Favorite JLA team

[Aldous]

My favourite JLA is the Gardner Fox-Mike Sekowsky-Bernard Sachs JLA.

I've never read a JLA comic by any other creative team that could match these ones. Later versions of the JLA, while I enjoyed them as a kid, don't stand up so well, with the exception of some of Len Wein's stories that I really like.

I don't think the JLA members could spend any time at all exploring each other's personal mythologies. If they did, or if the creative team examined the individual personalities to any great degree (or even invented personality "quirks" like in later years), it all would have fallen down.

In some ways, this makes "realistic" sense. There is a crisis that springs up... Someone finds out about it... That someone alerts the rest of the JLA... Now is the time they leave their respective "mythologies", their home-cities, their undersea kingdoms and day-to-day relationships, and answer the call to arms. The JLA responded to the crisis like a well-oiled combat unit. They did not drift together because no one had a date for Saturday night.

I imagine, from a "realistic" or Marvel viewpoint, that the JLA members, being the experienced and intelligent souls they were, simply avoided, for the most part, delving too deeply into each other's cultures. This makes sense from a practical aspect (concentration on the problems at hand). The JLA members obviously believed a team is composed of separate and strong individuals -- not like we have in today's cultural era, where "teams" and "gangs" and "committees" and whatnot come together because individually they are weak and seek to lean on each other.

[taz_16127]

The first comic book I ever bought was JLA #137 the 3rd part of the annual team-up with the JSA alongwith the Fawcett heroes thrown in. I was 12 going on 13 at the time... I was hooked. I took a long time to find the first 2 parts to that story.

My favorite JLA line-up is and has always been that era of heroes. However I have never said that any of the others line-ups were bad.

So my favorite line-up would include:

Superman
Batman
Wonder Woman
Black Canary
Green Lantern
Green Arrow
Atom
Aquaman
Flash
Elongated Man
Phantom Stranger
Hawkman
Hawkgirl
Red Tornado
Zatanna

That is the line-up I loved the most.

Tony

[nightwing]

I have to chip in a vote for the Englehart-era Justice League.  Nothing tops the "satellite era."

Returning to Martian Manhunter for a moment, I agree fire is a lame weakness for any superhero to have (though not as lame as Future-Superman's vulnerability to sea water!  Not so handy on a world that's 75% water, eh?).

I don't know what "negative" properties fire could have other than excessive heat.  I suppose you could argue that as Mars is further from the sun, it would be a cooler environment and thus Martians would have little resistance to heat.  But then, if that were the case a simple move to Earth and its warmer climes should be enough to weaken J'onn.  Combine this increased warmth with Earth's greater gravity, and by all logic J'onn should be the weakest being on our world, not one of the strongest.  

If memory serves, one of those horrid mini-series of the 90s delved into this old chestnut and "revealed" that the weakness to fire was illusory...some psychological hang-up J'onn had saddled himself with.  In other words, fire didn't hurt him, but he thought it did and that was good enough.  Maybe someone here remembers that better than I?  Anyway it would seem to be non-canon, since the first JLA story arc had Batman defeating other Martians with fire.

[Gernot]

Nightwing, I remember that mini-series.  It was revealed that a plague was wiping out the Martian population thousands and thousands of years ago.  The Martians disposed of their dead by burning, instead of burying them.  Professor Erksine's (sp?) teleport machine not only brought J'onn from another planet, but from another time!  By the time period Earth was in when J'onnz came here, HE was the sole-surviving Martian!  

J'onn's weakness to fire came from a DREAD of fire, what it represented to him, as opposed to its making him weaker or anything else.  

Gernot...