InsaneJournal

Place and time: The Batcave, soon after the events of "Babel." Despite the fact that the JLA functioned just fine for years without Batman's help, several of the remaining Leaguers apparently feel he's essential to the formula (hooray authorial fiat); at any rate, there's some idiocy happening where they've all fractioned into two groups, "yea" voters and "nay" voters, and everyone's being suspicious and stupid and teamwork has fallen apart (and frankly the idea that Diana and J'onn would ever come into conflict over something Batman did is an idiocy I can't quite wrap my brain around, but it's what we're given, so we'll roll with it). So Supes has come to hang out in the 'Cave and beg Batman to fix it.



Ignoring the silly histrionics here, pay careful attention to Clark's words in the second panel. (And how cute is it that Bats thinks he deserves an apology?)

Anyway, Clark spins this story about how the League (sans him, he was elsewhere) went to fight Dr. Destiny, and J'onn split them into teams to try to reconcile their differences and everyone bickered yadda yadda this is all an unimportant out-of-character-for-everyone subplot. Eventually they find Destiny and realize that he's swapped his dream-self for his real-self somehow, and the only way to defeat him is to take the fight to him on the astral plane.





Stuff like this is always cool (allowing for the crappy Top Cow-esque art) for what it says about a character's self-image. This is how they all see themselves in battle; J'onn as a full-on Martian, Wally as a blur, Kyle as the whole Lantern Corps with the world's best set of brass knuckles. And Diana, who sees herself as exactly as she is, except fifteen feet tall. That strikes me as reasonably accurate and entirely appropriate.



So they kick Destiny's butt (Supes calls Diana's plan an "unintentional masterstroke," which is to laugh - like Bats is the only guy on the team with any tactical comprehension whatsoever? I mean I get that she probably didn't anticipate the bonus effect of the dream-world on their teamwork, but still. It's not like she was just chucking darts blindfolded, here).

But that doesn't really make things better.



Insert comment about Supes who wasn't there and Bats who isn't even a member talking about what's wrong with the League and how they're going to deal with it here. Patronizing? Patriarchal? Who, the World's Finest? The devil you say.

Regardless, Bruce catches Clark's drift and calls the whole League into the Batcave, where they look for Bats and discover Bruce.



And also Clark.



Interesting that they're both looking at Diana when Bruce says "That's what you wanted, correct?" (And for that matter, so is Arthur.) I mean, I get that this is a big deal for the boys, but Diana already knew both their IDs and obviously didn't have a problem with them keeping them from the others. That wasn't her complaint with his behavior at all, and I don't see why this should placate her or suddenly renew her trust in him. On the other hand, it does make perfect sense for them to appeal to her as the team's default leader here - if she buys in on this gesture, the rest will follow - so while it's odd from her side, it does work from theirs.

Then everyone else hops on the meme.



Look, Diana's friendship with J'onn in evidence! It's always so subtle, but it's there, people, and strong. I maintain they got badly cheated in FC: Requiem. (Also neat: that Diana knows everybody's secrets. She doesn't have Clark's x-ray vision or Bruce's detective skills, but she doesn't need them; people tell her the truth.)

Then Batman shows up.



Things get wierd fast after that.



Through use of the lasso and some fancy telepathy tricks, the League ascertains that everybody is legit. Mysteriously, the whole JLA has been split into two; their secret IDs and hero IDs are now separate people. Further, Clark Kent and John Jones are human; Eel O'Brian can't morph; Wally West has no speed.

It's all very strange, but for the time being, they decide to send all the alter egos back home to their normal lives while the heroes keep heroing and try to figure out what's wrong.

Meanwhile, similarly weird things are happening all over the world.



The League gets called in to respond to some weird happenings in Washington.



I am all about Supes getting randomly teleported to Saturn, but it's kind of annoying when you consider the science of it. He's not supposed to be faster than Wally, and Wally's not supposed to be faster than light (or at least not without becoming part of the Speed Force), and in that case it should take Supes at least an hour and change to get back to Earth. But he shows up again right away, which means he's flying superluminal, which means he's faster than Wally. Considering that's all Wally has while Clark also gets to be strong enough to pull the moon out of orbit and sturdy enough to fly through the sun, that doesn't really seem just.

Anyway, they bring down the homeless dude.





Diana, it should be noted, has been somewhat skeptical of the heroes' behavior since this started. I can't say I blame her, since here they are going all Justice Lords on her and it hasn't even been two days since the split.

Things get worse pretty quickly, too. Lantern seems to forget how to use his ring as anything but a literal weapon, while Kyle flips out and obsessively draws, everywhere, on every flat surface he can find (although it does make his room look really cool). Plas becomes more and more useless comic relief, while Eel is fighting criminal impulses. Bruce is steadily becoming an angry psycho. And John Jones gets in a car crash.



John begs Arthur to let him stay John, stay separate, when the League finds a way to fix everything. Clark, too, seems satisfied with his new lot.



Good of her to check on her friend Clark. Shame she didn't stop by Kyle's place, although I give her some leeway here. This may be her first stop, and she can't exactly sonic boom into Kyle's neighborhood in full uniform without raising suspicion.

