Geoff Johns to do Justice Society Episode on Smallville!

Maybe they can "borrow" Marvel's Disco Dazzler...

 

Nah, they're saving her for WOLVERINE: THE DISCO YEARS.

 

Wasn't there one interpretation where the JSA fell into a time trap / black hole in the 50s and just now came out of it?

 

In Post-Crisis continuity, the story "Flash of Two Worlds" had Barry Allen vibrate into Keystone City, which had been knocked out of sync with the world. Keystone vanished on Earth, and was moved to another dimensional plane where time moved slower.

Something like this could be adapted. Villains attack the JSA during a meeting, throwing the entire city out of sync with the world. Maybe time passes half as fast, the fifty plus years they are gone only become 25.

Perhaps a surviving unpowered member travels to Metropolis after hearing of the Blur, looking for help in finding his missing team mates.

 

^That is just way too complicated an approach for Smallville to take. Remember, the majority of the show's viewers are not comics fans. The JSA needs to be presented in a way that's straightforward and accessible to new viewers. When adapting comics for a new audience, it's a very, very bad idea to keep all the insanely convoluted retcons and rationalizations that have been accreted onto the comics characters over the decades. Better to strip things down to the essentials.

 

I would imagine they would be heroes from the 1960s-1980s(depending on the age of the actors they use). They here about the Red Blue Blur and go to mentor him and maybe Ollie into becoming real heroes.

 

The Legion episode was one of the best written and worst directed/acted episodes of Smallville I've seen. Hopefully they will use a better director for Justice.

 

I agree that you don't want to bog SMALLVILLE down with decades of convoluted DC continuity and Crises, but I don't think the basic idea of Earth-2 requires too much explication. "We're from a parallel Earth . . . ."

That's a pretty standard sf-tv cliche. It shouldn't confuse non-comics fans.

 

A parallel Earth is a possibility, true. I just think it's unreasonable to expect the kind of convolutions the comics have employed to justify having WWII-era heroes be active in the present day. When starting from scratch, it makes more sense to make the JSA more recent -- or even contemporary in a parallel world.

 

How about a parallel earth where time moves slower and for them WWII just ended and they accidentally crossover to Small-Earth?

 

^Again, why bother? Why does WWII need to be brought in at all? The only reason is that it's what the original comics did and therefore the modern comics that pretend to be in the same continuity need to rationalize the time discrepancy. But for a new story in a separate continuity, there's no reason to associate the JSA with WWII. Especially given that we're talking about Smallville, a CW show aimed at young-adult viewers. For this show's target audience, WWII is ancient history. If the show's version of the JSA was associated with any war, it'll probably be Vietnam. But I don't see any need to tie them in to a particular wartime era at all.

 

I've only read a few JSA comics but I've always associated them with WWII. To me that's what defines them. To put them in a different war would just feel wrong to me. Nothing tops WWII. It was the ultimate story of human history. Korea? Vietnam? Gulf War I/II? Just doesn't feel right. But I guess in a CW world where there was no original generation of super-heroes it doesn't really matter... sad.

 

Oh, yeah, I'd ditch the WW II angle, too. That's dated and unnecessary. I'm just saying it might be easier to bring the JSA in from another Earth than to try to retcon an entire previous generation of superheroes into the world of SMALLVILLE. That doesn't mean you have to drag in World World II, Infinite Crises, or any of that stuff. "We're from a parallel Earth where superheroes are a proud tradition . . . ."

Think "Flash of Two Worlds," which was pretty simple story, really, than, say, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS . . .

 

How many of the stories from the actual 30s and 40s dealt with WWII? I doubt that many. I know with Superman it was rare, usually only on the covers. Even Siegel and Shuster's speculative "How Superman Would End the War" was published in LOOK MAGAZINE not any Superman titles. Having the JSA stories heavily involving the War was a retroactive choice to distinguish them from the JLA.

I thought Geoff Johns did a much better job of streamlining and combining the 2 versions of Hawkman in his JLU episodes than he did in the comics. Not surprisingly because for tv he just needed to focus on merging the basic ideas and not worry about reconciling continuity. He may well do the same with the JSA on Smallville.

 

Why tie them to any war? The JSA existed before WWII and after. Only half of their stories took place during WWII and of that half only a few were war related. They weren't like Captain America, where the series and character revolved around the war.