Collects JLA 10-17, JLA Secret Files #2, Prometheus (Villains) #1, JLA/WildC.A.T.s #1
Rock of Ages: This six-part time-travel / heist caper faces the JLA against Lex Luthor's new Injustice Gang and his hard-light constructs of the JLA in reverse: the Revenge Squad. Apparently this was the first Injustice Gang headed by Luthor and he treats it as a corporate takeover. Emboldened by a mysterious rock that he found in his global research, he has newfound influence over others and puts it to good use...to destroy Superman and the JLA! It's really genius how he uses the powers of the various members of the Gang in new ways to defeat old foes. For example, he combines Dr. Light's mastery of electromagnetic radiation with Mirror Master's mastery of...mirrors to create a hard-light construct replica of the Injustice Gang's satellite hardquarters. He lures Superman and the Martian Manhunter to the replica and hands it off to the Joker, who turns it into a death maze. What happens next is genius:
The entire arc is so creative in how it flexes these superpowers, villains or heroes, and there's this cat-and-mouse game of who is going to one-up the other with their superpower creativity. This is what great super-comics are made of. Here's another scene, where Dr. Light exploits Superman's new light-based superpowers, converts him into radio waves and transmits him out of the Solar System:
Don't worry: Superman bounces his signal off a space probe near Jupiter and returns when Green Arrow opens up a radio channel. There's so many subplots going on but it's for the most part legible. A second read a week apart would help. I secretly think these issues are a love letter to Superman. I have yet to read someone who can write Superman better than Grant Morrison. In the first part of Rock of Ages, the Revenge Squad kills a number of people in their attack on Star City, and the JLA overlook the wreckage. When an onlooker confronts Green Lantern about the carnage, they get into an argument, until Superman approaches the man and just straight up has a conversation with him.
They don't even tell you what he says: it was all in the background of that single page. But with just his words, Superman is able to calm this guy down and shake his hand in the end. This is an important scene: it turns out that death toll was going to be key to the plot. By the time the JLA apprehend the Injustice Gang, in the chaos, the Joker takes the Philosopher's Stone and imagines a slew of natural disasters that befall Earth. Just as quickly, the Martian Manhunter takes action and reshapes his brain, bringing order to the information that's going into it. In that moment, the Joker sees reason and Lex Luthor tells him to undo the deaths that happened in the Revenge Squad's attack. Without a death toll, and without any other tangible crime, Lex and the Injustice Gang get off scott-free. But in a later scene, Superman enters Lex's office and tells him:
I came to THANK you for what you did up there. Your idea was BRILLIANT. The dead of Star City are back, safe and well. They don't even remember being dead. BATMAN'S convinced you did it to avoid murder charges. I prefer to think otherwise.
It's Superman's optimism at the heart of these issues, and I think, along with the wild creativity of these superpowers, that's the best of what the JLA should be about.
About midway through Lex's takeover, Metron of the so-called "New Gods" BOOM tubes into the scene. He's come with a dire warning: if Superman destroys the philosopher's stone, it will set a series of events that will allow Darkseid to conquer Earth and infect the entire populace with his Anti-Life Equation. It's a whole sidestory that takes you to Wonderworld, a gargantuan land beyond space and time along with shunting you to Darkseid's Earth, 15 years from the current story. It's a convoluted way of keeping the philosopher's stone, that adds some nice character beats to the last stand of the JLA. I don't think it was all that necessary, but still strong. Check out how Green Arrow and the Atom defeat Darkseid:
Even though they "win," the entire experience is so harrowing that it leads to the disbanding of the JLA. But then the trade goes next to, what else, the reformation for the JLA with some new members including Steel and the Huntress. Just in time for Prometheus to hand them their butts.
Prometheus: JLA #'s 16-17 are about a contest to make the super-team more inclusive. Based on a selective process, a hero from Earth is going to be a member for a day...except a man called Prometheus killed him and hijacked his role. Prometheus is kind of like the opposite of Batman. He grew up with parents who were like "Bonnie and Clyde" and when justice caught up with them in a deadly shootout with the police, he used the wealth that they left to learn everything he could and prepare to destroy Justice . He has a fancy helmet that he can play discs on, to download things to his brain like the blueprints for the watchtower or the moves of the 30 best hand-to-hand fighters in the world. Other than that, he's a non-powered guy who takes out nearly every member of the JLA before Batman springs his "secret" agent out to save them all. A solid two-shot in direct contrast with the Rock of Ages: where it took a consortium of villains to take out the JLA in that story, it only took one man to take out the JLA in this one.
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