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Friday, August 19, 2011

JLA Flashback #5

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Justice League of America #203 - June 1982. Cover art by George Perez and Dick Giordano.

A striking composition, beautifully colored!

1 comment:

Joseph Brian Scott said...

Man, these Perez covers are a treat to look at. Too bad he didn't do more interior work. Oh vell, be grateful for what you got, not what you wanted, I guess.

#203 isn't exactly an example of this, but my favorite kind of JLA cover is what I call a "séance cover". I just like spooky stuff, and it's always a hoot to see it melded onto the super hero milieu. Vol. 1 of the JLA certainly had its share of spooky covers, w/ graves a frequently recurring motif, but specific examples of séance covers are #s 21, 83, 94, 98, and 107, with #98 being not only my favorite séance cover but also one of the best JLA covers ever in my opinion.

I have this theory, completely unsubstantiated by any hard research, that there was a trend toward spooky and supernatural subject matter in the DCU in the late 60s/early 70s that reflected a faddish interest in the supernatural in the popular culture at the time. For a few years there, Halloween seemed to last all year long. "Dark Shadows", though it only lasted from '66 to '71, had been extremely popular, and the ABC network in particular was showing, it seemed, a spooky made-for-tv movie every week. More horror titles at DC & Marvel were being published than ever before, though they tended to be short-lived, and even with the super heroes you saw more spooky stories. "Teen Titans" in particular was doing quite a bit of this in the early 70s toward the end of its first run.