Franchise · Tertiary · since 1960
The Justice League
Shorthand, on this site, for the DC guys: Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, Cyborg, the Flash and Aquaman. I am not a comics reader and this page does not pretend to be one. It is here for six characters, the cartoons that introduced me to them, and the films I liked that most people did not.
Superman’s problem is not that he can do anything. It is that he chooses not to.
Why the “boring” one is the hard one to write
I came to all of this through the cartoons rather than the comics, and I have never felt the need to correct that. The Bruce Timm run (Batman, then Superman, then Justice League and Unlimited) is where I met every one of these characters, and it is still the version I picture when somebody names one.
The films I like more than the consensus does. Batman v Superman is heavy and overlong and its plot does not survive much poking, but Affleck is a great Batman and the film is genuinely about something. I liked both Justice Leagues, the two-hour one and the four-hour one, when people generally only allow the second. And the three that got laughed out of the room, Aquaman, its sequel and The Flash, I loved. Now Gunn is starting over, which I am excited about, and Lanterns, out this August, is fire.
The table
Seven chairs, no chairman, and a rule that any member can call the others in. The headquarters moves with the era: a cave in Rhode Island, a satellite twenty-two thousand miles up, a bunker in Detroit, and finally the Watchtower on the moon.
The interesting part was never the fights. It is that the most powerful people alive agreed to answer to each other, and that Batman keeps a plan to stop every one of them in a drawer at home.