Catching up with Classic Justice League from the 80s

In my ongoing campaign to reread and rewatch and generally re-experience the media I liked when I was a teenager, I've hit on a new campaign since returning home from London, and have started rereading my old comics.

I don't exactly know what the impetus for this was, except that while I was in London this winter, I was taken by a craving to read my old Justice League comics, in particular. One factor that I can identify is Tim Ferriss's latest book, Tribe of Mentors, in which he interviews a number of famous people about their routines and what-not; one of these people said he re-reads his old Archie Comics before bed, to keep in touch with who he was as a kid, and this appealed to me too - it's just interesting that I seized on my old Justice Leagues and not, say, X-Men.

"Justice League #1". Greand Comics Database Project

Anyway, I had a look at some of the collected editions at the Forbidden Planet, but they didn't have the first volume on the shelf, so I bided my time until I could get home, and when I did, one of the first things I accomplished was to bring the box of Justice League comics out of my dad's garage.

They've been sitting there for a few years, at this point, as I moved my comics to his place in around 2002 or 2003, but they'd been sitting around for a bit longer, as I hadn't read them since high school. The nice thing is that I managed to box them roughly by title, so I have my classic JLA comics, going from the 1960s all the way to the end of the first book, as well as the Giffen-DeMatteis JLI books and the Grant Morrison-era JLA. There are a couple of other oddities and things I stuck in there at random, but the box is dominated by Justice League.

I've spoken before about the pleasures of reading old comics, or more accurately the ads, and I'm experiencing that again now. Because I started with Justice League of America #45 (the first appearance of the "classic" villain Shaggy Man), I was able to see how these ads changed between the 60s, 70s and 80s. For one thing, ads in early issues were a lot more likely to be comic strips themselves - the late 70s and early 80s featured ads with DC heroes using Hostess Twinkies and the like to foil villains, which is achingly naff, if you think about it, but also strangely charming.

(Incidentally, for American readers, here's the definition of naff, which is a word you really only find in the UK)

The other thing that's interesting is seeing how well the books themselves hold up. I actually think the last few years of the JLA weren't that well-written, especially when DC decided to jettison the marquee characters (i.e. the ones that people cared about and wanted to read) in favor of under-powered newcomers like Vibe, Gypsy, Steel and Vixen, and move them to the mean streets of Detroit. That lineup didn't last very long, but I remain intrigued by the fact that the Arrowverse shows on the CW have resurrected all of them, along with a bunch of other obscure DC characters, and actually made them fairly cool.

But the main event for me is the JLI era, because it's fair to say that those blew my mind when I discovered them in middle school. I was a couple years into my first comics mania, having gone first through Disney books featuring Carl Barks's Donald Duck stories, and then having discovered Marvel through Claremont and Lee's run on the X-Men (specifically the end of their run, as Chris Claremont left after a couple issues and Jim Lee left after that to co-found Image).

But among this box of random comics I'd received in the mail was Justice League America #33, which featured Guy Gardner using his ring to tickle Kilowog. I didn't know who these characters were, but I clearly responded to the humor and the art (this was Adam Hughes's first big gig, and he'd just started it two issues prior), and quickly snapped up all the back issues I could find. That led me into the never-ending labyrinth that is the history of DC, and I've been hooked since.

©DC Comics, 1989

It's worth noting that this incarnation of the league wasn't very iconic either. There were some big-hitters, like Batman and Wonder Woman, but also a lot of second-stringers like Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, who anchored their own books at the time but are mostly forgotten now. But, in contrast to the Detroit League mentioned above, this team had good stories - what's forgotten now, when people talk about the "Bwah-ha-ha" era of the Justice League, is that Giffen and DeMatteis started out telling really grounded stories, where a big concern looming over whatever the JLI did was the politics of the Cold War.

The second and third issues, for example, feature some obscure heroes (based on Marvel's Avengers, it turns out) coming from an alternate dimension to try and save Earth from itself, by destroying all of its nuclear missiles. It's maybe not as deep a treatment of this theme as, say, FX's The Americans or Sundance's Deutschland '83, but it's also not completely stupid. And I think that's one of the key things I loved about DC's books from the 80s.

What I'm finding on this reread is that some of the "hilarious" banter is a bit forced, but I also remember that as the books went on they could still tackle serious stories, like when Despero came back, or in both of the storylines that featured the Extremists.

So overall I'm happy that I've dug these old comics out. It's appropriate given last year's Justice League movie (which wasn't amazing) and given the renewed popularity of DC's deep bench, particularly those characters from the 80s. And to return to the point I made above about ads, it's also fascinating seeing mentions and ads for what would turn out to be era-defining comics, like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. There was a lot more experimentation going on at the time, which is what also led to the runs on Sandman, Animal Man and Swamp Thing that gave us Vertigo comics.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but this run on Justice League has to count as one of the things that made me want to be a writer. It was the first time I, as a comics fan, really appreciated the writing of a book, which led me to other well-written comics and to good writing in general.

