The Batlord

It's been forever and a day since I updated this journal but I'm bored and feel like being a dickbag to innocent writers and artists who are just trying to feed their kids. A couple years ago I found this series on a comic piracy site while scrolling through the new uploads and stopped at this. Extreme Justice. 1995. Have to have it. There was simply no way any comic from the early-mid 90s with "Extreme" in the title wasn't going to be a Sunny D commercial with angry eyebrows, and while I never ended up reading it, everything I've heard backs up my assumption. So I bring to you, the Justice League that time probably forgot...






Still haven't read it, I just wanted to take a minute to cringe at the cover, where Extreme Justice are I guess busting down the wall to your room and you better believe they're gonna bring down the house. Going clockwise from the 12 o'clock position we have Captain Atom, a silver guy who shoots, like, radiation or the sun or something. I know he's one of those big whammy superheroes like Superman or Thor, who can punch buildings and then make them apologize for getting in their way, but I've read almost nothing with him in it so I'm not too clear on his power set. I really like how they tried to make him as shiny and detailed as possible, but he just ends up looking like he has chicken pox.

Next we have Maxima, a character I only know from an episode of Superman: The Animated Series and from hearing about this series. As far as I know the entirety of her character is that she wants to bang superheroes (Superman most of all) and have their superbabies. And then she reformed her sleazy ways and joined the Justice League apparently, which gives me hope that if I ever gain superpowers and join a team that I might not be the most annoying twat in the room. And if you look at where her right arm is in relation to her crotch you'll notice that HER TORSO IS AT A 90° ****ING ANGLE FROM HER LOWER BODY! I've seen some ****, but I don't know that I've ever seen that kinda ****. (And yes, I totally just tried to do that, and no I couldn't, and you should be glad you weren't here to see it.)

Below her we have Booster Gold and what even the ****? This is Booster Gold when he's not looking like a SWAT team gladiator with 80s Madonna hair.


Simple, fun, and memorable. I like Booster Gold's character design. But **** whatever the hell '95 Booster is supposed to be.

Moving on to Blue Beetle. Blue Beetle is a gadget guy who I think has some fighting ability of his own, but is most certainly not Spider-Man and can not leap nimbly from building to building while contorted like a literal pretzel. You totally thought that was Spider-Man with a costume change before you remembered that this was a DC book, didn't you?

And finally there's "Amazing-Man" whose name made me literally cringe when I looked him up just now cause I sure as **** don't know who the hell Amazing-Man is. "Superman" sounds dumb but it still has a ring to it. "Amazing-Man" has all the stupid of "Superman" but without working despite itself. What even does Amazing-Man do, besides sporting pointless headgear that lines up perfectly with his eraser cut? I don't even wanna think about the rest of his green and gold wardrobe malfunction.

And don't even ask me why the series starts with issue #0 cause I don't even care to know. Now I'm actually going to read this thing and then... well I guess I'll probably go bite something.


Okay, so, first thing's first. This isn't as terribad as I was hoping, just really bland and uninteresting and ****ty. I was assuming that with a name like "Extreme Justice" this would be DC's answer to X-Force: a team of antiheroes with 'tude who don't play by the rules and like to sneer at the things they blow up. Extreme Justice (merely called the Justice League in this book) are just kind of a team who could have been in any series, but I guess DC wanted them to be EXTREME so they put it on the cover.

This inconsistency of approach dominates Extreme Justice #0. The artwork is a perfect example of this; much of the art looks straight from the 80s, with the detailed realism that had not yet been infected with the over-the-top, ugly grittiness of the Image Comics era. The pencilling can be more than a little busy, and the colors are painfully drab (pure 90s, right there), but as a fan of 80s comic art I was somewhat pleasantly surprised... all things considered.

And then you get to the shiny things. I have no idea why artist Marc Campos decided to add so much pointless detail to absolutely everything metal, but combined with the Pollock-esque coloring it's an optometrist's wet dream. Just look at this pile of what-the-**** ON THE FIRST TWO PAGES.






