583

See my note on it in my blog:

http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/04/booknote-jla-divided-we-fall.html ( )

I grabbed this at the Library sale, because, hey, it's been years since I could buy a comic book for 75¢. It reprints JLA issues 47 through 54. The writing is good, the art is mostly excellent. My one complaint is that it starts in the middle of a story without any summary of what had gone on before. As near as I can figure, right before these tales, the Justice League discovered that Batman had devised plans to capture and/or disable each member in the event that they turned to the dark side or some such. They discovered this because one of Batman's enemies, Ra's al Ghul, managed to get ahold of this data and put the fail-safe plans into action. This honked everybody off and the result was that Batman was voted out of the League, 4 to 3. The result is that you have a divided league who are not only in disagreement over whether Batman should have been axed, but also are starting to wonder what dark secrets their other teammates might be harboring. It makes for some ineffective crime fighting across multiple dimensions. Anyway, that's a long winded explanation of the overall scenario. If you want details, you'll just have to check it out for yourself.
--J. ( )

A collection of JLA stories marred by overly convoluted plotting, but with a fascinating premise: Batman has been expelled from the League for secretly planning ways to defeat each member without their knowledge (a safeguard against going rogue). To win back their trust, Batman (and Superman) reveal their secret identities to the rest of the team. However, their "ids" have been separated into two parts, the heroes and the normal humans they pose as, with illuminating consequences. Too bad such an interesting bit of super-hero psychology is marred by overly complicating the bad guys. I'm still not sure I followed all the storylines. ( )