Read all about it here, from the Newsarama board on Comicon.com:Fifteen years ago, they were a sensation, with embassies around the world, now; they’re renting a storefront in Queens. They used to go around under the name Justice League International, but now, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Fire, Captain Atom, the Elongated Man, are back in Formerly Known as the Justice League, a six issue miniseries coming later this year from DC which reunites original JLI creators Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire, and Joe Rubinstein.
And instead of calling themselves the Justice League, since they’re another group of heroes using that name these days, the team has come up with a new name: the Super Friends.
We’re not kidding. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back a little.
This year’s revisiting of the Giffen/DeMatteis League isn’t the first time such an idea has been floated by the creators. According to Giffen, the duo has been talking about returning to the League in some form or another since the mid-90s.
“They wanted me to do this a ways back,” Giffen said. “Marc and I would come back to it now and then, but my head wasn’t there. I didn’t want to go back. I didn’t want to go back just revisit these characters for the sake of revisiting them. I didn’t want to go back unless I could find something to wrap these characters around that was different. I didn’t want to do embassies.”
In fact, even Formerly Known as the Justice League has suffered through starts and stops, and as little as a few months back, was dead. The light bulb went on above Giffen’s head however, and the project sprung back to life. The concept for the team’s return to “team” status has to do with the man who got the Giffen/DeMatteis team together in the first place, DCU billionaire Maxwell Lord.
“It wasn’t until it dawned on me that if Max was going to try it again, he would probably take a different tact that I really got excited about going back to the League,” Giffen said. “Once I came up with the idea of them being ‘the people’s heroes,’ I figured we had something to go with. If you need a cop, who do you call? 911. In this universe, which is lousy with superheroes, how do you get in touch with them? All of these superheroes that populate the DCU are completely beyond the ability of common man to contact them.
“I thought – 1-800-SuperFriends, or something along those lines. They would operate out of a storefront in Queens and they’re a nonprofit organization. They trade their images for merchandising to plug money back into the organization, and it all goes back to the idea that these are superheroes who don’t need the money – they’re all doing fine, but they’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do. Yeah, they’re kind of goofy, but they’re altruistic and doing this for the right reasons. I figured we should give it a shot.”
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Those 60 issues of JLA were probably my favorite run of comics ever. Can't wait for this limited series to arrive.
