TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN: Justice League Month with Carlos Pacheco !

Thursday, March 20, 2025

Justice League Month with Carlos Pacheco !

Yes, I guess Carlos Pacheco did not even cross your mind when I started JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA MONTH and I would have thought the same but as usual Today I was looking for some good pages of Vixen from the Brad Meltzer / Ed Benes run of the title for another post and I came across issue 21 pencilled by Carlos Pacheco and inked by Jesus Merino.

And since it will take me a while to sift through all the Ed Benes pages to find the 23 most deserving ones I wanted to take the opportunity to put the issue on the blog and at the same time do another Justice League of America spotlight. So far we have been to the post CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS era, the Bronze Age with Dick Dillin and a slight detour for Ernie Chan's Batman ( and there will indeed be a somewhat Justice League Of America - centric post coming up even if I have to include his covers for series like THE FLASH, SUPER FRIENDS or THE SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER VILLAINS ) and now we are going to a more modern league era with this.

Now around the time that this issue came out it was not that unusual for Carlos Pacheco to do interior work but he was not the regular artist on this title. He did some issues of GREEN LANTERN and provided pages for Grant Morrison's FINAL CRISIS when push came to shove but usually he came onto a title - like SUPERMAN for example - and stuck with it for a while. That being said, the superb art of somebody like Carlos Pacheco very often came with a price which was mostly time so if he wasn't on some shorter story - like his excellent Absolute Power storyline in the SUPERMAN / BATMAN series by Jeph Loeb - they had to use fill in artists.

Which resulted in having more than one artist in such collections like the excellent SUPERMAN - CAMELOT FALLS which has gotten a deluxe edition since it's initial release but that should not deter you from reading it.

In any way, what I am trying to say is that although Carlos Pacheco never did a lengthy run on JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA this issue gave you a tiny glimpse of how glorious that would have been. This issue also is special to me because it is one of the few issues that survived from my old comicbook collection - at least I think it did - and as longtime blog followers may remember I also got an original sketch from this very issue. Not an original page but the layout sketch for the page featuring the big trinity during the only time when I managed to get a sketch from Carlos Pacheco back when I was still going to comicbook conventions.