Thread by @GailSimone

Okay, let ,me tell you about JLA. There won’t be any #SnyderCut spoilers, this is about the concept.

When I was a kid, I lived on a farm, and we were poor. All I wanted to do was read, so I read everything I could find, but I read a lot I didn’t love because it was there. 1/

My mom took me to a garage sale, there was a little stack of comics being sold for almost nothing. I saw an older comic and I just couldn’t look away. I begged to get it. I didn’t know who the characters were. It was this comic.
2/

I fell in love with comics that same night. I read that comic an untold number of times (I am ashamed to say I cut out some of the art and put it on my wall). I had to know who all the characters were, I made little notecards to add information as I learned about them.

3/

I didn’t know anything about comics. It was an older comic, it had been in someone’s collection, and it was the first part of a continued story. So I rode my bike every day to the drug store in our little town (many miles from home) to see if they got the next chapter.
4/

I didn’t know! I thought you just went to the store and asked for the next bit of the story. :).

Anyway, that comic was my Pokémon, my Star Wars, it made me a comics fan forever. It was a big team up issue, tons of characters and I had to know them all.

5/

So for me, THE comic has always been JLA. I never got over it, it was always the comic I had to check out even as I grew up and went to college and got married. It was always JLA.

6/

One of the things I loved was how EPIC the characters were. The Marvel style, I grew to love that later, but as a kid, I didn’t like to see my heroes squabbling all the time. I had enough of that in real life. My heroes were Superman, Batman, Flash, and yes, Wonder Woman. 7/

When I was in college, we were poor again, and it was often a choice between necessities and comics. I would usually choose comics. To this day, I am more star-struck meeting JLA creators than movie stars. Will probably never grow out of that.

8/

Flash forward to years later. I end up a comic writer at DC, which is already an impossible dream. One day very early in my career, the Editor in Chief at the time, Mike Carlin, calls me and asks if I would like to write six issues of Justice League.

I could barely speak.

9/

I got through the conversation, and finally remembered to ask, “okay, who is going to draw this?”

And Mike said, “How do you feel about Jose Garcia Lopez?”

And I absolutely lost it. I had two favorite artists in the WORLD and Jose was one of them.

10/

Jose Garcia Lopez is a god of comic art. He’s the artists other artists get tongue-tied even talking about. And he was going to draw my story.

My JLA story.

11/

I have written a LOT of comics since then and I am very proud of almost all of them. But my favorite artist on my favorite book for my favorite company with my favorite characters...?

If I never wrote another comic after that I would still think I was the luckiest fan ever. 12/

It turned out so beautiful, it’s still a comic I just re-read JUST to look at the art.

And Jose was lovely and I got to write Wonder Woman fighting Flash to save his life, and J’onn creating bio-armor, and...well, I was very, very happy.

13/

Here’s another cover to that story.

Jose Garcia Lopez. There’s no one better.

14/

Years later I got to write an episode of my favorite superhero animated series ever, Justice League Unlimited.

It still felt like a direct line to that crumpled comic I found at a garage sale as a kid. I was so happy!

15/

All of this is just to say something that may seem a little silly to some people, but not to me. Justice League was THE moment that changed my life for the better. It made childhood bearable and adulthood a joy.

I take the JLA seriously.

16/

I know that for a lot of people, maybe most people, the Avengers is hipper and all that, and I do love those movies.

But the JLA felt like the heroes I wanted most in the world.

17/

Flash forward again to the theatrical cut of the Justice League movie. I liked it, I didn’t hate it.

But it didn’t feel like the JLA to me despite incredible casting. It was entertaining (and frustrating) but it felt like a shadow, like something the JLA really never was.

18/

Last night, I was excited (but cautiously so) to see the Zack Snyder version. I haven’t kept up with most of the drama, I just didn’t want my vision of the JLA to be all mixed up in that stuff.

I got a preview invitation, my family gathered, we were making a night of it.

19/

As many of you know, Microsoft had a massive outage, and the film that we scheduled to watch at 3:00 didn’t start for us until after 11:00. I was tired from deadlines, it felt like kind of a bad omen. We figured we would watch an hour and see the rest the next day.

20/

Ten minutes in, we were so hooked that wasn’t even an option. We watched the whole thing, until 3:00 am, and truthfully? All I’ve been thinking about since is watching it again.

21/

It is a different take on the JLA. It is not the perfect gods and goddesses that they are often portrayed as.

That is a GOOD THING.

Every character has an arc. Some stuff that didn’t work in the other cut comes out as the BEST PART of the full version.

22/

It has heart and scope and it’s beautiful to look at and often achingly bittersweet at times. But it is not dour, it’s not cynical.

I don’t want to say any more specifics. But I loved it, it feels finally, like the other side of the coin to the Marvel films, in a GOOD way.

23/

There’s a LOT I want to talk about, I have a million thoughts on it.

But my advice is, put aside all the internet nonsense, and watch it with an open mind. A lot that I was nervous about was simply obliterated by the finish produce (that’s a good thing).

24/

Like I said, the JLA is the biggest thing in comics to me and always has been. And like every kid in the pre-MCU era, I could only imagine a great film based on my favorite comic ever coming to be.

Well, it did, it came to be.

This JLA fan is a believer.

25/

That’s it, see it and make up your own mind but try not to let all this irrelevant baggage cloud your enjoyment. It so exceeded my expectations and I know I won’t be alone in that.

I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT SO BAD. :)

But for now, thumbs up, thumbs way up.

26/

I know a bunch of people are going to bring nonsense to discussion of this movie. Don’t let them ruin it for you.

That’s it. Thank you for listening.

I am very happy. Hope you will be too.

LOVE TO ALL THE JLA FANS AND ALSO THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THIS MOVIE!

Oh, and finally...

THE AMAZONS.

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️♥️♥️

End/