Especially since I finally have accumulated enough material to write a spotlight post. Keeping in mind that the reason for this post is that I mentioned THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA and KINGDOM COME in another post I naturally wanted to include artwork from both series and I could have made one with just that plus some pages from the JUSTICE mini series. But I also wanted to include some material from one of my favourite series ASTRO CITY since so far I also have done just one full blown standalone spotlight post with just the art by Brent Anderson .
Don't get me wrong, Brent Anderson is a great artist and has gone well beyond what anyone would have expected from him but it would be nice to be able to add another post to the links and not rely so much on some small portion of the bonus section of a post where I mentioned the book.
That said there will be another ASTRO CITY post coming in the not too distant future as soon as I have enough quality material. I could do one right now but it just doesn't feel right because there are a few art pieces that are not up to the usual blog standards and I would like to wait a bit longer to see if I can get just one or two more pieces of higher quality.
Which is a lot of words about what will be just a small part of this post.
The main part will be about Mark Waid and Alex Ross KINGDOM COME which is for some the greatest super hero epos DC Comics published.
Being that the comic was fully painted this will be a different post than my regular ones which are mainly BLACK AND WHITE posts, meaning the original black and white art goes side by side with the coloured pages.
In this case there is only the original coloured art so that will make the main part shorter. Which is a good thing. Anyway, here are the pages from KINGDOM COME - with a few JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA covers thrown in for good measure - that I selected for this Alex Ross tribute.
Now that we got the Steve Mannion spotlight post out of the way ( allfourparts) 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 JUSTICELEAGUEMONTH 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 TheLegionofSuper - 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 LEAGUEMONTH 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 SteveEpting , Barry Kitson and Sean Chen plus covers by theincomparableAlanDavis best known forhisworkonEXCALIBUR ( 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 historyof 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 intheseposts ) 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.
lightning punch baby
justice stuff
justice links
justice videos
the greatest dc comic ever made
to tell the truth if I would rebuy these ( not that I had any of the omnibuses but I had all the single issues and even some hardcovers ) I would start with the third one because it contains the THY KINGDOM COME story but all of it is good
comic geek speak
a new justice society of america comic it was okay and the best parts were the ones drawn by jerry ordway they should do one just with art by him