Don't Captain Atom (middle) and Booster Gold (bottom left) look completely out of place? The background is, while being a bit busy and amorphous for my liking, rather subdued and "normal" looking, with the rest of the team looking positively funereal by comparison. But **** me if my eyes aren't actually hurting just a bit from looking at those two for too long. I'd say the only good thing about this "style" is Maxima, whose simple, dark purple costume actually contrasts nicely with the gold of her shoulder pads, gloves, and boots. (They could still be 50% less shiny, but so long as I don't have to look directly at Captain Atom then I'll count my blessings.) Also her hair is pretty and probably smells nice. And don't ask me why they seem to be flying through the inside of a giant pair of pajama bottoms.

Side note: in case you didn't know that the people who made this comic don't give any more of a **** about Amazing-Man (bottom right) than I do then just check how he's clearly been crammed into the edge of the page in such a way that he doesn't cover up Blue Beetle, even if he has to look like he's about to anally fist him.

That's not even the worst Captain Atom image either. I'm spoiled for choices, but I'm going with this one... ugh.




This issue definitely has its problems with art, but in general it's really not too terrible, and even works at times. But Captain Atom looks like absolute dog **** in every single panel. He looks like somebody ran over a zombie with a floor buffer. He looks like T-1000 melting. He looks like somebody asked a genie to make his lucky nickel into a real boy and it went horribly, horribly wrong. He looks like my grandmother got jizzed on by a tank. He looks like a ghost sending a warning to the living through a puddle of mercury.

But enough of that. This issue supposedly had a plot as well. The tone of the issue might not quite be bog standard 90s drek, but the first few pages couldn't be anything but: already assembled team attacks base with little introduction or explanation as to why these people all flying in the same direction are even working together in the first place, and you're just kind of expected to care cause you're twelve, like explosions, and don't know anything about proper storytelling. This time it's a base in Colorado that's been taken over by a rogue US general intent on launching nukes at Russia in order to force Washington to launch a preemptive nuclear strike because freedom. Extreme Justice (I'm not ****ing calling them the Justice League) fights a bunch of erroneous mechwarrior robots that apparently the general shouldn't have, a missile gets launched, Captain Atom chases after it, the missile blows up but Captain Atom is too boss to let a little thing like a thermonuclear explosion get to him, and end scene.

The only thing that makes this sequence even remotely interesting is Blue Beetle, who is the only character with any personality at this point, which is balls, cause Booster Gold is usually delightful (and I guess he's dressed like a Megazord because it powers his pacemaker?). After that is one of the most baffling plot progressions I've ever seen and I still don't know what it means or how it's stupid. The team now decides that they need a headquarters, so where do they go? Some abandoned military base in Nevada (remember, they were just in Colorado) where they find the same robots from the other base defending this base from the people who fought the robots at the other base who are the people now fighting the robots at this base. There is no indication that they were followed (and later in the book it's clear that they weren't), and Extreme Justice didn't go to the second base because of any link to the first base, they just sorta randomly found more robots as if killer robots are hiding behind trees and in trash cans all over your neighborhood.

Then there's some crooked general who's somehow involved with the second base who doesn't want Extreme Justice there, then some doctor tells some guy he has cancer, and then some dudes look like they're about to fight Extreme Justice and the issue ends. Oh yeah and some shadowy guy in 90s armor doesn't like Captain Atom for some reason. See how many "some"'s I put in the paragraph? I even went back and added one to illustrate how uninteresting this **** is. There is literally a scene where an unnamed person is told he has leukemia and only six months to a year and should go on vacation, and none of it even hints that it is any way superhero-related other than the insinuation that the leukemia is weird.

This is quite simply one of the most phoned in first issues I've ever read. I imagine that this was an assignment given to a middling creative team who could not possibly have been less interested in reinventing the Justice League for the grim and gritty 90s and so they just put in the minimum amount of effort to collect a paycheck. But as bad as it is it's not even good-bad like Youngblood or X-Force where I can laugh long and hard at how stupid it is. I just want to read something else and/or drink myself into a stupor.

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