Geoff Johns and Mikel Janin Talk Justice Society of America #1 and Legacy (Exclusive)

DC has returned to the Golden Age and this week, the third new title from writer Geoff Johns dealing with the iconic Golden Age heroes, the Justice Society of America arrives on store shelves. Justice Society of America #1 is on sale now, with the new monthly title picking up the story from The New Golden Age one-shot and delving into what might be the highest stakes threat and mystery the JSA has ever faced as a malevolent enemy has invaded the team’s entire history leaving one survivor from a future iteration of the team — Helena Wayne — to stop them. It’s a story of history and legacy, one that not only revisits familiar characters but tells some new stories as well. ComicBook.com recently sat down with Johns and artist Mike Janin to talk about Justice Society of America #1 about the issue. Warning: spoilers for Justice Society of America #1 beyond this point.

Nicole Drum, ComicBook.com: First and foremost, Geoff, we talked a lot about these New Golden Age-related titles before and we’ve spoken a lot about how this story is about legacy. I know I’ve asked this before, but I’m going to ask again. Why center it around Helena?

Geoff Johns: Well, there’s two reasons. I’ll talk about the one that for me as a writer is so compelling is that she’s such an interesting legacy character because she comes from the most impactful superhero arguably ever, Batman and one of the most impactful super villains, and I use that in quotes, ever, Catwoman. I think that dichotomy of it. And then there’s a really interesting thing, and she mentions it, that when she talks about her father’s legacy, everyone’s like, “It’s about fear and vengeance and darkness and this.” And she’s like, “That was my dad. He was not like that. That was not who he was. That was not what he embodied.” And for her to struggle like, “How do I carry it on? I assumed I would be about vengeance, but that’s not what I’m about.”

She struggles with what’s her dad’s legacy really about. Who is she going to be? And it’s not just about putting arrows in people’s chest. That’s just not Batman to her. He was her dad. And I think that when you know someone like that, it’s completely different. She saw a completely different side of him, and she saw him do things and live a life that was not just about vengeance. He opened his heart up and he fell in love, and he had a daughter, and she was that daughter. And then he stopped being Batman to save that family. And then having her mom still around, she’s not yet carrying her mom’s legacy on really. She’s really focused on her dad right now and her mom and her obviously have a very different opinion on what she should be doing.

Selina does not want her daughter doing this, especially the way she’s going about it. And one of my favorite scenes is the argument between them in the library where she’s saying, “How could you possibly work with these people? If somebody’s been murdered… if Dr. Fate’s been murdered, one of them had to have been involved and blah blah blah, and how can you trust them?” And she’s like, “Mom, you don’t think I checked in?” And they have this great argument where Helena says to her mom, “This is what dad did… dad did this with you.” And she’s like, “It’s completely different situation.” And they’re both right, which I love. But that’s why she’s become the anchor. That’s the first reason. Emotionally, she’s so interesting to me as a character. And she hasn’t been used in the context of the greater DC universe in a long, long time. So, I wanted to bring her back and put her in the center of it.

And then on the story front, because of her mom, she’s the only survivor of Degaton’s attacks so far as he goes back in time from the far future all the way to the present as he’s slaughtering JSA teams one by one. She’s the first survivor to escape him. And now he’s got an issue, right now he’s got a problem. Whatever his plan is, why he is doing this so methodically and viciously, that’s going to be interrupted by her now.

I thought it was really interesting too, getting to the fact that it’s because of Catwoman that Helena escapes and now is a problem for Degaton. That snow globe popped up and I kind of knew we were going to get a piece of that. I’ve read Flashpoint Beyond; we saw it briefly in The New Golden Age. I didn’t expect it to come into play like this. I feel like that’s a pretty significant thing that people are probably going to want to keep in the back of their minds. Will people benefit from reading those other stories?

Johns: I mean, I think they’re fun to read. So, but really on the snow-globe of it all, it’s obviously a talisman of chrono power and temporal ability. And so that’s going to come to play. Selina knew about it and knew it could be used in this situation of Degaton’s attack. So that’s why she retrieved it and used it. And we’ll get a little bit more into it in this, but the snow-globe does belong to somebody who’s going to want it back at some point.

Mikel, I know I am familiar with your work largely from Batman and you have a very identifiable style. But there are moment in Justice Society of America #1 that I could see where your work looks a bit different this time. Tel me about your approach to the art in this issue because it’s fantastic. 

Mikel Janin: I think it comes in every project that I do that I want to approach things differently than in other projects and try to… it’s a bit like an actor, you have a different character, so you have to play different skills and different muscles. So, in this particular project, I felt we needed first a bit of different styles because we have different timelines. So, I think that in the future or in the past, we will use subtle details that will lead us during the story, different details. And with those characters like Huntress, for example, is in the center of our story so far. So, I wanted it to be a very different character than other characters that I’ve drawn. So, I think it’s different from Selina, it’s different from Supergirl or Lois Lane. I tried to give each character to her personality in this case.

And I think like Geoff was saying before that I tried to discover who she is while drawing her. So, each time that I have her in a panel or in a scene, it’s like you are meeting this character if it was the first time. So, I try to discover who she is and bring that to the page.

There is a part at the end where we realize Helena is kind of being tossed backwards through time and I love how this page is set up. We see her back and then we see her literally scooching through time to get to that final page. That is such a cool representation of that, even as we’re getting all these different vintage styles. The whole book has this beautiful vintage feel. Was there a particular inspiration for how that particular piece of art happens? I’ve never seen anything quite like it to represent the motion through time. 

