Writer: Mark Waid
Artist: Dan Mora
DC Comics, January 2025
Veteran superhero comic book writer Mark Waid and his frequent collaborator Dan Mora have taken on the creative duties for this new Justice League title, called Justice League Unlimited. Writers of superhero teams sometimes in their beginnings turn to sport for inspiration and start with some sort of draft pick process – most memorably for us, All-Star Squadron #1, where the front cover depicts Hawkman, the Atom and Dr Mid-Nite working through a myriad of photographs of 1940s mystery-men as if deciding who has made the cut. Justice League Unlimited avoids all of that kerfuffle and all current characters in DC’s superhero universe are on the team.
All-Star Squadron was unique for its time. It’s successful and influential writer Roy Thomas grew up reading the adventures of all of the very many masked characters published in the Golden Age of superhero comics, and so he decided to indulge himself and include all of them in his narrative. Mr Waid’s task is almost identical to Mr Thomas’ in that this new roster is likewise very crowded indeed. How to incorporate all of these characters into a meaningful story?
Endeavouring to corral such an abundance of characters in a way which doesn’t become a confusing miasma of colour and altruism requires some skill. Mr Thomas managed it by repeatedly separating the characters into smaller teams for discrete missions, and by having the lesser known characters engage in extended group chatter by way of exposition. It enabled Mr Thomas to draw distinctions between characters who otherwise, from a personality-perspective, would have otherwise been bland copies of each other. And so hot-tempered Johnny Quick vies for the attention of the strong-willed Liberty Belle, Firebrand is at least for a while racist against the Japanese, Commander Steel is lonely and displaced, Tarantula is a bit of an intrusive snoop, the Atom has a chip on his shoulder about his height, and so on.
Mr Waid borrows from this playbook, but even so, we see many of the characters standing about posing, as if they were toys waiting for Mr Waid to pick them up and play with them. Mr Waid addresses this by literally having them wait, but with purpose: the android superhero Red Tornado has been given the role of emergency dispatch coordinator, and rapid-fire sends off various teams, or combinations of characters, to deal with different issues.
In that sense, Justice League Unlimited is a little different from All-Star Squadron: Mr Thomas for the most part had the characters on guard, waiting to foil Axis threats, whereas Justice League Unlimited has a decidedly triage-y feel to it. The Challengers of the Unknown barrel past on their way to deal with one task; Shazam (mysteriously called “Captain” – did Mr Waid forget that he is no longer “Captain Marvel” or have we missed something?) and Stargirl fly off to deal with another issue; Batman and Blue Beetle investigate a creepy mystery; and Superman, Wonder Woman, and a larger team deal with some new bad guys in South Africa. The posers we described above are otherwise waiting like firefighters for the next call-out. (Mr Waid has apparently imposed some limits in his cast, and has not blown the dust off some obscure Justice Leaguers which we have not seen for decades – Zauriel, Tomorrow Woman, Triumph, the Ray, Maxima, and Aztek at least for now all seem still to be stacked in the toy box.)
Our narrative guide to all of this activity, and patient inactivity, is Air-Wave. Air-Wave is a character we have not seen for a very long time, and with a well-established pedigree dating back to the 1980s as the young son of Silver Age superhero. The Flash takes us on a tour as he pushes Air-Wave around the enormously expanded Justice League satellite (Air-Wave is invited to take up residence in a suite numbered “120”, suggesting that there are at least 120 members of this team, or perhaps just plenty of rooms for their junk. Mr Waid has so far avoided the cliche of the trophy room).
The creative team plays upon Air-Wave’s youth by giving him some zany facial expressions (Mr Mora does a wonderful job as ever on this), awkward desperation, and the need to be babysat by old timer Black Lightning. Air-Wave ends up being instrumental in helping Star Sapphire save the life of a seriously injured bystander. It is with some genuine surprise that he is revealed in the final panel as a traitor. If successful in his mission to kill Justice Leaguers, that would certainly thin out the cast. (Perhaps however the editor of Justice League Unlimited should have exchanged notes with the editor of JSA #1, published this same month: in JSA #1, Green Lantern’s son Obsidian – actually, the evil Johnny Sorrow in disguise – is the traitor on that team.)
Mr Mora’s task is equally as complicated as Mr Waid’s and for the same reason. Visually distinguishing all of these costumes from one another must be tricky. But Mr Mora’s great skill, it seems to us, is his use of shadow. Mr Mora’s heroes stand out by contrast to his landscape of ink-obscured threats, whether manifesting as smoke from a battlefield or the ominous dark of a jungle.
Almost all critiques we have read in respect of this title have been embarrassingly gushing. But one critic was brave enough to express dissatisfaction with the raison détre of the team. The review at Gatecrashers.fan Justice League Unlimited #1 Review – GateCrashers struck us as genuine and honest:
“What does Justice League Unlimited do? Our heroes are sent to deal with “weapons of mass destruction,” during which they save people and are greeted by this new mysterious group of villains known as “Inferno,” without anything for me to latch on to. Furthermore, within our heroes themselves, there’s no push or pull. They’re all very agreeable with each other, with no sense of tension, with no sense of conflict, just guys on the job. What am I supposed to latch on to? Why should I care?“
It is early days for Justice League Unlimited, and so character tension has not had much time to manifest, and we think that in the soap opera of superhero comics abrasive was often goes too far: the sheer number of disagreements in JSA #1 make the title almost unreadable. Mark Millar has his characters in The Authority in the early 2000s deal with their stresses and internal tensions through partying and sex, neither of which we sadly will not see here. But “guys on the job” very much captures the essence of this title. Emergency service workers might get up each other’s noses on a day-to-day basis but they wait in the firehouse to save lives. Mr Waid’s depiction of superheroes has always been focussed on their altruism. There is, with respect to Gatecrashers.com, nothing odd or dull about a large number of like-minded people getting along.