You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. And you don’t know what you didn’t have until it’s there

Justice League of Americaw as my favorite comics series for most of its original run. Not always. Denny O’Neil’s run was the first of many bad stretches, and even Gardner Fox wrote some off issues. And there were periods when other series, such as Dial H for Hero, won my 12 cents.
By and large, though, the League ruled. It’s no surprise therefore that when I got back into comics in the early 1970s, it was the Justice League that served as the gateway. I mean jeepers! — quite aside from the cool cover image, this had the origin of my favorite super-team, a story I’d never read! How could I resist?

This was part two of the Mike Friedrich/Dick Dillin story pitting the JLA against Starbreaker — Galactus but without any of that “beyond good and evil” bilge. Starbreaker relishes destroying planets, then selling off some of his cosmic energy to tyrants to power their military weaponry (we never learn what he gets from this — it’s not like he needs the money). Then came a done-in-one pitting the JLA against alien anti-pollution activists doing more harm than good. I read them all. They seemed okay. They were the League.

Then came Justice League of America #100. And my perceptions changed.

Len Wein’s debut on the book was more than okay. It was a terrific adventure involving the JLA, the JSA and some group I’d only vaguely heard of called the Seven Soldiers of Victory. Could the Earth-One and Earth-Two heroes find the time-lost Law’s Legionnaires? Could they bring them back to the present fast enough to avert Earth-Two’s destruction? Well of course, but as with all comics, the fun is watching them do it.

There’s a bit of writing advice from Mark Twain, that finding the exact right word to use is the difference between “the lightning and the lightning bug.” This was sort of like that. Friedrich, to his credit, understood how to write a JLA story better than Denny O’Neil or Robert Kanigher, but as I’ll be blogging about eventually, he couldn’t quite pull it off. His stories were the lightning bug.

Wein by contrast, was able to pull it off. His run renewed my enthusiasm for the World’s Greatest Super-Heroes, enough that I kept buying them through the long, processed-cheese era between his departure and Steve Englehart becoming the writer. I’m not sure I’d count Wein’s stories as the lightning but they definitely crackled with more than enough energy to satisfy me.

Over the coming decades, other creative teams or individuals hit me the same way. The David Michelenie/Bob Layton team on Iron Man got me to buy Shellhead’s book for the first time ever. Walt Simonson’s Thor — well, sorry for the pun but that run was 100 percent the lightning.

Question of the week: what runs have affected you the same way, showing how good comics or a specific comic book could be?

Covers top to bottom by Jim Mooney, Neal Adams, Nick Cardy and Walt Simonson.