JLA #49

WARNING! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! I SAID SPOILERS, YA ROT-SUCKING MOFOS!

Title: Unhappily Ever After
Release Date: January 2001
Writer: Mark Waid
Pencillers: Bryan Hitch and Javier Saltares
Inkers: Paul Neary and Chris Ivy
JLA Members: Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern, The Flash, and Plastic Man.
Cameos: Queen Hippolyta, The Terminator, Freddy Krueger, the killer from "Scream", and Paul Bunyan.
Bad Guys: The Queen of Fables.

So what happens?
All over the world, fictional villains and monsters are attacking people, and the JLA, still wearing their goofy medieval armor, are just barely able to handle things in New York. The only way to get rid of the evil Queen of Fables is to force her back into the enchanted storybook, but the League faces a moral dilemma: the storybook contains a world of people the Queen can terrorize, so how can they save the people of Earth and the people in the book?

The Flash speeds off with the book to keep it safe from the Queen's monsters, and the rest of the JLA head for the Queen's new castle in the sky with a plan: lasso her with Wonder Woman's Magic Lasso, which forces people to see the truth instead of fiction and lies -- in theory, it should cut the Queen off from her powers.

As the JLA invades her castle, the Queen conjures up Paul Bunyan, who snaps the supposedly unbreakable Magic Lasso. Then she ensnares Wonder Woman in a bunch of nasty spider webs and stirs up fairy tales from non-human cultures, like the Atlantean Nykus, the Kryptonian Eorx Necroli, and the Martian Flesh-Candles of King My'Dorr. At the last second, Wonder Woman is able to get her hands on part of her Lasso, which she cracks like a whip to injure the Queen, causing her creations to disappear, returning New York to normal, and prematurely aging her. Flash finally shows up with the book and traps the Queen back inside. Later, he reveals that, since the Queen gained her power from imagination and would be able to gain power from the stories in the magic storybook, he made a quick book substitution and trapped the Queen in a book with nothing imaginative in it: the United States Tax Code Manual.

So everything's back to normal, A-OK, hunky-dory... except that everyone's still arguing about kicking Batman out of the League. Will the JLA be broken apart by petty bickering?

Cool Moments!
The bit with the tax code manual was pretty clever. 

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