Now on the Dinah Lance Show - Justice League of America #220
The Doppelganger Gambit
Justice League of America #220
Cover Date: November 1983Released: 4th August 1983
This is a Black Canary story!
No, really there are other scene's with the JLA and JSA but this 20th-anniversary team-up issue is to "fix" Black Canary going forward. I wonder if this was an attempt to move the JLA away from the JSA, what with their comic having been cancelled almost six years before. It would make sense what with they'll decide to do in just three more years! (the shadow of Crisis seems to be following us now!).
We start strong with Power Girl rushing off to battle one group of the three teams of villains. before Red Tornado stop her to suggest they split into teams and have a plan of action. She properly miffed as well looking to bust some villains heads, she's also more or less definitely flying here, which makes sense with how long she's been doing this now. Then Sargon turns up and despite being a hero we get probably the most forced heroes fight I've ever seen. Power Girl, Huntress and even Red Tornado just attack him for no reason. After they all get soundly beaten the flowery Sargon explains that he's guarding Jim Corrigan, the Spectre, after a Thunderbolt attack and agrees to go with Power Girl and deal with the villains at Stonehenge. Garrick tells kara not to sulk about being made to team up before quickly summing up what happened in the last issue.
We then cut straight to the Thunderbolt Dimension where Dinah and Starman are being held by Thunderbolt and Earth-1's Johnny Thunder. here we find that Thunderbolt is being controlled, against his will, by this Johnny Thunder. He's then told to explain what happened so far, how Earth-2's Johnny Thunder (bound and gagged here) worked alongside Dinah before things started to go wrong and Johnny Thunder started to work with the Thunderbolt power. Then Dinah went off with Larry Lance and Johnny felt left out in the cold before the JSA disbanded and Dinah married Larry and had a child, also called Dinah. I think you can see where this is going to go, but it gets even crazier from here...
The Wizard having escaped from jail, and having learned real magic, shows up and curses the little Dinah with a sonic blast. With no control over this, the Lances decide she'd be safer in another dimension so they make Thunderbolt take her to his dimension where he places her in stasis as she grows to adulthood. Thunderbolt then adds that he made the two though little Dinah had died because it would be easier for them. Now I've thankfully never been in such a situation, but I'm pretty sure that thinking your child had died is quite the opposite of the better solution!
Oh yes at this point the comic remembers that we're meant to be in a JLA/JSA team-up so we cut back to their encounters with the Earth-1 / Earth-2 villain team-ups. It doesn't really matter who's fighting who because the heroes get owned by the villain in around two pages or so without any real effort. Only Huntress get to do anything like fighting back, with her managing to throw a Batarang at the villain whilst on a literal slippery slope. I do like the two squaddies at Stonehenge talking about the bother of dealing with the villain before Power Girl literally flies past them towards the stones. Power Girl and Sargon are tricked into knocking each other out if you're interested in how they get taken down.
Then we're back to the Black Canary show! Thunderbolt is ordered to kill the two heroes but at the last minute, our Johnny Thunder takes back control of Thunderbolt and orders him to stand down and knocks out the "fake" Johnny Thunder. The freed Thunderbolt then heals up the JLA and we get them quickly coming in to beat the villains and defeat the threat. At least Power Girl gets to punch out Felix Faust, whilst the others are just saved by the JLA.
We then learned the truth about Dinah in the coffin, with Superman and Spectre, bought to the dimension to finish off the story. When the OG Dinah helped the JLA fight Aquarius (JLA #74) she took a lethal dose of radiation, not wanting to live without Larry she chooses to die, but for some crazy reason, they decided to give the young Dinah the memories of the older woman. So the Dinah we've been following in years is her daughter but with the memories of her mother. Weirdly our Dinah seems cool about the whole thing, wanting to tell Ollie about all this!
It's hard to judge what to make of this issue, as a JSA / JLA issue it's a weak issue with all but Dinah getting the briefest of mentions. With Power Girl getting the most to do because of her bullheadedness and general aggressiveness to the problem at hand. Really it seems that Roy Thomas wanted to tell this story about Dinah but had to do the team-up as it was just that time of year! As a fan of all the general canon weirdness, I enjoy it, but it's not something that everyone will enjoy.
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