JLA #37 is the last part of a story that bridges the end of Dwayne McDuffie’s prematurely curtailed JLA run and the start of his successors, James Robinson (currently writing the JLA mini-series Cry For Justice) and Mark Bagley (late of the Trinity weekly). The writer of this story arc (including JLA #35 and JLA #36) is veteran JLA writer Len Wein who wrote the League’s adventures in the 1970s and the artist is Tom Derenick.

From his privately owned Mississippi steamer Professor Amos Fortune and Roulette are playing a high stakes card game. He is using his own Royal Flush Gang while Roulette is backing the Justice League to win. The results are being relayed to her international gambling TV network. Fortune sent three of the Flush gang’s suits to different high profile locations to force the Justice League to divide their resources. Fortune had equipped his cards with the probability altering technology he had stolen from the casino (JLA #35) with the hope that it would swing the odds of winning away from the JLA.

Wonder Woman and the Red Tornado stop the Heart Suit from robbing the New York Museum of Natural History and are almost defeated by their own improbable bad luck. Ditto for Plastic Man and Doctor Light versus Spade Suit at Stellar Studios, Los Angeles and Firestorm and Vixen against the Diamond Suit at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. In each case the Leaguers are almost defeated after they seem to make amateurish mistakes, but it still isn’t enough to let the Royal Flush Gangs defeat them. Vixen notices a floating camera relaying the fight to Roulette’s viewer and has the Red Tornado track the signal to Fortune’s river boat. The League storm the boat, but Fortune has held his Diamond Suit in reserve. They can’t defeat the League, but they do give Roulette and Fortune enough time to escape.

Afterwards, Roulette’s part in the affair become clearer. She reluctantly delivers a data drive containing the surveillance data on the Justice League and various other parties to the Key.

I find Roulette and the Key working for a superior an interesting proposition as neither of them is particularly given to minion status. Given the events in Cry For Justice it would be logical to assume that their unnamed overlord is Prometheus. A second epilogue shows the wife of a deceased Royal Flush Gang member apparently murdering Amos Fortune for sacrificing her husband.

This issue is a strong finale to what’s been an enjoyable three issue storyline. Len Wein manages to place this story in the context of the League’s ongoing problems and thus makes it feel connected to the ongoing narrative. (Just my opinion, but there is a potential problem with Justice League stories that don’t connect with anything else. It can work to the story’s advantage when they’ve got a strong roster (e.g the Morrison Big-7), but it can also leave the story feeling a little hollow if you don’t think there will be any sort of follow up. A League adventure should be a big deal and should have repercussions.)

Again with the multiple inkers. Each of these guys does sterling work, but please can we get back to the good old tradition of one penciller, one inker per issue.

The Verdict

	Site	Reviewer	Original Score	%
Reviews Portal	Comic Book Resources	Doug Zawisza	2.5/5	50
Reviews Portal	IGN	Jason Sacks	1.5/5	30
Community Reviews	Comics Vine User Reviews	Ave of 0 review/s	/5	0
Community Reviews	iFanboy	183 pulls	2.8/5	56
Character Site	Superman Homepage	Michael Bailey	3 (story) & 3 (art)/5	60
Reviews Blog	A Comic Book Blog	Wayland	3/5	60
This Site	Captain’s JLA Blog	Jason Kirk		60%
		Grand Average		53%

Fortune reappeared in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol. 1#14 (September 1962) “The Menace of the ‘Atom’ Bomb!” under the alias “Mister Memory.” He’d created a device, the de-memorizer, that could make everybody is the world forget about a single person and then hired himself out to different super-villains so that they could make the world forget about their particular opponent. Fortune’s luck ran out when he made the world forget the Atom moments after the Justice League had elected him as their new member. They were curious why they’d elected somebody they’d never heard of (the Atom’s name was printed on the ballot papers) so set out to find this new hero – and in the process defeated and unmasked Fortune.

After his stimoluck and de-memoriser schemes failed Fortune turned his attention to “stellaration.” In the daffy world of comic book science stellar radiation (“stellaration”) when focused by a fortune teller renders the subject of the card reading extremely open to suggestion — to the point of forcing the subject to act out whatever prophecy the fortune tellers relates to them. Professor Amos Fortune discovered this phenomena and devised a way to saturate normal playing cards so that a single emotion or suggestion was imprinted onto them. Throw that card at a person and they would be compelled by the stellaration to act out that suggestion.

Figuring he’s need more muscle than in his first two encounters Fortune recruited the four members of his high-school gang. For those that aren’t familiar with poker “a hand” is merely that set of five random cards that a player currently holds, a “flush” is a hand that consists of five sequentially numbered cards, and royal flush is a hand where those five sequential cards are the highest ranked in the deck. This set contains the three royal cards (King, Queen, and Jack) and so earns its royal status. Fortune assumed the role of “Ace” of Clubs and his four friends became the King of Clubs, Queen of Clubs, Jack of Clubs, and Ten of Clubs.

The Royal Flush Gang first appeared in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol. 1 #43 (March 1966) in the story “The Card Crimes of the Royal Flush Gang” written by Gardner Fox, illustrated by Mike Sekowsky and Bernard Sachs, and edited by Julius Schwartz. In the story, Jack of Clubs robs a Bank and then disables Hawkman and Hawkgirl with a Seven of Spades that compels them to argue with each other and ignore him. In Central City, King steals a cubist artwork from the Metropolitan Art Gallery and blinds the Flash with the Five of Diamonds. Elsewhere, the Queen steals a diamond encrusted cloak off of Wonder Woman’s back – whilst she was modelling it at a fashion show. The Queen uses a Nine of Diamonds to force Wonder Woman to leave her alone and call a meeting of the Justice League.

