Justice League: Fury Part One

Screen Shots

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Episode Credits

• Story: Stan Berkowitz
• Teleplay: Dwayne McDuffie
• Directer: Butch Lukic
• Composer: Kristopher Carter
• Storyboard: Butch Lukic, Ricardo Morales, Bob Smith, Sean Song
• Animation Services: Koko Enterprise Co. Ltd.
• Main Cast: Kevin Conroy (Batman), Maria Canals (Hawkgirl), Susan Eisenberg (Wonder Woman), Phil LaMarr (Green Lantern), Carl Lumbly (J’onn J’onzz), George Newbern (Superman), Michael Rosenbaum (Flash)
• Supporting Cast: Julie Bowen (Aresia), Susan Sullivan (Hippolyta), Olivia D’Abo (Star Sapphire), Mark Hamill (Solomon Grundy), Stephen McHattie (Shade), Karen Maruyama (Tsukuri), Jose Yenque (Copperhead), Maggie Wheeler (Antiope), Vanessa Marshall (Lipstick Lady), Julianne Grossman (Phillipus).

Synopsis

A lone guard on the front gate of Gotham Biotech is incapacitated by the mercenary Copperhead. He, Solomon Grundy, the Shade, and Star Sapphire were part of Lex Luthor’s failed mercenary group (Injustice For All). They have since been hired, along with a Japanese swordswoman called Tsukuri, to provide assistance to a mysterious blond-haired woman. Copperhead is charmed by her praise, as is Grundy when she asks him to force open the main door. Once inside Tsukuri knocks out the guards and the Shade covers their path with darkness.

Inside the facility’s massive vault they find a single plant specimen. It is obviously valuable to their leader, but it remains a mystery to the hired help. The villains are on their way out when the Batman arrives. He breezes through the gang, knocking out each villain in turn until only the blond leader is left. He asks her name, but she tells him that she “Answers to no man! Not even you!” Batman underestimates her strength. She over powers him, but leaves him alive. What she doesn’t notice is that the Batman has torn off her necklace during their fight.

Wonder Woman (Diana, Princess of the Amazons)  is still new to Man’s World. Her sightseeing tour of “Bergduff’s”, an upmarket department store, attracts bemused onlookers. She puzzles over the fashion displays and gets a snarky comment when she asks why the women there want to cover up their natural beauty with make-up. As she leave the store Wonder Woman sees a delivery van blocking a parked car. A woman in the car wants to drive off, but the van driver refuses to budge until he’s finished his coffee break. Wonder Woman lifts the van out the woman’s way and then reminds the van driver to watch his manners. Batman interrupts Wonder Woman’s sight-seeing tour to ask her about the superpowered woman he met. Her necklace was of Amazonian design, but Wonder Woman flatly refuses to believe that an Amazon would be capable of being a burglary.

At her warehouse hideout, the woman outlines the target of her next heist – a Gem Depository containing almost 25 million dollars in precious stones. Her gang appreciate the new target and she assures Grundy that she’s ready for the Justice League. Her team enters the Depository via different routes, taking out the guards as they go. She tells her gang that she is going to disable the security cameras, but instead uses them to dare the police and Justice League to stop them. Their leader meets up with the gang as they loot the main vault. She tells them to take what they’ve got and to return to the hideout, but she stays behind to grab two large rubies – the raid’s real target. Superman blocks her escape and, like Batman, he initially underestimates Aresia’s strength. She throws a container of gas at him and Superman instantly becomes feverish. Wonder Woman arrives next and recognises her as a women she knows called “Aresia”, but cuts off her pursuit when Superman collapses. She takes Superman to the Watchtower while the Flash and Green Lantern continue the hunt for Aresia and her gang.

Batman does not believe Wonder Woman’s assertion that there are no Amazonian criminals so he asks Hawkgirl to reconnoiter Themyscira, the Amazon island homeland. Men are forbidden from setting foot on the island so the Batman circles the island in the Batplane. Amazon patrols are searching the island for a thief. They discover Hawkgirl and bring her to Queen Hippolyta in the belief that she if the thief. Hawkgirl explains to the Queen that she is Wonder Woman’s friend and that she is investigating a theft involving an Amazon. Hawkgirl produces the necklace that Batman snatched as proof. This surprises Hippolyta and she demands that her horse be made ready. She and Hawkgirl race to a tower on an exposed promontory.