Johns: I mean it was always designed to be really important kind of moments. So, we have Bruce Wayne’s funeral, then we wanted to see the joy that Jay and Judy will have once they’re reunited. That’s going to happen. So just to say that’s going to be so cool to watch. Then we’re going to get to… then we wanted to really firmly reestablish the ’76 era of the JSA, which we’ll be playing with a lot more. And then ultimately hint at the Red Lantern, which Ruby… if you’ve read the Who’s Who entries, you’ll know that he had to break his daughter out and that was 1951. And so that kind of hints at that whole history, which we’ve just seen Ruby in there. So, there’s a really complicated relationship there as well. And then finally getting her to the past. But going backwards through that and then showing this… I love that how Mikel drew it.

This energy’s like… and then it’s almost like a rhythm as she breaks through the… I have it right here, it’s so cool. But as she breaks through the borders, I love this energy and that’s just so cool. I just love how we did that. And it ties everything in together, which is great. But this book’s all about… JSA is all about history and legacy and the past, present, and future. And so that was important for us to say our tapestry that we’re painting our story across is the entire history of the DC universe. And that showed just a glimpse of what we’re doing.

Like you said, we’re getting these new characters. If you read the back material for The New Golden Age and the Who’s Who, immediately I was like, “That’s the daughter. We’ve not seen her before.” Were there any particular challenges you faced in integrating these unfamiliar characters into a team that is, for any comic fan, deeply iconic?

Roy Thomas, I used to love reading Roy Thomas’s work on the team because he would introduce new characters that we never heard of. Amazing man. And those characters were cool and then they stuck, and they became part of the history and the tapestry of the teams. And I think there’s room to do that still. I think there’s room to expand The Golden Age out and say there were more characters we haven’t seen there. And this was in a way to unify it all and say how special it is. Because when you introduce a character like The Golden Age Red Lantern, or you say, “Hey, there was a Golden Age Mr. Miracle that established Justice Society Dark, what was that?” There’s suddenly these stories you can tell, and they don’t just sit in the forties, they affect the stories today so that we can have characters like Ruby show up or Harlequin, something there can be stories about that took place in the forties that had their roots there but also affect today and affect the future like we did here.

And that to me is one of the reasons that Ruby is such a present character and she’s so cool. I love Mikel’s design for her. That’s a cool design. And she’s got a great hardcore personality. Clearly her dad, she idolizes her dad and really learned from him in a lot of ways. And the idea though is if we introduce all these characters in the past, it’s not just saying, “Oh look, all these characters are in the past.” That affects the present day. That affects the future. Now there’s Ruby who’s a character who wouldn’t have existed without The Golden Age Red Lantern.

Mikel let’s talk about the design for Ruby for a second. Did you have any particular inspirations for that? Because she has this cool vibe to her. I want to get to know this character so much more because she’s got this hard attitude, but she just looks so cool.

Janin: Thanks. Yeah, well it was one of the characters that we didn’t have another design. So, I had more freedom to play with her. And we had the inspiration of the design that Brad Peterson did for her, The Golden Age Red Lantern. So, we used this like a base, the color palette and all this. But we play with her. So, I wanted to give her a futuristic touch and a modern bit like a video game character. So, I put a lot of detail in the costume, and I think it worked.

Johns: I mean she clearly too is… I want her to meet Jade very much, that encounter, that’s just interesting. What’s that going to be like? So, it’s cool. I love that we could introduce… I think again, there’s still just room to do surprises in DC’s history in the past and in the present and future and introducing a character like Ruby or the Harlequin’s son. A lot of these characters are brand new. And I think that makes the books more exciting because you don’t know everything about them. They don’t have 10 different versions of their origin story that you have to figure out which one is their origin this time. They can just be who they are now.

As a storyteller, do you find it more challenging to create new characters for an established setting? Or do you find it more challenging to tell stories with existing characters?

Johns: I like both. I’ve always done both. From early on in Flash, I introduced a lot of rogues, like brand new rogues and characters. And then JSA introduced a lot of new JSA members back then in Green Lantern and obviously a lot of new characters there. I think for me, I have to always be introducing new characters with what I’m doing. Otherwise, it gets stagnant. It’s very rare that I think I like doing a run on a book and not introducing brand new characters. And we introduced Miss Martian in Teen Titans and so some of these characters will stick and become bigger than… you want that to happen. You want the characters to live on and other things. You want these characters to become part of the DC universe where you can’t imagine a Green Lantern in a world where there isn’t a Blue Lantern. It doesn’t exist.

That’s the hope that we… or you take characters like John Ostrander introduced Mister Terrific. Grant Morrison introduced you Jakeem Thunder who was called JJ Thunder back then and we took him in JSA and ran with them. And you want that with some of these characters. Someone might come along and take one of these characters and make them into something bigger. And that’s always the hope is when you’re working in a shared universe is that you’re always adding to it and you’re pulling to it and you’re pulling from every era and trying to make it continue to grow and live and breathe and be exciting. I think new characters are always exciting to me because their stories haven’t been told yet.

One of the things that I thought was interesting, it definitely feels like Selina may actually have a larger role in this than we might realize because of something she says to Helena that I thought was kind of interesting where she shows up to save the day and she just says, “Find Dr. Fate. He can explain. I should have.” I know that this is centering a lot around Helena, but it feels like there’s almost a story there, too.

Johns: There is a big story with Selina. Selina will play a big role in this story.

One last question: why Degaton?

Johns: He’s a great Justice Society villain. He walks between eras. He’s just a great character and I love his… I got to work with him once in JSA and I love working with him because he was so calm, because I feel like I love time travel. I love time travel stories. I love time travel characters because there’s something really interesting about them knowing what the future is and knowing how things are going to play out already and having complete confidence that for the most part they’re right. I just find him chilling. He’s a scary character. And he is a Nazi. So, it’s a great villain for the JSA. You wanted to see him get defeated, but time traveling Nazi is just fun to play with.

Justice Society of America #1 is on sale now.