FORTRESS OF BAILEYTUDE

Welcome to the fourth day of Justice Society of America Week here at the Fortress of Baileytude.  Today I wanted to reveal the person I consider to be the Justice Society artist.  There have been a lot of great artists that have worked on the JSA over the years.  I talked about Mike Parobeck two days ago.  There’s also George Perez, who drew the team in numerous JLA/JSA crossovers.  More recently Leonard Kirk did a bang up job drawing the team and I liked what Dale Eaglesham did with the group.  And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the Golden and Silver Age artists that worked on the JSA.  They are all talented artists, but there is one guy that does it best.

Jerry Ordway.

Jerry Ordway or at least his art and I go way back.  In 1987 I started buying the Superman titles full time and Jerry¹ was drawing Adventures of Superman.  I’m somewhat ashamed to admit this but I didn’t care for his work at first.  I have gone on and on about this on From Crisis to Crisis² but I think it bears repeating here.  I was young and foolish.  Several years later I came to really like Ordway’s art in general and he quickly became one of my favorite Superman artists.

In late 1994 I bought a handful of All-Star Squadron back issues from a thirty cent bin and really got into the team.  I was fairly excited to find out that Jerry Ordway drew some of the issues I had picked up  It was some of his earliest DC work and there was something about the way he drew the Golden Age DC characters that really brought them to life for me.  Ordway has such a classic style and that style fit perfectly with the era that the All-Star Squadron took place in.  The characters and the setting looked just…awesome.  I really can’t find the words to properly articulate how the work made me feel.  Something in me just…responded to it.

Thanks to All-Star Squadron I got the bug to check out Infinity, Inc. Shortly after moving to Georgia in late 1995 I managed to snag the first ten issues of that series for a song and it was here that Ordway was forever cemented as my favorite Justice Society artist.

Infinity, Inc. was a different animal than All-Star Squadron.  Squadron was set in the Golden Age of DC Comics.  It was a period piece whereas Infinity was set very much in the then present.  These were the adventures of the sons and daughters of the Justice Society and while Ordway’s Squadron work was always top notch there was something truly special about his run on Infinity, Inc.

To my mind I think the work had a little more umph because Ordway helped create most of Infinity, Inc‘s cast of characters. Power Girl and Huntress were part of the team’s initial adventure and the Star-Spangled Kid stuck around  for the rest of the series until his unfortunate end but other than that these were characters that Jerry created the visual look for.  While some of the characters were very eighties³ others had that classic look that I was going on about earlier.  Obsidian in particular looked as though he could have existed in just about any era.  The same thing with Fury⁴.

Even though they weren’t a huge part of the book beyond the first story arc Ordway did some neat things with the Justice Society as well.  They looked older but not ancient.  A lot of comic book artists tend to over do it when it comes to drawing an older character.  In the case of Ordway he allowed the characters to retain their classic looks while at the same time showing that it wasn’t the Golden Age anymore.  In most cases the art was very subtle and it was neat to see the differences between how Ordway drew certain characters in the past and then in the present.

I think the greatest testament to Ordway’s legacy with the Justice Society is that in the past few years if there was a story that took place on Earth-2 or dealt with the Golden Age characters on a high profile book Ordway was tapped to do the art.  I don’t think that the fight between the current Superman and the Superman of Earth-2 would have had as much impact with me if Ordway hadn’t done the art for that scene in Infinite Crisis.  It was the same with Justice Society of America Annual #1 from 2008.  The setting was Earth-2 so Ordway was given the job.  Sure it wasn’t the “real” Earth-2.  That ceased to exist in Crisis on Infinite Earths, but it was close enough that it wouldn’t have felt right to me if Ordway hadn’t drawn the book.

I could go on for hours but this post is running a bit long as it is.  Frankly I could devote a whole blog to Ordway’s work with DC’s Golden Age characters but with all of the stuff I am involved with now and the project that is in the planning stages at the moment I don’t have the time.  For the moment I have to settle for devoting a day of Justice Society of America Week to Ordway and his art.

To quote another Ordway co-creation, “He’s my fav’rit.”

Gotta love Bibbo.

No seriously.  You have to love Bibbo.  If you don’t…well, I just don’t know how you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning.

Well that’s it for today.  Tomorrow; the dramatic conclusion with the answer to one simple question.

Why do I like the Justice Society so much?

More to follow…

Fortress Footnotes