Justice League Europe #1
Writer: J.M. DeMatteis
Art: Bart Sears, Pablo Marcos

This comic crawls with irony and idiocity. I don’t know what else I should have expected from the highly acclaimed JLE (doesn’t have the same ring, does it?). Even the first page speaks a bad omen, as the only line spoken is someone off page saying “This is gonna be a disaster.” There’s also the fact that the cover has the JLE reading a JLA comic and saying “Wow, Deja Vu.” This comic is just so full of ’80s and the tacky fact that it’s a spin-off that it’s hard not to love.

Adding onto the tackiness is when Captain Atom’s speech has a typo. He says “I was new to the 1980′s.” Now I know some people will argue that the apostrophe after this 0 is fine. In fact, wikipedia says

most authorities prefer 1960s to1960′s (although the latter is noted by at least one source as acceptable in American usage), and 90s or ’90s to 90′s or ‘90′s.

The irony? It’s acceptable in American usage (sometimes!), but this is the Justice League Europe! Shouldn’t they be getting their act together for the people who refuse to even say “zee”?

Regardless, this, along with a John Elway’s Quarterback for NES advertisement, got me to thinking of other random things we’ve tried bringing over to Europe that failed, and something that came up was the NFL Europe. First of all, the fact that we tried to bring over a sport called football to a place that already has a sport with that same name is hilarious. It’d be like the great republic of the arctic poles coming to us with their game they made up called “baseball.” But beside that fact, I don’t get this obsession to go global. Well, check that, I get it, but I don’t get why so many companies think it will automatically succeed. You just know their corporate minds are going “oh, sure it’ll work. Europeans are exactly like Americans. They’re our brothers after all.” But it don’t work like that, folks!

And that’s why the JLE’s tumultuous run of fear and terror only lasted for 60+ issues. Sure, that’s not awful, but I’m sure DC execs were hoping for a little more from that franchise and also for a little more than for their first issue to be sold at cover value 20 years later. I do think this means that Excalibur deserves props, though, as they survived the rough of going European and are still churning out issues today.

As they say in a particular country in Europe: “Fin.”