Thursday, February 12, 2015

Crossover Covers: Justice, Inc.

The Shadow, Doc Savage, and the newly-minted Avenger battle Rodil Mocquino and John Sunlight, who seek to master time itself. In #3, Doc says that one of his ancestors was a Vandal. The implication of this statement is that Doc is descended from the immortal DC Comics supervillain Vandal Savage. The Shadow compares the death of Richard Benson’s wife and daughter to “that murder case last May…only there the child survived while the parents were slain.” The child is Bruce Wayne, later known as the Batman. In #5, John Sunlight has two-way wrist radios, which were stolen from “those detectives I killed last month,” a reference to Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem. Michael Uslan’s annotations in the back of the issue indicate that Sunlight only thought he killed Tracy and Catchem. In #6, a Nazi agent named Kruger appears. This is meant to be Heinz Kruger, the Nazi agent who killed Dr. Reinstein, the creator of the Super-Soldier Serum that empowered Captain America. This series offers a completely different take on the circumstances of the Avenger’s origin than Paul Ernst’s original pulp novel Justice, Inc. A time-traveling Doc Savage from the 21st century appears; this is meant to be the version of Doc seen in Dynamite’s Doc Savage miniseries. However, that series is incompatible with the details of Doc’s later life given in Philip José Farmer and Win Scott Eckert’s The Evil in Pemberley House. Also, Bruce Wayne’s parents died in 1929 in the CU, not 1938. Therefore, this series must take place in an alternate universe.


6 comments:

  1. On the Shadow Fan Podcast, Michael Uslan mentions he started plotting this story which involves a disappearing plane right before Malaysian Flight 370 disappeared.

    http://theshadowfan.libsyn.com/justice-inc-begins

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  2. Regarding Vandal Savage, is he in the CU? The Star Trek/Legion of Superheroes crossover established that Vandal Savage is the same man as Star Trek's Flint, but is Flint in the CU?

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  3. Given that Star Trek is firmly in the CU, Flint is too. Therefore, Flint is Vandal Savage's CU counterpart, as established in the Trek/Legion crossover.

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  4. Justice Inc's also a sequel to Uslan's Shadow/Green Hornet crossover (Doc indicates its events happened the prior month), so I do find it a little weird that Detective Comics #27 exists (as established in both Shadow/GH and Justice Inc) while Bruce Wayne's parents were killed the prior May.

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  5. And the Shadow/Hornet crossover has a panel showing the offices that surround the B. Jonas office, including one whose door reads Justice, Inc., which judging by the sequel wouldn't exist yet!

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  6. That's right! There was also a Benson Industries door in the same panel too. Maybe Benson got the idea for the name from there? But then his company's named Hallibenson in the Justice Inc miniseries.

    Also I reread the Justice Inc miniseries; in the annotations for #3 Uslan says about the reference to the murder of the Waynes, "Read more in 'The Gotham Times' about this famous murder case first reported in May 1939." So I'm led to believe he intended it to be 1939 instead of 1938, and that the Shadow/Green Hornet crossover took place in May 1939.

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