Justice League #33 (DC)

writer: Geoff Johns
artist: Doug Manhke

via Comics X-aminer

Every time the Justice League forms anew, they have the iconic characters as the starting point, and then start dubbing in second stringers, until it's only second stringers.  We're three years in on this run.  New characters have started to join.  That's what's happening again, right?

Well, wrong.  Lex Luthor joined.  In typical Geoff Johns fashion, it's a radical new vision of previously established continuity.  Now that we're a few issues into the Luthor age, how're things looking?  

Actually, pretty good.

That page above has Luthor, plus Niles Caulder, founder of the Doom Patrol, sort of X-Men before there was X-Men.  There's also Power Ring, the new one, like Luthor another gift from Forever Evil.  All three are elements Johns has brought along to great effect.  He introduced Jessica Cruz, actually, in his final issue of Green Lantern, and Element Woman from Doom Patrol is a character he's been working with since Justice League #16 (although she debuted in Flashpoint).  These are examples of long-term planning and stories coalescing.  Maybe not too impressive a fete in and of itself, but also not what other people would do with the League.  Which is what Johns does all the time.  What seems natural after he does it, but probably would never have happened until he did.

Same with Luthor.  Same with Doom Patrol.  Luthor and Caulder clash over ideologies.  As everyone is with Luthor in the League, Luthor views Caulder, with extreme skepticism.  At this point, it's safe to assume we can take Lex at face value.  He wants to be a part of the League.  For all intents and purposes, he is a good guy now.

But it doesn't mean he's always right.  Take Caulder at face value, and statements like this are completely  natural in this series:

"Not everyone with super-powers can be an inspiration."

It's a pretty profound statement.  As far as Johns is concerned, the good guys are the good guys, and the Justice League is comprised of the best good guys there are.  But not everyone is League material.  And that's what Doom Patrol is for Johns, a chance to view superheroes in a different context.  Far too often, what the League itself is can be obscured by what it does.  But a team like Doom Patrol has been lost in the DC shuffle for years.  Not just because Grant Morrison happened to establish his whole legacy in part on the Vertigo series where the team was last relevant, but because sometimes, it's hard even for a company that's handled superheroes for three quarters of a century to know what to do with some of them.  There are plenty of lost superheroes out there.  Some of them are ripe for new context exactly like this.

So you get a perfect platform for a team that's the opposite of the League within Justice League itself.

In the middle of Lex Luthor joining.  In the middle of an alternate version of Green Lantern who's evil but actually it's just the ring and it's now in the possession of someone who's probably good.  I would hyphen all of that, but honestly, that's too much even for me.  Suffice to say, busy, but Johns handles it effortlessly.

That's why he's paid to do this, folks, why he's a cornerstone of DC as a whole.

And while all that is going on, just in case you didn't know the difference between Lex Luthor and Batman, Batman sets that record straight, too.  Because even though Luthor's with the good guys, he still has a massive ego.  And needs to learn his place.  Who better than Batman to teach him?  And who else but Batman can do it while addressing a different problem entirely?

And so that's how, oddly enough, Lex Luthor officially joins the League.

And this is also to say that it's nice to have Doug Mahnke on art.  He belongs here.  Let him stick around a while.