What's This? An old brownstone.
The facts: When the JSA premiered in All-Star Comics #3 (December 1940), the concept came complete with a brownstone HQ, much where you'd think a "society" (like one of those gentlemen's clubs) would meet. It had a big round table and that's about it. It was the first superhero headquarters, what can I tell you? By the Bronze Age, the JSA had more high-tech digs, but it was still housed in a brownstone. This second building was specifically in Gotham and it's where the kids of the Super-Squad roomed. The third building was Wesley Dodds's manor, which the team inherited in JSA Secret Files and Origins in 1999, which the entire team used as living quarters. In 2007's Justice Society of America #1, they moved into a fourth brownstone managed by Ma Hunkel. These are all kind of the same, so I don't make a distinction.
How you could have heard of it: The JSA is still housed in that fourth brownstone. It also appears in the Batman: The Brave and the Bold animated series episode "The Golden Age of Justice!". The HQ in Black Adam is more like a big castle.
Example story: JSA #82 (April 2006) "Ghost in the House" by Paul Levitz, George Pérez and Bob Wiacek
It's the Infinite Crisis and Power Girl narrates:
Nice entry into what I guess is the fourth brownstone, but it feels just like home anyway. PG is soaked (was this a riff on the thunderstorm red skies of the original Crisis? That THIS TIME it's actually raining?) and Ma Hunkel is adamant she get off her dry floors and into a shower. She's also brought an artifact for the museum room - Lois Lane of Earth-2's notebook!
And although Peej couldn't break the "secret code" in the notebook, Ma is a little wiser - it's shorthand. In it, Lois-2 recounts an event that happened at the original brownstone, soon after the JSA disbanded rather than reveal their identities to Congress. Superman-2 and Batman-2 enter the old HQ to make sure nothing there can expose the superheroes' secrets.
Ma is surprised, because the World's Finest team wasn't in her JSA, but Power Girl knows all about the Multiverse, and tells her to read on. Lois-2 reveals the place had been trashed by the Gentleman Ghost, who uses the secret files to rob things of value the JSA was meant to be guarding, including a rare book at Wayne Manor! Well, there's a bunch a robberies and heroes intervening (including Wonder Woman-2) and we're told that Batman eventually secured all the JSA's secret stuff. As this is Earth-2 (as written by '70s JSA revival writer Paul Levitz, no less), one imagines they remained safe until taken out of storage when the team returned to active status. This was the last story Lois Lane-2 wrote before dying in that post-Crisis limbo.
Who's Next? Darkseid's son.
Comments