Letters to Justice League Vol. 2 #1

A big thank you to DrDread for agreeing to cover this book for the foreseeable future and delivering a cover that had me asking "WHO IS HE USING TO MODEL THESE CHARACTERS ON?!" and for Mark for helping me pull this story together. Lots of big plans for this title, hope you enjoy the ride!

Read it! Enjoyed it! LOVE LOVE LOVE Kobra! In fact something in the back of my head says I used them once too or was going to. Anyway, this adventure was a great setup for the title. It probably deserves five stars from me but I gave you four only because this is the Justice League line up I have never been a fan of. However, nobody can pull it off like you can, Charlie! I'm SO looking forward to what you are going to do with the group and especially Kobra.

Dr. You have been SO missed here and your cover is like welcoming home an old friend!!! Congrats to everyone!

Thanks guys! Here's an alternate cover... for Movember, I guess?

Sorry you're not a fan of the roster, Brian. I hope that the stories pull you in, even if the team disappoints!

HA! That's great, Doc.

Thanks for the kind words, Don. I know that the big seven isn't a big hit with a lot of readers on the site, but I hope that I can impress moving forward. Lots of plans solidified this weekend, and I've finally got my hook beyond it being about the seven (eight!) "biggest" heroes of the DC2 against Kobra, so the next few months will be very exciting for me! And hopefully you, as the reader!

ALSO, this morning Doc showed me the cover to #2, so I'm really excited for that issue to post! SO EXCITED. 

Thanks, Fant. I've actually been struggling with the title since I said I'd write it. Unlike Green Lantern, which flows thick and fast-- potentially too fast for the posting schedule I initially came up with!-- Justice League has been slower, but with the plans I've been coming up with over the weekend, taking inspiration from Jonathan Hickman's Marvel work (both Avengers and Fantastic Four), I've got a plan and it stretches across a whole host of source materials. I've had my eye on a particular Wildstorm concept I've wanted to write for some time, so expect to see something brewing in the background of the book in the coming months...

I think we have very similar touchstones when it comes to references and inspirations. When you mentioned Refn in the Letters to Batman & Robin #0 thread I had just finished writing a short discussion between two characters in Hourman #60 about him and his films that same weekend. Hickman's world building gets a bad wrap, but at the same time I think he's doing some new stuff with the genre at the minute that is a better frame of reference than others in a similar position. I'm trying to move away from Morrison, inspiration-wise, and try something different. I know they're not too far off from one another, but can't hurt to try something different.

The plan around the time we relaunched the title was to have a bit of a resurgence; David planned on writing a more ‘domestic’-orientated Justice League of America (which I’ll go into later), Brian was working on Batwoman and the Outsiders, and there were others things here and there… if I remember rightly, The Flash was going to undergo a revamp… there was a Hellblazer title that we’ll hopefully see continued one day… at least, I think it was all happening around that time? Sufficed to say, it all fell apart except for this book, which is quietly ticking along even to this day...


I recall having problems writing the scenes ‘underground’ for this story. The introduction of DC2’s defacto Strikeforce Kobra was fun, and Planetmaster was a concept that kind of grew in my own internal DC2 continuity that I’ve extrapolated into other projects and will continue to do so. There are so many threads from this issue that I’ve not finished pulling yet. It’s mad.

But also, it does raise a problem I’ve had with the Big Seven concept. They’re all big hitters, so you have to smash them down hard to make any conflict worthwhile. If you have a lower powered team, threats can be big and scary and they make sense when they win out. But a straight Kobra vs League fight is going to be difficult because what are they, really?


Hawkman is a character that meant a lot to me, but I wasn't allowed to keep him in the title. I'll go into more detail later when we talk about the next issue. Character interactions are what pushes my writing forward and Bruce being the perpetual straight man, apart from the odd occurrence where he actually cracks a joke, is a staple of how I work. I'm glad you're enjoying my work from this time! 

For better or for worse, the current vision of the DC2 is mine. This may very well be the final iteration of the site, but that's fine. It's an interesting place to be in... I was always the yippy little kid coming up with wild ideas for the site, and it took a while for me to mature to a place where my writing ability caught up with my enthusiasm. I've been searching for some missing content for the upcoming Justice League Annual #3 (I'm going on about it everywhere now) and found four issues for an event called Justice League: Earth War, and it's... bloody terrible. Absolutely god awful. It was supposed to be the first appearance of the Crime Syndicate of Amerika in DC2 continuity, before the CSA title David launched, and it's just... ooph, I am now a hundred times the writer I was then. Everything is written in the present tense. Ugh ugh ugh. 

But the relaunch put the Justice League on track, and the fact that every other title fell to the wayside was actually quite freeing. This is the spine book of the DC2. I've contemplated renaming it Justice League Universe, or even DC2 Universe, but I think it would be too on the nose (and Mark probably wouldn't let me). I mentioned in a previous post how events in teambooks can't impact solo character with their own titles, but if Batman doesn't have his own book, and neither does Wonder Woman, that means that what's happening in Justice League is the canon. Do you remember when the two dated back in the mid 00s in the JLA title? Concurrently, both characters were dating other characters in their solo titles. That's not exactly right, but which one is the "correct" relationship? I'd say the one in the main solo title! But with the DC2, as there's nothing going on by way of solo titles right now, this means that what's happening in Justice League goes. And as I have plans for new Bat-books (with yourself!), it means I can make sure there's a continuity between the two that means Bruce doesn't cheat on Wonder Woman (because honestly, why would he?).


I think one of the regrets I have with the current state of the book is that I don't get to focus on the PR stuff, the small-scale battles and the like. There's still intrigue, but there's no strict runner with PR scandals and perception issues. I think I put a strong bow on it in the Stormwatch arc, which we can discuss later, when you get to those issues. The main issue is that there's so much story, the asides to things that aren't directly story related probably damage the momentum of the main thread! In a scene I wrote just before I sent Justice League #70 to Mark, I did something reeeeally small scale that probably doesn't matter to anybody but me, but I thought it tied in nicely with the themes of the issue and hopefully it isn't too jarring or unimportant to the rest of the plot. We'll see.


I go into some detail about this in the letter thread for #2, which I posted in a few minutes ago. I hope you find the information there useful! 

Batman is a very fun, dry and wry guy to have on the team. I enjoy him being the straight man (which you've seen) but also the moments of humour he brings out in scenes when no one expects it. Now that he's dating Wonder Woman, that part of him is coming out more and more, and I'm trying to find the right place to introduce a cosmetic change to him that represents this as well. It's something I never thought I would do with the character, but it's perfect right now.


Thanks again for reading, O!