(This post is part of my ongoing look at superhero comics and RPGs, Project Yellow Sun.)

JLA - Rock of Ages

Moving right along through Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s amazing run on JLA, we get to the first of a handful of big arcs Morrison pulls off.

Spanning six issues, the Rock of Ages arc starts off with the threat of a new Injustice Gang, led by Lex Luthor and made up of some of worst villains from each hero’s rogue’s gallery. The plot soon splits into two threads: the Injustice Gang’s assault, which Luthor runs as a hostile takeover, and the quest that spans timespace to find the Philosopher’s Stone before it falls into the hands of the evil god Darkseid.

This is the first arc where there’s really two solid plots going on at once. Either one could stand on its own, but as a whole it really sings. As the JLA grows (they picked up Green Arrow during the last arc and gain a few more members at the end of this one) the book becomes more and more an ensemble piece, as each character gets less screen time. Something like this could work in a game, particularly if the players are drawing from a pool of heroes, kind of like the Ars Magica troupe style play.

The structure of the two stories is particularly great. The first three issues of the arc split their focus between Luthor’s takeover and the quest for the stone, but parts four and five take place all in the future, returning to the present for the final issue. It’s a cool story-within-a-story, where parts four and five can be read on their own as a fairly satisfying plot.

Morrison also deals with the happenings in other books just about as well as can be hoped. Between the first and second issue of this arc the DCU had a big crossover event, Superman’s powers change over the course of the series, and all those events are reflected just enough to make this book part of a whole but not so much you have to know anything about what’s going on in the broader DCU. It’s kind of all the upsides to continuity comics thrown together, with very few of the downsides.

Not to repeat myself, but during the last arc I brought up how crazy a concern about putting Batman and Superman in the same book is, and this arc continues that trend. Batman saves the league with, of all things, his business knowledge (Luthor wasn’t counting on someone as familiar with hostile takeovers as he is: Bruce Wayne). In the future, Batman has defeated a god, and the heroes that finally take down Darkseid are Green Arrow and the Atom. Yes, the big bad is eventually taken down by a guy with trick arrows and someone who can shrink, and it’s awesome. A task-oriented game like DC Adventures makes ‘human’ heroes walking next to aliens and mutants seem out of place, but that isn’t really how this comic works.

I also want to point out that, with the exception of a few panels in the first issue, we’ve never seen the JLA out of costume so far. This take on the JLA is really about epic heroes, the whole secret identity shtick just never needs to come into play to make that work.

Gaming Idea

Not a new idea per se, but a riff on something Spirit of the Century already does: a comics game should really embrace the issue metaphor. Advancement can be tied to what’s happening in a hero’s solo title, crossovers and previous appearances can be referenced. Nothing in this arc is entirely new, all the villains and heroes are established players in the DCU, which is essentially a playground shared by all the company’s writers. A game that reflects that style really has to allow for the same kind of shared playground, where each writer is writing new stuff using each other’s creations.