Welcome back to the Society Pages, a column that looks back at the ‘modern’ history of the Justice Society of America. The main thrust of this column is to look at “JSA” and “Justice Society of America,” two ongoing series, written for most of their runs by Geoff Johns.
We are back with the finale of, you guessed it, [air horn] MAGOGTOBER!
Plotted by Keith Giffen and Judd WinickCover by Cliff Chiang
Scripted by Judd Winick
Penciled by Aaron Lopresti, Joe Bennett, Fernando Dagnino, and Keith Giffen
Inked by Matt Ryan, Jack Jadson, BIT, Raul Fernandez, and Ruy Jose
Colored by Hi-Fi Design
Lettered by Sal Cipriano, Pat Brousseau, Steve Wands, and Travis LanhamMind-controlling mastermind Maxwell Lord is targeting the members of the defunct Justice League International. Now, surviving members Booster Gold, Captain Atom, Fire and Ice must stop him from destroying the entire Super Hero community.
As we saw with “Titans” a few weeks ago, each character resurrected in “Blackest Night” #8 gets a goal put forth by the White Lantern that they need to achieve in order to fully gain their life back. It’s a pretty fun concept that was sort of rushed in the year of “Brightest Day,” and then left unremarked upon because of “Flashpoint” and the New 52. So when Maxwell Lord is resurrected, his mandate is to ‘stop the war.’
This is, initially, left quite vague, except that it involves our favorite soldier, Magog. Eventually, it appears that the war he’s supposed to stop is the events of “Kingdom Come.” Now, that’s not really what this series is about, and is possibly something handed to Judd Winick to incorporate. But since Magog is a JSA character, that’s where our attention is going for this column. That said, this series is a trip through some of DC’s weirder concepts and is super fun, despite about 1/3 of the art being done by now-cancelled bigot artist Joe Bennett. Also, more than half the covers are done by Cliff Chiang or Dustin Nguyen, and are dope as fuck. But let’s dig into the Magog stuff.
One of the things that Winick does early on is present a moral center within Magog, in the form of conversations with his grandfather. These conversations are there to give us a hint that Magog is capable of doing good things, or at the very least, not being the asshat he typically is. Well here, he’s an extra-large asshat (ass bonnet? ten gallon asshat?), and seems like a caricature of Magog, who is already a caricature of a good character. It, of course, turns out that he is being controlled by Max Lord, and we get the most humanity we’ve ever seen from Magog in the final moments of his life.
Lord forces Magog to point his lance at his head and fire, essentially committing suicide. But since Max has mind-wiped himself from existence, people think they are watching Captain Atom kill him. Magog had been tasked by Lord to kill Atom, and so they’ve been fighting in downtown Chicago. Magog’s turbo-charged lance then explodes, and to save folks, Atom attempts to absorb its energy and is sent into the timestream. I’m only mentioning this, because he winds up in the far future with a future version of another JSAer, Captain Marvel/Shazam that I’d love to see more of one day.
The burning question I have at the end of this is how, exactly, Magog in this timeline would’ve caused “Kingdom Come” on an alternate Earth, unless those events would be continued/replicated here. I mean, hell, Magog shows up at the same time that “Kingdom Come” Superman is palling around with the JSA. It isn’t a hugely important point, and maybe it is another idea that DC flushed away with the New 52, but I’m still curious about it.
Like I said earlier, most of this series has little to nothing to do with Magog or the JSA, but this is the end of the line for him, and so made sense to cover in this column. Again, read this book; it’s among the most fun books of its era, and stands as something that would likely never happen again. It is also notable for what a New 52 Captain Atom series could’ve been under Winick’s pen. Alas. We hope you all have had a good [air horn] MAGOGTOBER!
Next week: the finale of “JSA All-Stars.”
