The Teasdale Imperative: Part Two: Teasdale Unbound!
JLA (volume 1) #32
Cover Date: November 1989
Released: 12th September 1989
- Writers: Keith Giffen / J.M. DeMatteis
- Pencilers: Adam Hughes
- Inker: Art Nichols
- Colourists: Gene D’Angelo
- Letterer: Bob Lappan
- Editors: Andrew Helfer / Kevin Dooley
Continued from JLE #7.
Even though this is 1) A JSA issue and b) An origin story of the eponymous Dr Teasdale, we actual get a fair amount of Pee Gee actions.
First let’s get the boring plot stuff out of the way, Teasdale is creating these “vampire” with a disease that he created on behalf of Stagg industries the evil industrialist (obviously an oxymoron) that tangles often with Metamorpho. His entire vampire horde is to gain revenge on said industrialist, who’s kindly offered his aid to the JLA/JLE whilst withholding information about why Teasdale wants his revenge. Teasdale in his flashback has no such reluctance telling us the audience that Stagg planned to betrayed him, going to kill him after developing his zombie (even the comic isn’t pretending at this point) virus to control the populous.
Meanwhile Spectre and Dr Light are in the astral plane discussion how the Gray man tricked the Spectre in doing his bidding, and Spectre being Spectre vows his revenge… !
Right onto the lovely Pee Gee stuff! The League is on the backfoot through most of the issue not quite knowing how to deal with the infestation, and not wanting to harm the innocents. If there’s one criticism I’ll bring up again and again on Giffen / J.M. DeMatteis run, which don’t get me wrong I love, is that the heroes so rarely seem to doing anything really heroic.
Anyway we start with a one two punch, of first J’onn saying that’s looks can be deceiving, for Captain Atom calling him out for using cliche’s, only for Pee Gee to turn the tables and say the same to Captain Atom when he say’s he has a bad feeling about this! And to add I just love this image, the whole composition just tickles me for some reason.
We then get a page or so of the team flailing around aimlessly, with some cool panels of Pee Gee flying around, though somehow both she and Captain Atom missed the canister that could have stopped all this, but still not really doing nothing! (see above).
After a half page of Pee Gee destroying military hardware so it doesn’t fall into enemy hands, though its more implied that show, because we’re juggling a lot of characters here, the team withdraw to a safe distance. And to be fair this comic deftly juggled two whole teams giving most something to do or say that if not vital to the plot give flavour to things going down.
Before we get Stagg turn up and the plot move forward we get one last scene with Pee Gee, and this time Mister Miracle. He seems to be dealing badly with the whole situation, not wanting to be here at all and rather at home with Barda (which to be honest I can’t blame him). Blundering into this is Pee Gee who asks if he could rustle up some kind of Kirby tech to help the innocents, having read her files because remember she’s actually really, really smart. Which is weird because she then blunders and said he’s from Apokolips, when from the files she should have know he was raised on New Genesis.
This is a classic middling comic, it’s designed to move the plot forward, filling in the background of Teasdale and showing the threat needed to be dealt with, and attack on Stagg and on of his facility. I have to be honest if I wasn’t doing this I’d skim it and go on to the next issue, a flyover comic if you will. However the character moments, a good showing from Pee Gee here as a bonus, raise the issue to the point I gain more from it than I would normally.