Justice Society of America

Welcome to Give 'Em Elle, a new weekly column that hopes to bridge the gap between old school comics fandom and the progressive edge of comics culture. In the future, I plan to take questions from readers and answer them in this column. I’ll solicit them on Twitter, where I’m @anotherelle if you want to go ahead and follow me. But since this is the very first edition, I’m on my own. So in the absence of a direct question, I want to talk about something that I hear discussed in comics all the time, and offer an explanation that I’ve never quite heard from anyone else. Specifically, I want to talk about the Marvel Universe and the DC Universe, and what makes them different. The big difference, in terms of continuity and structure, is that the DC Universe has been rebooted several times, with drastic changes to its history, and the Marvel Universe never really has. To be sure, the Marvel timeline gets messed with now and again (most recently with 2015’s Secret Wars), but it always defaults back to “things happened the way you remember, but nobody’s getting old.”

Q: Why is the Justice Society of America of such fundamental importance to the DC Universe? -- @M_Morse A: I've been doing this column for a pretty long time, and almost every week, I get a question like this one, where the question itself assumes a pretty specific premise. Sometimes, they go as far as actually answering the question before the end of the sentence, making my part in the whole thing pretty irrelevant --- like, say, "who is the dreamiest guy and why is it Batman?" --- but sometimes, it's that premise that grabs my attention more than what's actually being asked. All of which is just a longwinded way to say that I'm not sure I can really explain why the JSA is a fundamental part of the DC Universe, because I'm not actually sure that they are.

This weekend at Fan Expo Canada, Dan DiDio confirmed an ongoing rumor: James Robinson and Nicola Scott are working on a new Justice Society of America book -- that takes place on Earth-Two. DiDio said he and Robinson were "hammering out the characters as late as yesterday," implying it might take a few months for the book to hit stores...

Last week, the CW aired "Absolute Justice," a two-hour "Smallville" event --a.k.a. a two-part episode smashed into one double-sized time-slot -- that involved Clark Kent teaming up with some of the Golden Age heroes of the Justice Society. The hype machine for this one had been running full-tilt since the first pictures of actors in costume as Dr...

There's some old song about breaking up being hard to do, but we know that's not true for super hero teams. It's been happening all the time lately. What is hard, though, is being a fan caught in the middle. It forces some uncomfortable taking-of-sides, you know...

We've showed you Lego Cube Dudes, we've showed you custom minifigs, but there's something extra special about our latest find - Lego reenactments of two classic comic book covers. This set of Lego comic book covers (including "Action Comics" #1 and "Justice Society of America" #1) were created by none other than Julian Fong of Pixar's Flickr stream...

Nabu's back, baby! DC Comics' sorcerer supreme most wizardly wizard gets back to adventuring in the pages of "Justice Society of America" #30 by writers Matthew Sturges and Bill Willingham and artist Jesus Merino this week, after several months of being missing in action...