Queen Hippolyta explains that the necklace belongs to a woman called Aresia. She was not born an Amazon. Aresia was born in Man’s World, the daughter of a peasant family living in a violent war zone. She and her mother fled as refugee after their village was destroyed. They eventually found there way to a refugee ship, but sunk by pirates. Aresia was the only survivor. Miraculously she washed ashore on Themyscira and was found by Queen Hippolyta (who looked virtually identical to Aresia’s dead mother). The Amazon’s adopted Aresia and magically bestowed her with Amazonian strength and speed. Her secluded contemplation in the tower was to have been the last part of her ritual progression into Amazonian society, but a stash of forbidden books with titles like “Germ Warfare” suggest that she has other plans.

In the Watchtower infirmary, J’onn J’onzz studies the rapidly deteriorating Superman. He cannot identify Superman’s illness, but the Man of Steel is not the only victim. Green Lantern brings the unconscious Flash to the Watchtower, but falls unconscious himself as soon as he’s aboard. Back at her hideout, Aresia smashes the stolen rubies into powder and mixes them with her toxins. Star Sapphire and the others demand to know what’s going on so Aresia demonstrates by releasing her toxin. Copperhead, Grundy, and the Shade instantly pass out. Hawkgirl explains what she found on Themyscira as the Batplane returns to the mainland. As they approach the City they hear a slew of emergency calls – all in female voices. Aresia’s toxin has gone city-wide. Men, and only men, are rapidly falling sick. The female firefighters and emergency responders are stretched thin trying to deal with the growing disaster, but they’re numbers are too few to cope.

Commentary

Fury/Aresia

There are parts of her origin and background that tie Aresia to the heroine Fury, but it’s not a particularly close match. This episode is called Fury, the name of a character related to Wonder Woman, but at no point does Aresia called herself Fury. Her name appears to be a female form of Ares – the Greek God of War and Wonder Woman’s arch-enemy.

Comics crashed at the start of the 1950s and many superhero books were cancelled. The character concepts were revived and updated at the start of the 1960s. This created two versions of most DC superheroes, the 1940s versions and the 1960s versions. The 1960s heroes, the Justice League, lived on the main Earth, Earth-One, while the original heroes, the Justice Society, lived on a parallel world called Earth-Two. Time had continued to pass of Earth-Two – Superman’s hair was turning white at the temples, Batman had retired to become Gotham City’s Police Commissioner, and Wonder Woman had married Steve Trevor. A second generation of heroes, the children of the Justice Society members, had formed their own team called Infinity Inc.

One of the members of Infinity Inc was Fury, alias Hippolyta (Lyta) Trevor, the daughter of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman and the grand-daughter of the Earth-Two Queen Hippolyta. She appeared in the adventures of the Earth-Two Wonder Woman and had adventures with the rest of Infinity Inc. That was until 1985, when things became very, very complicated. DC Comics decided that their parallel Earths were getting too confusing for new readers so it was mandated that they no longer existed. The histories of Earth-One and Earth-Two were mixed together to create a new unified Earth. A side-effect of this was that Earth-Two characters with duplicates on Earth-One were written out of continuity. The Earth-Two Wonder Woman no longer existed in the new universe, but her daughter did. That obviously created causality problems so a new character Helena Kosmatos, also called Fury, was introduced and was explained to be Lyta Trevor’s real mother.

Helena Kostmatos had been given power by the mythical Furies, female spirits who punished people who had broken oaths. During her normal adventures she had Amazonian strength and speed, but when angered she could transform into a monstrous avatar of the Fury Tisiphone. Poor Helena wasn’t that mentally stable and started to believe that she was Wonder Woman’s sister. The Amazons, either by pity or fear, adopted Helena into their society.

Lyta, Helena’s daughter, was raised by another couple and grew up to become a superhero herself. She eventually married a dead man called Hector Hall (Sandman) who believed that he was the defender of the Dreaming, the land of dreams. They had a son together called Daniel. Unfortunately, Hector became embroiled in the affairs of a powerful entity called Morpheus – the personification of Dream and the true defender of the Dreaming.

