Every week, we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer while still acknowledging that the abandoned story DID still happen. Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of Abandoned Love. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.
This time around, we look at how Grant Morrison cleared the previous Justice League America out of the way for his JLA...
When Gerard Jones' Justice League America ended with #113 (drawn by Chuck Wotjkiewicz, Will Blyberg and Prentis Rollins), the team of heroes (a hodge podge of established heroes like Wonder Woman, Hawkman, Flash, Power Girl and Green Lantern and less well-known heroes like Nuklon, Obsidian and Ice Maiden) were still together on a team...
The Mark Waid/Fabian Nicieza mini-series Midsummers Nightmare (with art by Darick Robertson and Hannibal Rodriguez) explains how seven disparate superheroes joined together as the only heroes on Earth who realized that they were under a spell...
Okay, so that explains why these heroes want to become the Justice League. But what about the heroes ALREADY calling themselves the Justice League?
Morrison had to take them off the deck in JLA #1 (honestly, they really should have disbanded the previous team in the last issue of Justice League America. Making Morrison do it seems kind of odd). His solution is to have them already leaving their spaceship headquarters to let the new JLA move in (JLA #1 was drawn by Howard Porter and John Dell)...
And then, just to make sure they're REALLY out of the way, the Hyper Clan show up and blow up their headquarters, with only Metamorpho's valiant sacrifice saving them...
And that was it for the old Justice League.
I suppose some folks took issue with the fact that Morrison didn't really EXPLAIN why the old League had to leave. So he then wrote Justice League Secret Files #1 with Mark Millar (commenter Travis Pelkie theorizes that Millar likely wrote the story pretty much by himself, which could be true. I dunno), which shows the time right before the new League is formed and explains what happens to the old League, but only in the most basic way possible (Porter and Dell drew this story, as well)...
Really, as you can see, someone else really should have just disbanded the previous League instead of leaving it to Morrison, as he clearly did not want to bother himself with the previous League.