The Justice League has had an impressive roster of heroes throughout the years, but there are times when even the likes of Superman have to call in some extra help. While DC’s premier super-team may include the most powerful beings in existence, some threats are too big even for them to handle alone. Some threats require the League to open up their roster, like the one time they drafted the entire population of planet Earth to join the team.
The Justice League hasn’t always boasted such an impressive line-up. There was a time in the early ’90s when the team was made up of a bunch of lesser-known heroes like Nuklon and Bloodwynd. All of that changed in 1997 with the arrival of JLA, Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s bold revamp of the team. For the first time in decades, the Justice League was restored to the “Big Seven”: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Flash, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter. Morrison also quickly established the types of threats the League would routinely face—over the course of their run, the Justice League had to deal with a White Martian invasion, the armies of Heaven and Hell and reality-warping djinn from the 5th Dimension. Yet there was one threat above all the others, set up right from the beginning and hinted at throughout Morrison and Porter’s entire run.
The Justice League’s ultimate challenge is Mageddon, an ancient war machine used by the Old Gods in the time before Darkseid ruled Apokalips. Placed in a gravity sinkhole at the edge of the universe, Mageddon eventually breaks free and embarks on a direct collision course with Earth. The world-ending weapon arrives in Morrison and Porter’s final storyline, “World War III,” running in JLA #36-41. The Justice League quickly find themselves overwhelmed, as part of Mageddon’s tactics involve increasing the aggression of a planet so that a population will eventually wipe themselves out. As supervillains run amok and wars break out everywhere, the League opens its doors to every hero in the DCU. It’s still not enough, however, as a Mageddon-controlled Lex Luthor and a new Injustice Gang successfully infiltrate the League and destroy the Watchtower on the Moon.
Just as everything seems lost, the Justice League puts together a last ditch effort of mind-boggling proportions. With the help of a god-like being known as the Glimmer, the League unleashes a powerful wave of energy to activate the dormant metahuman gene in every human on the planet, bypassing thousands of years of evolution in the blink of an eye. Faced against the cosmic horror of Mageddon, the newly super-powered population of Earth is drafted into the League as reserve members. In a jaw-dropping double-page spread from artist Howard Porter, some six billion super-humans enter Earth’s orbit to help the Justice League save the world.
It’s an idea that is completely ridiculous, yet entirely in keeping with Morrison’s modern updates of Silver Age sensibilities. In the writer’s approach to superheroes, stories must have the playfulness found in those old comics—gleefully throwing all notions of “realism” to the side in favor of pure imagination. Consider one of their final JLA story’s most powerful moments, where Barbara Gordon aka Oracle gains superpowers with the rest of Earth’s population and lifts herself up from her wheelchair. In Morrison and Porter’s hands, the scene becomes the ultimate triumph of Silver Age imagination over Dark Age deconstructionism. Drafting the entire population of Earth into the Justice League is the epitome of Grant Morrison’s entire thesis on the power of imagination.
