And yet, playing off Batman against Green Lantern, each as foil, then counter-foil to the other, seemed to make no sense.

In a very direct sense, Batman demanded to be confronted by any writer of any Justice League book. Last August’s release of Justice League #1 seemed the right kind of move on Geoff’s part. It only made sense then, for Geoff Johns, DC’s Chief Creative Officer and writer at the helm of the newest Justice League book, to tackle the problem directly and shift the focus of the first issue to Batman. Even after Grant, with Mark Waid’s Tower of Babel and later with Joe Kelly’s Obsidian Age and Dwayne McDuffie’s landmark Lightning Saga, we continued to see the real problem Batman presented. He was Mister Spock and Bruce Lee and Sherlock Holmes all rolled into one. The real problem with the League was that the superheroes with “real” powers dulled their resilience by relying on those powers far too much. Batman was singularly capable, it was his capacity for self-discipline and his tactical assessment of every situation that made him superhuman. And when their ruse was finally uncovered, and when Superman and Wonder Woman each fought a single White Martian to a standstill, it was Batman who singlehandedly defeated four.

It was Batman who first uncovered the secret that these aliens were in fact White Martians. In the opening arc, “New World Order”, it was Batman who first realized that the media-friendly group of intergalactic troubadour-superheroes was in fact attempting a planetary-scale brainwash. It wasn’t until Grant Morrison’s handling of the League in the seminal JLA, that we began to realize the real problem wasn’t Superman at all, but Batman. And what could keep him in check save the incredibly rare shards of Kryptonite? The art of the Justice League always lay in creating villains that were large enough to push the other members to their limits. He bend steel beams, dodge bullets (but he doesn’t need to), shoot heat-vision bolts from his eyes, fly, give a locomotive a run for its money, the list is seemingly endless. Justice League International simply wrote Superman out of the League, as did the book Wonder Woman. Were the original creators of the very first Justice League scared of Superman? Decades later with Justice League International, the Justice League incarnation that spanned the 80s-90s and loosely chronicled the emerging post-Soviet world, the creators certainly appeared to be.

Geoff johns batman