Justice League America #67-68 (October-November 1992)
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Justice League America #67-68 (October-November 1992)
Superman and the JLA versus the Earth's legal owner, a weird four-armed alien named Chaq who… who… listen, man, I just wanna get to Doomsday. Why are you doing this to me?
In Justice League America #67 (which Superman doesn't appear in), the League is called down to a NASA base because they lost a spaceship or whatever. I don't care. I just wanna get to Doomsday. Anyway, while investigating what happened to the missing astronauts, the gang goes into a giant spaceship and they end up getting captured themselves. In JLA #68, Superman finally bothers to show up to help another set of Leaguesters find their kidnapped friends. That's when they meet Chaq (read: NOT DOOMSDAY), who claims he bought the Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, so now we're literally all his.
Unfortunately, Maxima confirms that Chaq's documents are in order: he legally owns the Earth, and if the JLA tries to keep him away from his property, some powerful cosmic authorities will come to destroy us (or, at the very least, give us a heavy fine). Superman is like "Let's punch aliens until this problem solves itself!" but Maxima has another idea – she telepathically instructs Guy Gardner to create some fake space money with his Yellow Lantern ring so they can "buy" the Earth from Chaq, and the big dope totally falls for it. Chaq gets back on his ship for another 100,000 year trip, and by the time he realizes he got scammed and gets back, we'll all be long dead.
The only problem now (besides the fact that Doomsday isn't in this issue, where's Doomsday) is that Chaq gave the Earth's deed to Guy, so now HE'S the rightful owner of the entire planet! Uh-oh! Looking forward to the wacky 10-part storyline in which Superman and the League must figure out a clever way to–
Or, they could just do that.
Who The Heck Is Bloodwynd-Watch:
Bloodwynd guesses what the problem is at NASA before the guy in charge there can even tell the League about it, leading him to ask if Bloody is "a mind reader or something." OK, if you haven't guessed who Bloodwynd is by now, you've never read a DC comic before.
Romance-Watch:
Maxima is strangely apathetic to Superman in these issues (maybe she's still upset that he dared to acknowledge Wonder Woman in front of her), while Ice has a moment of self-awareness:
She then wonders, in perfectly Jane Austen fashion, how come he "hasn't taken any interest in me despite my [obvious as hell] feelings for him." It's like the guy is engaged to another woman or something.
Plotline-Watch:
A running plot in these two issues is the fact that Superman has refused to carry a JLA communicator so far, but the fact that some of his teammates got abducted and no one could locate him finally convinces him to accept one. I'm sure he'll get to use it in many missions after this!
This storyline is notable because it was (I'm pretty sure) the last comedic JLA story in this series, which was 99% jokes at one point. Besides the obvious absurdity of the Earth-owning alien, there's a subplot about Booster Gold tricking Fire into posing for an erotic calendar, and a scene where Booster and Blue Beetle pretend to get into a teleporter mishap while visiting the Justice League Europe headquarters:
(The JLE return them to America tied up to each other and in their underpants, if you were wondering.)
I think that's an appropriate send-off for this era of the League, since there won't be a whole lot of room for levity after the events of next issue, which reminds me that I've now typed enough words in this entry and WE CAN GET TO DOOMSDAY NOW OMG.