(Diana's "good hands" also seems a little optimistic, considering, but in her defense, she wasn't there for the green goo fight where her team went *really* off the rails).

Huh. Time for an explanation for all this, doncha think? Okay then. Introducing: the freaky 6-D bug guys.



See the little kid on the big cube face in the second panel? He's this kid:



This is the signal alert that Diana was recieving. We're looking at Metamorpho's son Joey, here - the arguing family he speaks of are his mother Sapphire and his grandfather Simon Stagg who, to be quite frank, could not stop arguing about Metamorpho if the sky fell, regardless of what Rex himself is or is not doing. However, in this instance, they are ostensibly arguing because, at this point in continuity, Metamorpho is dead. (Sort of.)



Hey, the bug guys are here! And know what the hell is going on! To save you the headache of trying to parse their speech bubbles, I will summarize the next couple pages of exposition for you. It seems that they created what they call "Id," a runaway "sentient energy" from the sixth dimension that, when brought to our dimension, has the ability to grant desires and wishes. So when Joey wished for his dad back, freaky Metamorpho showed up. Operative word "back," not "alive." The bugs then tell the League to give them a couple minutes to get into the kid's head and fix things.

I bet you can all guess what happened to the League now. Nice one, Supes.

The League holds off Metamorpho for a couple pages, and the bugs manage to access the part of Id that's lingering in Joey's brain and reverse the wish.



Y'know, it'd be a good moment no matter who said it, but coming from Diana, who doesn't lie, that line becomes about a hundred times more powerful.

Anyway, the 6-D bugs explain that they're trying to recapture the Id and recruit the JLA to help them.

Also, Supes, impressively, manages to strike upon a design that looks even dippier than his normal suit.



Kal, honey. Of all the kryptonian motifs you could have incorporated, you had to pick the ruffles? Really, big guy? Really?

Elsewhere, John Jones is playing with matches, and Eel O'Brian comes to talk to him in one of the best Plas scenes on record.





That had nothing to do with Diana, but it was too good not to post regardless. The point is basically that Eel is hardcore, and knows this needs fixing, and so he starts rounding up all the other alter egos and strongarming them into playing along. He starts with Bruce, who just flipped out and beat some thugs bloody before Eel pistol-whipped him.



I don't know how much I buy this read on Bats, but I suppose it's an interesting concept.

So Eel gets the whole gang together, and they charge off to the scene of another wish-gone-bad, where the League and the 6-D bug dudes are trying to get Id under control (with fair success).





Oh NOES, a 6-D doublecross!

Fortunately the alter egos show up right about then. Eel gets the bright idea to grab the little thinking band the bugs were using to fix people's heads before and put it on Supes, since it was his wish in the first place.





The half-merged identities go to war with each other, unable to accomplish anything. Arthur talks J'onn and John into getting over it, though, for the good of everyone, and they wade into the lasso-bound Id in an attempt to reason with it (remember, it's sentient). The bugs get pissed by this and zap J'onn/John, then split Arthur.





Is it just me who finds it equally badass and hilarious the way Diana just saved Arthur?



What is Diana's dichotomy? Where is the split, the contradiction in her nature?

(Don't worry if you can't read the bugs' word-bubbles here, they really aren't important.)


She's a mortal, a simple woman made of dust and returned to dust like any other. And she's Truth, so elemental that she was once its goddess.





Boo-ya.

Then J'onn sets up a mindlink and they beat the bad guys.



So this whole story sort of exemplifies, for me, why Diana's such a good fit for the Justice League. Yes, she's one of the most powerful heroes on the planet, both as a matter of raw scale and in terms of tactics and battle prowess, but it's more than that, and maybe not even primarily that. It's that she's fundamentally a team player, and that she makes the team a better team by being there. When they fight with each other, she calms them; when they're acting weird, she picks up on it first; when they're incapable of acting as a unit, of agreeing even with themselves, she puts them back on the right track. She makes it easier for the rest of them to do what they have to, and she pulls her own weight as an individual. Of the others, only J'onn is as aware of and as beneficial to the cohesion of the group. (Which is no small part of why I think it's incredibly stupid to have the two of them, of all people, who've respected and trusted each other since years before Bats came into the picture and who are the most conscious of unity, the least judgemental*, the least upset, and the least prone to projection, to be at odds over Bats leaving, but again, whatever.)

* Usually. Not counting J'onn's periodic "humans suck, you're all hateful bastards and I don't know why I even bother with the lot of you assholes" cycles.

It's worth noting that this is not the first time Wondy's clay/spirit nature, combined with fundamental awesomeness, saves the entire JLA; and in fact of the two stories I can think off offhand (the other being Primeval), this one isn't even my favorite. She's written better in Primeval, too, without the burden of the "Babel" stuff hanging over the League. But as a Wondy spotlight, "Id" gives her more throughout - and since part of my goal with this series is to show as many different facets of Diana's character as possible, I couldn't leave out the Metamorpho lie. That always sticks with me as one of Diana's defining moments - it hits on her compassion, her decency, her honesty, and the burden she's willing to shoulder all in two tiny syllables. It even gives me chills sometimes.

All scans from JLA v3, #50-54, collected in "JLA: Divided we Fall."