It’s amazing how much of my Hot Dog output is ninth-gen bootleg VHS tapes I bought in the ’90s & ’00s, waiting for this website to be born. The Almighty Hot Dog’s arrival reverberates even backwards in time.
Back in the ’80s there was a comic called, by various turns, Justice League, Justice League International, and finally Justice League of America, and it was very, very good. It took a bunch of third-stringers, saddled a couple of DC’s heavy hitters with the burden of parenting them, and created a crowded house sitcom with real character development, pathos, and actual laugh-out-loud comedy. It’s the sole reason I became a DC fan, and the bulk of why I became a Guy Gardner fan. The first week of my DC internship, I crept into Andy Helfer’s office to thank him for presiding over it, and found myself introduced to Kevin Maguire, but that’s another story.
Come the ’90s, the creative team was understandably a bit tuckered out, and so they closed up shop in a lengthy crossover called “Breakdowns,” which, coinciding with my arrival into my teenage years, provided a thick dollop of wistfulness for the nostalgia to come. Everything ends, you had to realize, even if you screeched “They killed General Glory!” in the back of a van traveling from a cross-country meet in Manchester, NH, alarming your coach into pumping the brakes and glaring at you. The League limped on after that, most notably getting stomped into paste trying to stop Doomsday from killing Superman, running through a series of increasingly awful spinoffs like Justice League Task Force or Extreme Justice, and clinging to a roster that should have retired earlier. It’s almost impossible for things to get worse, or further away, from those glory days that forged my entire superhero team tastes, than the state of the League just prior to Grant Morrison’s total reboot with JLA.
But for a second, at that nadir, there was an honest attempt at a live-action version of the League in its sitcom successes, and it failed brutally. Perhaps even horribly. Even in a JLA focusing way, way too much on Blue Devil, there’s a worse version lurking out there contemporaneously. This TV movie-slash-maybe-pilot was so bad that I didn’t hear about it for years, despite being such a colossal Justice League nerd that DC’s sysops on AOL specifically knew me as such in the Year 1997 A.D. (AOL-DC). I have fridge magnets of these characters, even though DC never released any.
Anyway, I have a new column up at 1-900-HOTDOG. It’s about The Atom rewriting the JLI’s reality on a quantum level to create a universe where Nice Guys can be kings but still never have to actually engage with their crushes. Surely these two things have nothing to do with one another. We’re just stuck in a world where the worst people continue to have their way with reality rather than confront their own psychological issues, and that’s why the Justice League of America TV show exists as it does.
And in a funny twist, after I submitted this, I put in some voice samples for a fan-made animation of the JLI, and got an email tapping me for it this morning, right next to this article in my inbox. So it’s a very Justice League International kind of day.