JL #25 "The Ice Age Cometh!" FORWARD

You're in for a treat this time because this is one of if not *the* best I ever got with my stories!



I was working on all-cylinders with this issue: my pens were new, my colored pencils were all in order, and my script was based on another classic JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA story, "The Ice Age Cometh!" by Steve Englehart and Dick Dillin, from JLA #139. The source material is one of my favorite JLA stories because 1. it features the entire membership (always a huge plus in my book) and 2. it's an exciting, well-told, and logical story.

My cover had to be totally original because the source material appeared as the second story in JLA # 139. As you can see with this awesome cover by Neal Adams, it was not the story that was cover featured.

I changed only nominal things for this story to fit it into my universe. The main thing, I guess, was that the original story features The Atom instead of Martian Manhunter. I simply switched them, and gave some of The Atom's lines to Aquaman. The second thing was that Steve Englehart began in his story a sub-plot of Wonder Woman being a hard-ass; I chose to ignore that character development.

The other major thing I changed was the villains: in the source material an old Wonder Woman villain named Minister Blizzard and an old Justice SOCIETY villain named The Icicle were used. Instead of creating two more one-shot bad guys, I brought back my old favorite, The Weather Wizard, and used Batman's villain, Mister Freeze. (I had established The Icicle, but he was on Earth-2, so I didn't want to try to include him here because I was trying to show that the two worlds were not just a quick trip apart...)

And lastly, I changed the ending....but I'll talk about that after you read the story.

I did change the locale from Central America to Africa. At this point I'm not exactly sure why I did this...probably because Japanese knew more about Africa than they did Central America, and maybe because I had extra brown pencils to use in the coloring?

Look for all the snow falling, and the heroes' breaths being visible in the freezing weather. I think the first few pages where the coldness of Nigeria is being established is some of my best work.

This story came at a time when my go-to translation assistant was busy. So I had her look at it, but I also asked a buddy of mine in my education office to read it and let me know if he could understand it. So a big THANK YOU to Yuzo Saito for helping out.