Anyway, now that I've developed a taste for it, I'm planning on checking out the other series I loved at the time, which was the rebooted version of the Legion of Superheroes that Keith Giffen was plotting at the same time that he was doing Justice League. And from there, who knows what other delights I'll find...?

Football as Shared Culture in Post-War Europe

My latest sojourn in the UK is finished, I'm back to semi-normalcy in Palo Alto (apart from the fact that I still need to find a job), and I've been reading some of the many books I picked up while I was out there.

Now, as I'm sure I've noted here before, one of the nice things about spending three months in London this time was that I could finally indulge my addiction to buying books, and also I could finally buy some books from my beloved Big Waterstones, on Piccadilly. It was one of my first stops when I arrived in January, and in the (many) subsequent visits it was driven home for me just how different the selection of books is there compared to here.

Part of that is, of course, that the Bay Area doesn't have any bookstores nearly as large as Big Waterstones, or Foyles, so the selection is always going to be a little worse. But there's also a clear difference in the types of books and authors you get there vs here, and the main one is books about football.

I spent a lot of time in the football section this year, because I had decided it was going to be my year to finally buy that history of Italian soccer that I'd been eyeing up for, I kid you not, years: Calcio, by John Foot, a magisterial and expensive tome that I'd never felt able to sufficiently justify on previous trips.

And naturally when I went looking for it in its usual spot in the travel section, it was no longer there.

It took me a couple of trips to various bookstores to find it, but I did, and I finally got to go through its 500-odd pages and learn about the origins and currents of Italian football, told from the perspective of a foreign and therefore (mostly) impartial observer. As I read it I was reminded of Sid Lowe's Fear and Loathing in La Liga, which provided a history of Spanish football seen through the lens of the Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry, and that brought me to the realization that histories of European football are essentially histories of post-war Europe.

This is an impression borne out by finishing Calcio, and Brilliant Orange (a similar book about Dutch football by David Winner), and by what I've read so far of Tor!, Uli Hesse's history of soccer in Germany.

That last one is particularly important, because as I've noted before, it's frustratingly difficult to find any books that talk about German history after the Second World War. Germania, Simon Winder's otherwise excellent non-Nazi-focused history, ends in 1933, while Philip Oltermann's also excellent Keeping Up with the Germans does talk about Baader-Meinhof, football and Volkswagen, but it remains a bit too fragmented to really give a sense of the flow of things after 1945.

I did pick up an e-book copy of Norman Stone's history of the Cold War, The Atlantic and Its Enemies, because it promised a look at Germany, but what struck me is that the Cold War notwithstanding, the lack of histories of the period is probably due to the fact that not much has actually happened in Western Europe since the end of WWII.

That's not to slight the end of Communism, the end of Franco's fascist regime, or the years of lead in Italy's undeclared civil war. But the fall of the Soviet Union is something that happened on the edges of Western Europe, while the lingering effects of fascism ending or resurfacing somehow gives the impression of flying under the radar - these are all things that were of paramount importance in those countries, but haven't really had such a global import. After all, how many foreigners would know about Italy's years of lead if they haven't actually studied the country's history?

So that's one reason why I suggest that football histories can take the place of proper histories; the other reason is that of course these political currents affected what happened on and around the pitch. In Fear and Loathing, Sid Lowe starts by taking apart the myth of Real Madrid being the "right-wing" club and Barcelona being the bastion of resistance against Franco's regime. John Foot, meanwhile, talks in Calcio about how far-right politics have been a mainstay of large parts of fandom (particularly among Lazio and Inter fans), as well as giving a view of how the paranoia of the 70s led to the death of Lazio player Enrico Re Cecconi when he tried to play a prank on a shopkeeper in Rome (look it up, it's fascinating).

And it's a truism to suggest that what's happening on the pitch reflects what's happening in society. Soccer's maybe a little conservative when it comes, for instance, to racial integration, but John Barnes signing for Liverpool in the 1980s, or France dominating with its multicultural team in 1998 and 2000, indicate ways in which British and French society were opening up (though not always unopposed). Another truism is the way in which globalization's acceleration after the fall of Communism has echoed in the way footballing dominance has come straight to Europe, after decades of alternating with South America.

In graduate school I was a bit miffed when a friend suggested that Europe wouldn't be important in the decades to come, as China came into its own power. As a conversation, it's stuck with me ever since, because she was both right and wrong. In a lot of ways you can say that Europe is making itself irrelevant in geopolitics, given its position between the US, Russia and (figuratively) China. But culturally Europe is probably even more important than it's ever been, in part because of football.

