Forgive me for mixing companies here, but as Uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” As we’ve seen, time and time again, Superman’s power is unrivaled. Even Doomsday, once powerful enough to “kill” Superman, has been reduced to another of Superman’s personal punching bags. So what should Supes do with all this power? Should he use it to defend the Metropolis, Kansas, The earth, and the Universe? Or should he ally himself with half a dozen other heroes whose powers are now being wasted? The choice seems obvious to me.
That being said, let’s take a look at the other members of the Justice League. We have the Martian Manhunter, who is basically Superman, with a much more common weakness. I suspect Martian Manhunter hasnt Aquaman, super strong, talks to fish, you know this guy. We’ve seen that the Flash is faster than Superman, but he is constantly wasted on crowd control and disarming military forces. Green Lantern, the power of the human mind in the force of a small green ring. Green Lantern has other duties, but seems to spend all his time on earth helping the League, however, there are 4…no wait, 5 Green Lanterns from Earth, so they can share their responsibilities. Wonder Woman is also on the team, if you stripped Superman down to his core powers and gave him breasts you would have Wonder Woman. (But at least she’s better than the Wasp). Finally Batman, who is barely on the team to begin with. I’m going to go ahead and leave Batman out of this, because I don’t plan on getting beaten about the head and neck by fan-boys.
So, the problem we run into is that Superman, a veritable Swiss-army knife of super powers, is just in the way. Most Justice League encounters devolve into Superman handing out busywork and then going to punch somebody into submission. This is not the best recipe for compelling stories.
Ideally, the Justice League should be composed of heroes who need to work together and can feed off each others’ strengths while covering their weaknesses. I’m not suggesting we use Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, because we’ve seen that fail in the past, but I am suggesting a more power-diverse team. Its not necessary to have Superman team up with anyone, but if DC decides that they want or need it to happen to sell comics, then I suggest the Trinity style team that they ran in 2008.
I encourage you to leave your JLA dream team in the comments section, and to visit my blog at checkmatecomics.wordpress.com, mostly for links back to here.
Justice League and Superman and all that are trademarks of DC Comics, while Uncle Ben belongs to Marvel