Hector’s soul was stuck in the Dreaming, somewhere between life and death. Morpheus released it so he continue into the afterlife. From Lyta’s point-of-view it appeared that Morpheus had killed Hector. She called upon the vengeful Furies to kill Morpheus. This may have been Morpheus’s way of committing suicide. Nevertheless, an entity like Dream is too primal to actually die. The Furies killed the Morpheus personality causing Daniel, Lyta and Hector’s son, to be elevated as Dream’s new persona/incarnation. Daniel has become a rather powerful and distant entity, but at times he has aided and favoured his mortal bloodline and has shown knowledge of its history from before the pattern of parallel worlds changed.

Aresia is played by Julie Bowen.

Tsukuri

Tsukuri is an original character in the DCAU. The word itself is Japanese and in a martial arts context means to make or create an opening in your opponents defenses by forcing them off-balance. Little more that this concept is revealed about the character. She is nearly Batman’s equal in the martial arts and almost beats him.

Notes

• Olivia D’Abo, Stephen McHattie, and Mark Hamill reprise their roles as Star Sapphire, Shade, and Solomon Grundy from Injustice For All. Jose Yenque replaces Efrain Figueroa as Copperhead. Susan Sullivan reprises her role as Hippolyta from Secret Origins and Paradise Lost.

• The Amazon’s Phillipus (left) and Antiope (right) are name checked by Wonder Woman in Paradise Lost, but aren’t explicitly identified. Andrea Romano voiced one of the Amazon guards in that episode. In Fury Antiope and Phillipus are named in the credits as being played by Maggie Wheeler and Julianne Grossman. Phillipus is the head of the Guards. Maggie Wheeler is probably best known as Janice from Friends. Julianne Grossman played Etta Candy in the Wonder Woman direct-to-DVD feature film.
• The woman who Wonder Woman meets in the department store – described in the credits as lipstick-lady – is no stranger to the Justice League. She is Vanessa Marshall who will play Wonder Woman in the Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths direct-to-DVD feature film. She also played on of the Amazon’s in Justice League: The New Frontier.
• Aresia’s home country is not identified, but it seems Balkan – the obvious parallel would be the conflicts that sprung up during the collapse of Yugoslavia. It’s a fair bet that the war zone is Kasnia – the DCAU fictional country of choice for all wars, arms deals, and related politics.
• To point out the obvious – the gold that Aresia pays Grundy off with is the Amazonian gold that Queen Hippolyta’s guards are searching for.
• Queen Hippolyta wouldn’t have recognised Hawkgirl – the wings are easy to remember – as she wasn’t one of the Justice Leaguers who visited Themyscira during the Faust / Lord Hades incident (Paradise Lost).
• TV meme – Grundy smashing an electronic lock and pulling our the wires will force a door to open.
• The vine in the Biotech plant is pretty well guarded. One wonders if Bruce Wayne is deliberately keeping it away from Poison Ivy.
• Unanswered questions: Where did Aresia get the Germ Warfare book if contact with the outside world if forbidden? Toonzone makes a very good argument that Aresia has an unseen benefactor in this story. Based on her name, this would of course be Ares, the Olympian god of War. Furthermore, how did Aresia get to Man’s World? The only Amazon able to fly is Wonder Woman so we must assume that Aresia swam to Man’s World carrying the massive haul of stolen royal treasure.

Opinion

Highlights

Batman single-handedly taking down Copperhead, Shade, Grundy, Star Sapphire, and Tsukuri.

Oddities

Unanswered questions about Aresia (see above).

My Thoughts

There is a lot to like in this episode – Batman being Batman, the return of the super villains and Queen Hippolyta – but there is also a lot to be nervous about. The focus is on the female characters with the male characters being only lightly sketched. Superman, Flash and Green Lantern are only in it to get immediately shot down by the toxin. Even Copperhead, Grundy, and the Shade get less characterisation than in Injustice For All. I don’t mean to imply the story shouldn’t focus on the female characters for once, but historically comics and Saturday morning cartoon aren’t known for their enlightened portrayal of women. Given that history, Fury does pretty well and, in my opinion, is only really let down by a fairly vanilla villain.

Rating:

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