Written by Grant Morrison
Illustrated by Frank Quitely
Letters by Kenny Lopez
Color and Separations by Laura Depuy and Wildstorm FX
Hardback, $24.95 from DC Comics
There is a comic book earth, this much we know, and it has rules-- actually, it has one rule: Good tends to win. There are exceptions, of course; the forces of good often meet with crises and setbacks and lose a player or two along the way. Some forces of good stray a little into the gray, not-so-heroic side. But when you lay it all out, you'll find that being a super-hero predestines you to more than your share of victories, and being a super-villain in the major comics universes is akin to banging your head repeatedly against Superman's Golden Fortress Gate. This is one of the reasons we have a strange admiration for the loyal oppositions like Luthor and the Joker; what a cosmic joke has been played upon them, that they must strive, and fail, and strive, and fail.
In *JLA: Earth 2*, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely paint new colors on an old DC trick just to explore this strangely reliable win/loss destiny of the heroes and villains of DC's earth. Within the confines of their story they pretend for a moment that the way super-hero stories work out is not a cliché but a fundamental piece of the way the world works.
We open with a mystery: the JLA, for now comprised of the heavy hitters of the DC Universe, Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter, save a crashing plane only to discover the plane has come from nowhere and contains a load of already-dead passengers. Not only that, but the passengers are "reversed," with their hearts subtly to the wrong side. When our heroes pay a visit to Luthor (they appear suspended outside his conference room window, *a la* Christopher Reeve), they find that Luthor is not himself.
Luthor is actually an alternate Luthor who's already locked up his evil counterpart. The newly arrived Luthor tells the JLA he's an embattled super-hero from an earth where villains vastly outnumber him. Would the JLA care to come back and sweep up during, say, a twenty-four-hour time window?
Well, sure they would. Wouldn't you? In fact they bicker about it a little but in the end they leave Manhunter and Aquaman to guard the fort and our heroes step into the alternate dimension. When they get there they find a world turned upside-down: an evil JLA called the Crime Syndicate, led by Ultraman, Owlman, Johnny Quick and Superwoman rules the planet, allowing mob bosses to handle the every day terrorizing.
Okay, now, I know what the reader is thinking: Haven't we seen this? Didn't *Star Trek* do this to death? Yes and no. Yes, we've seen the Dark Mirror versions of our heroes. But no, because Morrison and Quitely actually have something clever up their sleeve.
Because they just can't win. The heroes have little trouble collapsing the evil regimes of the Earth in no time flat, but looking around, there doesn’t seem to be anybody suited to taking over because everyone tends towards the corrupt, except Luthor. That means Luthor, rather than being a hero, is starting to look a little insane and sad. Meanwhile, the Crime Syndicate try their hand at our Earth, and find a similar conundrum. "What's the *point?*" they ask. They want to go home. There is a point, but I'm not telling. I will say that it involves yet another, more post-modern attitude, one that has thrown comics itself into a morass of confusion-- what are these stories supposed to be about? Should good always win? Why not? This is a story that gets better the more you ponder it; so much is going on beyond the actual happenings in the book.
I loved the characters in the Crime Syndicate: Ultraman is Superman if he had Mr. Fantastic's origin and was rebuilt by aliens; he's mean and brutish and even a little slow. Owlman is still the son of Thomas Wayne; he's not Bruce and yet he is, and you have to admire the idea that in any universe, the Dark Knight is still the smart one. Green Lantern's alternate, Power Ring, has a better ring than ours does. It's a living alien entity that keeps thinking and computing while the rest of the Syndicate ignore it. Owlman, to my mind, should have taken that ring long ago. Johnny Quick is the junkie that Speedy never put in enough years to become.
The new mystery arises as soon as the two Batmans start pondering the meaning of their universes and decide maybe they've made a mistake. In the end they're left with a sober lesson that one hopes they'll try not to think about. *JLA*, of course, is a stacked-deck comic; the Batman here is not the Batman of *Arkham Asylum*, really. But Morrison seems to suggest that those stories of darkness and madness are trying something noble but not really necessary: just because you want to see heroes triumph doesn't mean you deny reality.
*JLA: Earth 2* is one of the few stories I've read in a while where it's clear that we're not looking at a fictional version of *our* earth, "one where super-heroes exist." DC used to play that game a lot, back when our earth was called Earth Prime and the world of the Silver Age was called Earth 1 (Golden Age heroes lived on the oddly-enumerated Earth 2.) But "where heroes exist" is a simplistic story idea; "where the forces of the universe conspire to see that good or evil prevail" is a more sophisticated and complicated one. More complicated because it acknowledges that the heroes are basically cheating, more sophisticated because it acknowledges that we of the lowly real earth will have no such luck. And more than this, it's okay-- there's no shame in those stories. How lovely to dream of a stacked world. Wonderfully, *JLA: Earth 2* brings us back to why we read super-hero comics in the first place: to get off this rock and out to some place better.