The Only Thing I Want Back From Before The New 52 Is The JSA

With Dan DiDio releasing a sneak peek of the covers to New 52 Futures End #23-24 earlier this week, DC Comics fans have been speculating about the significance of the images they contain. Many people have pointed out that the red skies look a lot like the ones that preceded the wave of anti-matter that destroyed alternate worlds back in the seminal Crisis on Infinite Earths event in the 80s. Bleeding Cool, which has been reporting on the likelihood of an event of some sort that would coincide with DC’s move from New York to California next spring, has taken to calling it “Blood Moon” due to some wording in previous DC teasers.

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Given the company’s history and the fact that next year is the 30th anniversary of the original Crisis, I’d lay some money down on another one during 2015 if you could place bets on such things. But some fans are going a step further, looking at the images of characters from before the New 52 in both these covers and the end of Superman: Doomed #2 and predicting that DC is going to use whatever’s coming in 2015 as the mechanism to revert to its pre-New 52 continuity.

I grew up in the late Silver Age, and the Satellite Era JLA was my favorite thing to read when I first started getting into comics. That makes me one of the people who should welcome a return if that’s what is in the cards, but I’m hoping this isn’t the case. Reminiscing is fine, and I’ll be the first to say there have been plenty of things in the New 52 I haven’t liked, but super hero comics in general spend plenty of time tripping over their own past. Even though rewinding the clock to a time before Flashpoint would be a welcome move in some parts of fandom — and would no doubt make DC a boatload of money in the short term, out of sheer curiosity alone — I’m a fan of the Big Two moving forward, not backward.

That being said, there is one thing I miss from the pre-New 52 DC Comics lineup that hasn’t been effectively replaced, and that’s the Justice Society of America. The legacy theme was something DC had that really set it apart from its competition, and even though it took a series of somewhat ridiculous (even by comic book standards) plot devices to keep some of the original JSA members in the mix in the present day, there was something cool about having the heroes who inspired their Silver Age counterparts still doing the same thing decades later. In real life, people often think about their own legacies and what they might hand down to future generations, and that same idea applied to characters with super powers was always fun to explore.

The new Earth 2 versions of Alan Scott, Jay Garrick and the rest have been surprisingly entertaining, but all they are is alternate versions of heroes who already exist on the prime Earth. There’s no legacy aspect to them, and as a result, the only thing that makes them stand out from the heroes on any of the other 52 worlds is that they happen to share names with those from the original Earth-Two.

I recognize the inherent hypocrisy in advocating for the return of something from the past when I just explained why DC shouldn’t do that. I don’t miss the JSA so much that I’m hoping for a continuity rollback next spring. I guess I’m just saying that I miss that team, and if DC does decide to go through the Big Reversion in 2015, the return of the JSA will be the one thing I can tell you ahead of time I’ll welcome with open arms.

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