shit. The next thing is, that they probably don’t have to pay taxes. I mean, they don’t have a revenue stream as far as I can tell. Plus, they save the world on a regular basis. I guess there was a heated debate on Capitol Hill for that Exempt regulation, but eventually the pros outweighed the cons.
Next up: The trophy room! Oh yes, they steal things from their adversaries and store it in one secure place. I like that idea. That way, you have an endless stream of stories. Think about it: A villain gets thrown in jail, breaks out and the first thing he does is return to the JLA Headquarters to retrieve his shit. Boom, instant story. Wally is on monitor duty? Great, let him deal with it. That simple, and you got your focus issue.
But I guess Wally is returning to a more interesting pretty soon, with Flash: Rebirth and all. The monthly Flash series is coming, along with a Kid Flash book. And the way Geoff Johns writes it, we’re gonna see a lot of Wally in Flash. Which is nice, because it really underscores the legacy factor in the DCU. You get some corny with the legacy, but that’s alright. For gritty you can go over to Marvel…
I guess I kinda lost the guilty pleasure thing early on, but that’s okay. That’s kind of the idea behind this whole thing. Oh, and to bring this article full circle: The rest of the E.N.D.? Kinda sucks…
P.S. I can’t write an article about the machinations of the JLA and the Flash without mentioning Tom Katers. Go check out “Tom vs. The Flash”. It’s awesome!
Pete Schueler is currently residing in Berlin, Germany. He’s desperately trying to get his writing career somewhere. Where that is exactly, is not defined yet, but it should be somewhere where it’s visible. He’s been a comic book and pop culture geek all his life, but started reading them funny-books again on a weekly basis just three short years ago. In this time he matured from reading just DC books, to preferring mostly Indie titles. He still has a reverence for the Big Two and superheroes in general, and consumes them at a regular rate. The books, not the heroes. 
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