The Gang then challenge the Justice League to stop them robbing the Plateau City Band. The lingering effects of the Flash’s blindness and Hawkman’s compulsive arguing hamper the team, but they’re left completely ineffective when a Nine of Spades renders Wonder Woman doubled over with sickness, a Four of Diamonds turns Batman into an unwitting betrayer, and an Ace of Spades saturated with red sun stellaration cripples Superman. Ace (Fortune) gloats that “I have won! I have gained my long sought for revenge over the Justice League! They can never threaten me again!”

The League retreat to their Secret Sanctuary to lick their wounds, but its during Hawkman’s argument with Snapper Carr that the League realise that they’ve been dosed with stellaration. Hawkman builds a similar machine to Fortune’s machine and saturates Snapper with Stellaration which turns him into their “Joker in the deck.” A single hand shake or back slap from the saturated Snapper is enough to cancel out the Gang’s compulsion. Needless to say the League are rather pleased with their young mascot…

Wonder Woman makes Snapper his own Joker costume and he joins the Justice League in an assault on the Royal Flush Gang’s hideout. Each time the Gang pull out a new card Snapper short-circuits it effect. The Gang’s final gambit is to link hands to create a super-concentrated blast of stellaration, but Batman and Wonder Woman hurl Snapper at them and he completely eliminates their stored up supply. Its then simple for the League to capture the now powerless Gang and to unmask Ace as Amos Fortune.

The Royal Flush Gang and Amos Fortune next appear in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA Vol 1. #54 (June 1967) in a story called “The History-Making Costumes of the Royal-Flush Gang!”. This is again by Fox, Sekowsky, and Schwartz, but this time inker Sid Greene replaces Sachs. The Gang are on the trail of a fabulous treasure map that was discovered by an  explorer called Professor Marley, but the Professor dies in chance car crash before he can find the treasure itself. Its Green Lantern, in his civilian guise as Hal Jordan, who finds the dying Professor. He tells Jordan about the treasure map and makes him promise to give the treasure to his daughter Irene. Hal goes to retrieve the treasure map from the book store in Cape City where its stored, but he’s mugged by members of the Royal Flush Gang as his leaves the shop.

The Royal Flush Gang are still using stellaration to power their abilities and weapons, but this time around they’ve adopted costumes based on the origins of their cards. As Batman later relates,

“According to the history of cards, the King of Clubs was derived from Alexander the Great, the Club Queen from Queen Elizabeth I of England — while the Jack was inspired by Sir Lancelot! The Ace is called a Serpent in Spanish! In poker, three tens is known as a Judge Duffy.”

Their new costumes allow them to use the stellaration to call forth abilities based on those new identities. Hal’s mugging leaves him critically injured in hospital and that of course gets the Justice League’s attention. This ring relates the story so far to the Flash. Batman and the Flash then save Irene Marley from being kidnapped by King (Alexander the Great) and Jack (Sir Lancelot) while the Martian Manhunter and Atom stop Ace (the Serpent Man) and Ten of Clubs (the Judge) from kidnapping Hal from hospital. When Wonder Woman stops Queen (Queen Elizabeth) from kidnapping Hal’s doctor she realises that she’s fighting somebody she’s met before. That allows the League to make the connection between their historical themed enemies and the Royal Flush Gang.

The Gang may have the treasure map, but without Irene Maclay or Hal Jordan they can’t decipher the strange annotations on it. That map shows the location of a hoard of writings and weapons salvaged by an ancient collector called Sassanos. Included in that hoard is the Trumpet of Joshua which brought down the walls of Jericho, the Mirrors of Archimedes which he used to destroy the Spartan navy, and the Magical Tripod of the Delphic Oracle. The Gang seize these treasures, but the League are hot on their trail (the Martian Manhunter read a copy of the map from the mind of the book store owner who had been looking after it). The Gang try using the ancient weapons against the Justice League, but are, of course, defeated.

The kicker at the end of the story is that the Royal Flush Gang never translated the annotations on the map. Irene translates them as a warning about the preservation of the archives. When the Gang opened the archives they let in air that instantly causes all the hundreds of ancient scolls collected by Sassanos to crumble to dust.

The Royal Flush Gang that Amos Fortune created were the Ace, Ten, Jack, Queen, and King of Clubs. This is the Gang that fought the Justice League in the 1960s and later Wonder Woman and the Joker in the 1970s, but it is not the same Gang which fought the League in the 1980s. A new Royal Flush Gang appeared in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #203 (June 1982), but this was a new group comprised of the Ten (Wanda Wayland), Jack, Queen (Mona Taylor) and King (Joe Carny) of Spades (a different suit). More noticeable was the shift of the Ten from a man to a woman and the replacement of Ace with a robot. This is the Gang that Maxwell Lord hired to allow Booster Gold to prove  himself and again when Lord wanted to re-establish the League following the events of “Breakdowns.”

Another new hand, this time the Diamond Royal Flush Gang, appeared in SUPERMAN: THE MAN OF STEEL #121 (February 2002) written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by Todd Nauck and Lary Stucker. While the basic pattern was the same, the modus operandi of this new Royal Flush Gang was different. Now they’d expanded beyond the normal 5-member team to include an entire deck. They’d started to expand through out Chicago, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and finally Metropolis. They’d take over local gangs branding them as a particular suit of cards and the 52 highest ranking members of the local Gang would each adopt the identity of one of the cards from the deck. Its the King of Spades from one of these franchises that the Joker kills in INFINITE CRISIS #2 (January 2006).