TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN: It's Menace to ( Justice ) Society Saturday !

Saturday, June 28, 2025

It's Menace to ( Justice ) Society Saturday !

Now that we got the Steve Mannion spotlight post out of the way ( all four parts ) we can come to what I initially wanted to post and as you might've guessed from the title it's time for some justice - society style !

As usual the genesis of this post lies in the old klingon proverb " old posts lead to new posts " and it was indeed the last post of JUSTICE LEAGUE MONTH back in April that led to me writing this post. Blog regulars might remember that the post included the full sixth issue of JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA which was part four of The Lightning Saga that brought The Legion of Super - Heroes back into the proper DC universe - among other things I don't want to spoil yet. The issue features art by Dale Eaglesham who my faithful followers know to be one of my favourite artists even if it is not always easy to follow him onto all the different books he does.

One of his most distinguished bodies of work - which I already mentioned in the JUSTICE LEAGUE MONTH post - is Johnathan Hickman's run on the FANTASTIC FOUR and as I am writing this it is still available at amazon Spain for 62 EUROS which is a pretty hefty discount for an 800 pages thick book with an in store price of around 110 EUROS. Besides Dale Eaglesham it also features art by Steve Epting , Barry Kitson and Sean Chen plus covers by the incomparable Alan Davis best known for his work on EXCALIBUR ( which probably would have sold more if they had titled it X - CALIBUR ) and as there is a new FANTASTIC FOUR movie you might want to get it before the price goes up. At least my readers in Spain.

Coming back to Dale Eaglesham's stint on JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA, since the aforementioned JUSTICE LEAGUE MONTH post included a full issue there was no room to include the original art I came across doing the research for the post. Because you always have to do the research !

Okay, I get it that nobody can know everything about everything - except maybe Reed Richards - and I am fine with that. But not bothering to do the the proper research to me just is lazy. And disrespecting to your audience because it shows that you are not taking your work seriously.

Anyway, since I don't throw the stuff that I find during my research away I put it on hold for later and when I was looking for the corresponding coloured pages to the original artwork I came across a lot of variant covers by Dale Eaglesham. And when I say " a lot " I mean more than a dozen. You see, back in those days the variant cover craziness was not as rampant as it is right now where every comicbook seems to have at least five variant covers three of which showing something that has nothing to do with the series. Nevertheless comic companies and especially DC Comics wanted to give the readers incentives or a special bonus so some of their issues featured variant covers. In the case of this volume of THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA we really had the best of both worlds with the spectacular Alex Ross providing a lot of the regular covers while Dale Eaglesham did fantastic variant covers for at least the first two years.

Now one reason why I decided to make this post even though the most part of it are variant covers ( and I usually like to include more interior pages in my BLACK AND WHITE posts since there are more possibilities to use covers in a post ) is that while THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA was one of DC Comics constantly best written and best drawn titles it was often overshadowed by THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA since the book and its roster was better known to readers and many were hesitant to get into the wider history of the society and the larger DC universe.

So there may be a lot of people who have no seen these variant covers or are not even aware that these variant covers exist. Another reason is that a big portion of the pages within this post are from my favourite JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA story Thy Kingdom Come ( about which I have also written at length in these posts ) where the Superman from the KINGDOM COME timeline lands in the regular DC universe where he does all kinds of cool stuff. Like sucker punching a lightning bolt. Yep, that happened. Anyway, we got a lot of cool stuff here so enough of my unqualified ramblings already and let's get to the good stuff right now.