Justice League Companion (Michael Eury)

I often find it hard to review reference material about the Justice League. While I would never count myself as being in the same “League” as older pro fans, I do often find myself using the “well it’s not how I’d have done it” line.

JUSTICE LEAGUE COMPANION (Vol. 1); $24.95By Michael Eury – Published by TwoMorrows Publishing – ISBN 1-893905-48-9 – 220 pages

The Justice League Companion is a 220-page exploration of the 1960s and early 1970s Justice League of America. The first chapter starts with a detailed overview presented in a FAQ format and then goes into an odd mix of short tangent articles and interviews. The second chapter is a collection of light biographies of the characters and various checklists. The third chapter covers the series creators and includes interviews with Murphy Anderson, Joe Giella, Denny O’Neil, and Mike Friedrich. The fourth chapter looks at merchandising while the fifth chapter is an index of the first 100 issues.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the birth of hardcore comics fandom around fanzines such as Jerry Bail & Roy Thomas’s Alter Ego. The core of this community were corresponding with the professional writers and editors. Ironically many of them later became the new generation of creators who replaced old timers they’d been corresponding with. This companion is really an examination of the Justice League as seen through their eyes.

The opening FAQ format is interesting, but it doesn’t really make up for a lack of a solid essay about the League’s genesis. Without that some of the minutia that the writers address exists without context. The context that the Companion does do rather well is the context of the League stories to the wider social and political landscape during the 1950s and 1960s.

I personally found the more interesting parts of this Companion to be the selection of new interviews, but I was slightly disappointing was that they didn’t reprint old interviews with the creators who are no longer with us (Gardner Fox, et al). Interspersing most of the features are a range of original artwork, commissions, convention sketches, and contemporary photographs than make you wish they’d been able to publish the book in colour.

There have already been two excellent, but now out-of-print, Justice League reference works – Mark Gruenwald’s Amazing World of DC Comics #14 and ICG’s Official JLA Index. And while the Index‘s indexes and Gruenwald’s essays are better than those found in this Companion they are relatively hard to find making the Justice League Companion the best in-print reference guide to the background and origins of the early Justice League.

TwoMorrows have produced a range of Companion books. On my book shelf I’ve got the Teen Titans, Legion, and All-Star Companions. The Teen Titan and Legion Companions are basically interview collections with almost no essays or indexes and are arguably the more modern works. The All-Star Companion suffers from being rather dry and overtly fanish, but it is still an excellent read. This Justice League Companion is more like the latter than the former – a bit too fanish for the main stream, but it is a wonderful reward for those that have read the original comics and a good companion piece to the new black and white Showcase reprints.