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Before the JLA reformed, DC confronted the Justice League’s identity crisis on the page in A Midsummer’s Nightmare, reasserting the team as DC’s best.
As Marvel’s world-warping Heroes Reborn saga comes to a close, the Marvel Universe is finally returning to some semblance of normalcy as the amnesiac Avengers have remembered who they are and why they’re Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. While this is a new experience for the Avengers, it’s quite similar to one that DC’s Justice League lived through in 1996’s Justice League: A Midsummer’s Nightmare, a three-part miniseries, by Mark Waid, Fabian Nicieza, Jeff Johnson, Darick Robertson, Jon Holdredge and Hanibal Rodriguez, that kicked off one of the team’s most celebrated eras.
By the mid-90s, the Justice League had forgotten what it was, in a sense. Instead of DC’s greatest heroes, it featured a crowded field of heroes spread out across several teams. While Grant Morrison and Howard Porter’s JLA would rectify that, A Midsummer’s Nightmare literalizes the team’s identity crisis by giving the League’s marquee members amnesia.
Midsummer’s Nightmare features powerless versions of the members of the Justice League doing what they can to find their ways in the world as ordinary citizens. Kyle Rayner is an ordinary artist struggling to meet his comic book deadlines; Diana Prince is a teacher at the Theyscira school for girls; Arthur Curry is an environmentalist working at a fishery; Bruce Wayne runs a charity and bickers with his parents; Martian Manhunter enjoys a peaceful life with his family on his home planet; Wally West is a teacher plagued by uninterested students and strange dreams; and Clark Kent is a reporter having difficulty reporting on a strange new phenomenon taking over the planet. All across the globe, people are being “sparked” and suddenly discovering that they possess superpowers.
Something about the situation doesn’t feel right to Clark, but he doesn’t know why. Until one night while reporting on the dangerous impact the sudden abundance of new metahumans with superpowers has had on Metropolis’s nightlife, something in the chaos jogs his memory. Much like Blade in Marvel’s Heroes Reborn, Clark Kent realizes that he is more than an ordinary man. As if waking from a dream, Superman springs into action and prevents the powerful citizens of Metropolis from praying upon the less fortunate.
While Superman is coming to his senses in Metropolis, Bruce Wayne is having a similar experience in Gotham. While speaking with his mother and father, his mother’s pearl necklace happens to break, which triggers memories of Bruce’s mother and father being killed years ago. Soon after this painful dose of reality, Bruce reunites with Clark Kent and the two make a plan to track down the rest of the Justice League and bring them back to reality.
Once the Justice League is reunited, they realize that the world’s reality is being manipulated by the powerful Doctor Destiny, who has left subconscious clues about his whereabouts in the comics Kyle Rayner was drawing. The team tracks him down only to find him begging them for help. As it turns out, he was recruited by the ancient hero Know Man to alter reality. However, the power overwhelmed him and he quickly became trapped in the illusion. The Justice League frees him from the machine, but the world was still overrun with super-powered people.
Know Man attacks the heroes and explains that he is trying to save the world from a looming cosmic threat that will require stronger heroes than the JLA. He accuses them of not doing enough to bring peace to the world they protect. While the powerful antagonist and Superman duke it out, Martian Manhunter and Doctor Destiny connect psychically to free the people of Earth from their altered reality. In a last-ditch effort to defeat the heroes, Know Man gives them all an overwhelming amount of power so that they can no longer control themselves, but Martian Manhunter saves the day again by wrapping the entire team up in Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth which shatters the illusion.
Admitting defeat, Know Man leaves the planet after warning the heroes that the Earth is in grave danger. It is a bittersweet moment for the Justice League. The Earth is back to normal, but the simple pleasures of their ordinary, powerless lives are gone. They once again bear the burden of protecting an entire planet and all of the people on it, but their bout with unreality reinforced how powerful they can be when they work together.
Over the course of this series, the League confronted its identity crisis head-on, and officially decided to reform around its core seven members. While the changing tides of the DC Universe saw this line-up grow and change, the lesson that the Justice League should always include at least some of the most famous and powerful heroes in the DC Universe has almost always remained a firm guiding principle for the team since this event.
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