JLA Number 11 "A Power Struggle!" FORWARD

 This is the story that I was really looking forward to doing when I started. I had decided to start adapting existing JLA stories instead of adapting just the plots or writing my own stories, and I started with one of my all-time favorites! This issue is based on JUSTICE LEAGUE #111, "A Balance of Power!" I couldn't translate that title very well for my audience, so I ended up re-naming it "A Power Struggle!" which sort of kind of means the same thing, haha! I think I *should* have called it, "When Titans Clash" but that wouldn't have translated very well, either, haha!

This was the issue where the JLA faces off with a group made up of some of their worst enemies. In the comics they faced The Injustice Gang, made up of: the Shadow Thief, Chronos, Poison Ivy, the Scarecrow, Mirror Master, and the Tattooed Man. A quick glance will show that I kept the first four and dumped the last two. I'm sure I chose Dr. Polaris as the GL villain because he was more interesting than the Tattooed Man, but I don't  remember why I didn't use Mirror Master. I know by this point I had purchased a whole case of DC collectors' cards and was using the characters featured in that collection as my "who's who"....but I can't imagine Mirror Master not being in that group! Oh well, sorry, Mirror Master! You appear *briefly* in an upcoming story, which is more than I can say about the Tattooed Man, who never appeared ever. 

One point I liked about my version of this story is that I had the group consist of TEN bad guys instead of six. There were currently ten JLAers, and I figured that if you are stupid enough to go out and PICK A FIGHT WITH THE JLA (!!?!) you would want to atleast have the same number of members as them! So I added Aquaman's foe Black Manta, Superman's enemy the Toyman, Wonder Woman's foe the Cheetah, and Black Canary/Green Arrow enemy Count Vertigo. Plus I added master villain Vandal Savage to take the place of Libra in the original and a more logical (?) power source. It worked out well, as you'll see.

My favorite part of this issue, though, is that I had it start with the villains hunting the heroes. I played up the idea that part of what the JLA would do if they really existed would be to make benefit appearances for charity: but if they actually *did* that, what would stop the bad guys from attacking them at those appearances? Nothing, atleast in this story...! I thought that was clever.

This is the first time I used a new assistant to translate the English into Japanese. I talked to Yukiko Ochiai, a woman who worked in my office at the town Board of Education. She was much more available than my previous assistant, Mariko Tadokoro. However, she didn't have the interest or something, as I often found people reading the stories after they were printed asking me what I had meant etc. That is why you may see some obvious whited-out corrections in the Japanese in this issue. I went back with someone else and changed some of the terms to make them more clear or correct.

I'm pretty sure the English is okay, though. :-)