After all, US fans (at least the white ones) typically have their local team and their European team (usually English, and usually Liverpool or Manchester United), while trips to Asia have become mandatory for European clubs to top up their coffers every season. The fact that so many Asian, Russian and Middle Eastern billionaires are buying up European clubs suggests that they see more upside there than in trying to buy NFL or NBA teams (though I'm aware that these are the nationalities that are probably less favored to buy US sports teams).

As far as the history aspect, I haven't been totally disappointed. Brilliant Orange, for example, linked the emergence of the Dutch national team and its Total Football with the Provo art movement of the 1960s, and interestingly links the Dutch national character to why the Netherlands never quite wins tournaments. I'm also seeing how the rise of Nazism and the progress of the war affected German football, so I look forward to seeing what Uli Hesse can tell me about the post-war period and the tension between East and West Germany.

Though as a final thought it's interesting to note that there isn't a similar book about English football. This is probably understandable when you consider that most of these books I've mentioned are written by Englishmen (except for Tor) and are aimed at explaining the local variety of football to British readers. As such an all-encompassing history of English football is probably superfluous, because everyone already knows the story - but as a non-Brit I'd find it very interesting if someone did write such a book.

One last point that's occurred to me as I wrote that last paragraph. The fascination of British readers/viewers for a specific brand of European football comes, again, from the increased globalization of the game, where you could suddenly watch Italian or Spanish football on TV in the 80s and 90s. But even before that fans would take to a specific team from memorable World Cup or European Championship performances - David Winner talks about falling in love with the Dutch team in 1974, and when I mentioned the book to my dad he also remembered their place in that tournament.

Which perhaps demonstrates my central thesis of football as being the binding cultural force of post-war Europe.

Some thoughts on the British Museum

I'm getting to the end of my time in Europe on this work contract, and with that in mind I decided to visit one of my happy places in London: the British Museum.

Now, it's slightly less of a happy place for me these days, since it started doing bag checks in its forecourt. I understand that London's a bit tense these days, thanks to various terrorist attacks in the last couple of years, and I understand that as a free museum it has to control the ever-increasing number of tourists that flock to it. But there's something about the way it's implemented the bag checks, where it causes long lines to get in on weekends, and the unfriendliness of the people doing the searches, that makes it less fun.

And the new entry requirements mean that the museum no longer does the garden exhibitions it used to do - one of my favorites was a replica Chinese garden, right there in the forecourt, with small recreations of a bunch of different Chinese ecosystems laid out next to each other. They later did one for Indian plants and one for African plants, and I remember enjoying those a whole lot too, so it's a shame that they won't be providing that anymore.

On the other hand, the inside is still great. Just today, among the temporary free exhibits, I had a look at a gallery on Toussaint Louverture, the hero of Haitian independence, and one on the friendship between artists Niko Ghika and John Craxton, and author Patrick Leigh Fermor, all centered around their time on various Greek islands in the 1950s and 1960s.

I also had a closer look at the redone Chinese gallery, which I got to check out back in January when I first arrived, having missed out on it and the adjoining Indian gallery after their refurbishments of the past year or so. Disappointingly, the Japanese gallery is closed for refurbishment until September, but at least I got to see my other happy place within the museum, which is the Korean gallery's sarangbang.

I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the place, but for the past ten or so years, I've always felt the need to stop by and have a look. I think on one hand it's because it's so cozy and perfect, with a bed and stuff for writing and stuff for reading and stuff for tea. Somehow I'm just drawn to these well-designed, self-contained little living spaces.

On the other hand, it occurred to me today that I think I'd have taken well to being a Confucian scholar-gentleman. From what I've been able to understand, they basically took their examinations, figured out what level they'd occupy and then just hung around for the rest of their lives writing poetry, painting landscapes and playing music.

None of those things is completely in my wheelhouse, but the lure of being able to sit around all day doing whatever intellectual thing takes my fancy, without worrying about, y'know, supporting myself, is pretty attractive. Though to be honest I'd probably spend a significant part of each day playing video games (I'm assuming I'd get to be a gentleman-scholar in modern times).

It's kind of too bad there's no scholar class like that anymore. The people who might be interested in writing treatises on random stuff don't really have the money to do that, while the people who have the money for it seem to be interested more in subverting democracy and corrupting political processes. Or, at the very least, in accumulating more money, which, again, leaves precious little time for important things like calligraphy or vertical landscape paintings.

My aim is to become so filthy rich that I can afford a sarangbang myself (along with a tea room like they have or had in the British Museum's Japanese gallery), and then to actually spend time in it. Probably playing video games, sure, but also likely learning languages and working on my latest disquisition on proper orchid-growing techniques.

Or this blog, who knows?