Since Tim unknowingly started this Tuesday Ten thing off last week with his rundown of the ten lamest Avengers ever (a pretty impressive list, I must say), I thought it was only fair to follow it up by picking through the detritus of DC's premier super-team, the Justice League. Some of the Leaguers below were part of some of the various Justice League offshoots, (Justice League Task Force, Extreme snicker Justice), but all can fairly be considered members of the Justice League... even if they weren't members for very long.
I'm upping the degree of difficulty just a bit with this list by not allowing myself to include Vibe, who would honestly have to be the worst Leaguer ever. By several orders of magnitude. I'm also not considerding those characters who were played purely for laughs during the Giffen/DeMatteis years (G'nort, Justice League Antarctica) -- the entire point of those characters was their awfulness. So think of this list as "The Ten Worst Justice Leaguers Not Named Vibe And Not Purposely Ridiculous."
(All images below graciously ganked from Ze Ball Breaker Micro-Heroes Site. Go poke around... it's easy to lose hours looking at all the bizarre stuff there.)
Bloodwynd. Much like "Ten Worst Avengers" desginee Deathcry, Bloodwynd's suckitude starts with the grotesque mid-90's name, but surely doesn't end there. Turns out at first Bloodwynd was a mind-controlled Martian Manhunter in disguise, and then we found out that there was a real Bloodwynd who the Manhunter had been mimicking. That Bloodwynd was some sort of necromancer who wouldn't deign actually to do anything for the League on the grounds that he didn't want to disturb the natural order of things. Good thing the "natural order of things" for Bloodwynd was to quickly fade into obscurity. (I'll admit that I kinda dug his costume, though.)
Blue Jay. Is there any chance whatsoever that the name "Blue Jay" ever inspired fear into the hearts of any criminals anywhere? At least the Marvel hero of whom he was an analogue, Yellowjacket, had a name which could terrify bad guys allergic to bee stings. (C'mon... Blue Jay?)
Doctor Fate (Linda Strauss). This version of Doctor Fate makes the list thanks largely to the brevity of her run with the League which, if I'm remembering correctly, consisted almost entirely of the cover of Justice League America #31. I think Giffen and DeMatteis planned to keep her around longer, but events in her own book -- like her death -- scuttled those plans.
Geo-Force. I'm sorry, Brad Meltzer: he's not cool. Horrendous name, worse costume, not even a hundredth as interesting as his late half-sister, the original Terra. Also, I'm pretty sure that he's added absolutely nothing to Meltzer's run on the book, though we still have an issue left, so maybe he'll, y'know, do something seriously amazing then.
L-Ron/Despero. I liked L-Ron, the little robot who served as Maxwell Lord's majordomo during the Giffen/DeMatteis era -- he brought a welcome sense of snarky humor to the book (as opposed to the ridiculous humor most of the other characters brought). I like Despero as a villain for the JLA -- his brutal attack on that same League (featuring the supposed death of Mr. Miracle) was a highlight of the Giffen/DeMatteis run. Putting L-Ron's consciousness in Despero's body and making him a full League member? With a big gun? Seriously, who thought that was a good idea?
Mystek. Perhaps the character herself wasn't lame, or wouldn't have been if she'd been given the opportunity to develop, but she was knocked off almost as soon as she joined up with the Justice League Task Force. Writer Christopher Priest had intended her to be a creator-owned character starring in her own mini-series and had put her in JLTF to build some buzz for her. But DC nixed that mini-series, so Priest nixed Mystek.
Plastic Man. Yeah, you read me right. Plas always felt like an incongruous presence in the League and I never quite understood his continued membership past Morrison's "Godly Legion of Leaguers" roster -- it became "The Big Seven, Oh And Also By The Way Plastic Man." If I had to have a stretchy hero in the JLA, I'd much have preferred Elongated Man, who could bring the funny and had more depth to his character. Guess that's not happening anytime soon, though, is it?
Triumph. DC's version of Marvel's Sentry, but before Marvel got around to creating the Sentry. Triumph, apparently, was one of the original founders of the Justice League, but was removed from the timestream and erased from the memories of everyone everywhere. When he "came back" into the modern DCU, he was, frankly, an asshole. Theoretically, his assholishness was justified, since no one even remembered he'd ever existed -- I'm sure that would have hacked me off pretty good, too -- but it sure made for an unlikable character. In a vaguely ironic final twist on the "no one remembers Triumph" bit, a turned-into-glass-by-the-Spectre Triumph was still in the JLA Watchtower when Grant Morrison destroyed it, presumably destroying Triumph as well... not that anyone, including Morrison, seemed to remember. Or care.
Zan and Jayna, The Wonder Twins. The friggin' Wonder Twins?! In a book called Extreme Justice? Wow, this idea positively reeked of eau du nineties, didn't it? (Dr. Olsen's Fun Science Fact: That feeling in your brain you're getting while trying to reconcile "Wonder Twins" and "Extreme Justice"? That's what we like to call cognitive dissonance.)
Hmmmm... a full half of the entrants on this list come from Extreme Justice, and I can promise you that wasn't intentional. I guess it just shows that Chris Sims (as usual) was right: Extreme Justice might very well have been the worst series DC ever published.
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