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Justice
League Unlimited
The Once and Future Thing, Part 1
Original Airdate - 01/22/05
Oh boy.
Hopeless
loser David Clinton has been hiding in his garage to get
away from his overbearing wife. While puttering one day,
he invents a chrono suit that lets him travel through time
where he collects rare, but worthless, artifacts. When his
wife finds out that he hasn't been altering the timeline
for fun and profit, she goes psychotic on him. David does
the only thing he can do…runs from his wife and hides somewhere
in the space time continuum.
Raise your hand
if you have ever felt like doing that.
Meanwhile
back in the JLU watchtower, Batman and Green Lantern talk
about girls and who they are planning on asking to the senior
prom. Suddenly an intruder alarm goes off and Batman, Wonder
Woman and Green Lantern discover time traveling David stealing
one of Batman's spare utility belts. David tries to make
a run for it through a time tunnel, but the Justice League
trio follow him.
Unfortunately,
rather than ending up in the watchtower laundry room, they
end up in the Wild West, at gun point from the local banditos.
Before long, they discover that the time travel device has
ended up in the hands of the local bad guy, Tobias Manning,
who has been using it to steal technology from the future.
Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern team up with local
heroes Jonah Hex, El Diablo, Bat Lash and Ohiyesa ("Pow
Wow") Smith to fight Tobias's army of robots,
tanks and dinosaurs in order to gain control of the chrono
suit so they can fix the timeline.
This
episode is a lot like playing a game of Shadow
Fist.
Although this
episode is billed as a two-parter, the first half stands
solidly on its own. There's great dialogue between the characters
and they manage to keep the ball rolling on plotlines and
tension from previous episodes. Justice League Unlimited
does a better job of maintaining the feeling of an ongoing
comic book than Justice League did. Of course they
have to, given the half hour timeslot.
Part
one also comes to a satisfying conclusion only to have the
Justice League trio jump into the future where they run
into the characters and events depicted in canceled series
Batman Beyond. Next week's episode should be a blast
for those folks who watched Batman Beyond and may
fill in a lot of history of what happened between the two
shows.
Derek's
Continuity Corner
David
Clinton has a long history (pardon the pun) in the DC Universe.
Though now deceased, or at least currently considered so,
he stands as the closest thing The Atom has to an actual
arch-villain, unless you consider his ex-wife. As Chronos,
Clinton bedeviled The Atom time and time again -- and if
current issues of Superman/Batman are to believed,
often went back in time to try and kill Ray Palmer in the
crib. For a short while, a pseudo-hero carried the name
Chronos, but he accidentally wiped himself out of the timestream
and now hangs out with Ambush Bug in a bar outside of time
and space.
The
Western heroes included in this episode have spotty histories.
Perhaps the most popular and long-lived character is Jonah
Hex, though Bat Lash has a cult following.
Hex was
a Confederate soldier scarred by Indians, hence the trademark
half-skull face. He starred in All-Star Western (later
retitled Weird Western Tales in the seventies) for
several issues until spinning off into his own book, replaced
in WWT by Scalphunter. His stories tended to be creepy,
moody and very cool, with a long run done by artist Nestor
Redondo. Hex wandered the West, occasionally encountering
the supernatural, but often finding that man had a greater
capacity for evil without the devil's help.
For
a time, DC thrust Jonah Hex into the future, perhaps trying
to ape the success of Mad Max in a book titled
simply Hex. The scarred gunman fought against the
usual post-apocalyptic madmen before finally making his
way back into his own time and place. In an unusual move,
DC editors revealed Hex's final fate even before that odd
series, when his aged and stuffed corpse was found at a
carnival sideshow.
In the
early nineties, horror writer Joe R. Lansdale revived Jonah
Hex for the Vertigo line, penning a couple of grotesque
mini-series most notable now for having caused rocker Edgar
Winter to sue DC over his resemblance to one of the villains.
It's
also only fair to mention El Diablo, a character that also
got the Vertigo treatment from writer Brian Azzarello before
DC backed away from that writer's much darker tone. Not
that El Diablo's story ever had much lighthearted in it.
The slightly effete Lazarus Long received a beating from
a gang of cutthroats and thieves that put him into a coma.
However, his sense of justice was so strong that at night
his body would be possessed by a terrible force of vengeance
that called itself El Diablo. Recently, DC reprinted the
first El Diablo story in Weird Secret Origins, which you
can probably still find at your local comics shop.
An unrelated
El Diablo also appeared in the modern-day DCU, even joining
the Justice League for a time. If you can find a run of
that book, by Gerard Jones and Mike Parobeck, it's well
worth seeking out, being slightly ahead of its time in its
depiction of a character ultimately far more interested
in the politics of his home city than in crime fighting.
Ex Machina, anyone?
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