Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #477: Justice Incarnate

Last week, I covered a multiversal version of Marvel’s Masters of Evil.  But DC has its own version of a team composed of members from across their multiverse.

The good news there is this group is for good guys, going by Justice Incarnate, something of an ultimate Justice League.

Actually, Justice Incarnate is kind of a hard group to pin down as they aren’t exactly a group with a steady membership.  They were the end result of Grant Morrison’s event series The Multiversity.  They idea there was there was a framing sequence where some heroes from different Earths went out to deal with a multiversal threat called the Gentry.  The middle issues were basically one-shots set on different Earths, each one with a different feel and tone, all written by Morrison.  Their goal was to set up new playgrounds for future storylines, but the only one that got any traction was the Justice Incarnate team, namely the loose team of heroes that work out of the Bleed, the weird space between dimensions, in their massive headquarters called the Hall of Heroes.  They travel through the multiverse in their special ship the Ultima Thule, a craft made out of frozen music.

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So, that’s the background, and theoretically any hero from any Earth can be a member of this team.  But there are some prominent members from the handful of stories they appear in, namely:

• President Superman, AKA Calvin Ellis, who is both the Superman of Earth-30 and the President of the United States there.
• Captain Carrot from Earth-26, a world of cartoon animals, and he has the powers of cartoon physics on his side.
• Aquawoman from Earth-11, a gender-swapped version of the main DC Earth.
• Thunderer from Earth-7, the lone survivor of his world and since his world is a Marvel Universe stand-in, he’s basically Thor.
• Machinehead from Earth-8, another Marvel knock-off world, basically Iron Man, and he’d betray the team.
• Avery Ho, the Flash of China from Earth-1, basically one of the Justice League of China’s members.
• Mary Marvel from Earth-5, basically the Fawcett Comics universe from the Pre-Crisis era.
• Doctor Multiverse, also from Earth-8, a unique being who had the powers of the multiverse at her disposal.
• Dino-Cop from Earth-41, a cop who is part dinosaur and looks like a Savage Dragon stand-in.
• Red Racer from Earth-36, the Flash of his world who found love with his (male) teammate Flashlight (the Green Lantern of that Earth).
• Flashpoint Batman the Batman from a doomed timeline who found himself temporarily stranded in the multiverse after his own world temporarily ceased to exist.

So, what did these guys do?  Actually, not much.  They seem to largely exist to be useless, like some major threat will pop up and somehow make sure Justice Incarnate is either rendered unable to help for some reason or they just taken down by some super-baddie like Darkseid.

The last time I saw them was in the opening issue of the Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths which, despite the title, was not one of those big continuity reset storylines.  The villain there was Pariah, having finally gone mad, and supposedly under the thrall of the Great Darkness and putting other characters, especially particularly powerful bad guys like Darkseid, under the Great Darkness’s control, but then it turned out it was Pariah had gone mad and was somehow misusing the Great Darkness to do his bidding as the Great Darkness was more like a force of nature and not something that wanted to mess around with superheroes.  Anyway, that storyline opened with Pariah’s appearing to kill the entire Justice League save for Black Adam, who went back to Earth-1 to warn everyone there that the League was all dead.  Granted, the League wasn’t dead and they came back, but Justice Incarnate was there too, and they were pretty much wiped out in the same attack and then…well, not much was said about them after that.  I’m sure they’re fine and all, but I don’t think anyone cares enough about them to do anything about or with those characters.

So, basically, they are like all the other new characters Morrison introduced in The Multiversity.  That tracks.

I think I need a better alternate Justice League for next time.