Justice League #17 / by MELINDA Schmidbauer

When we left off, Queen Bee had just ordered Wandjina to kill Rumaan Harjvati, the despot of  Bialya and declared herself Queen.  So, what happens next?

Queen Bee is holding all the important guests in isolation and the outside world doesn't know what is going on.  (I am really enjoying some of the references, but they'd probably go over the head of a young reader now...Jim Nabors?  Really!)  Captain Atom is upset that Batman got the team into a situation they apparently couldn't handle, but Oberon isn't worried.

Meanwhile, in Bialya, the former Global Guardians are getting a little worried about what the Queen is doing, and Batman has changed his disguise from Bruce Wayne to Max Lord.  But was Max even supposed to be there?  How could this fool anyone?  It seems to me that the Bat is not thinking very hard here.  I agree with Captain Atom.  And why weren't the Bialyans the least bit suspicious about the Legion flight ring they found on Booster?  Didn't they realize then he was a
superhero?

Anyway, eventually Bats, Green Flame, Booster and Beetle all meet up again (no one fully dressed except for Batman...hmmmm, maybe he is thinking), and are trying to escape when they run into Wandjina  and...Captain Atom saves the day.  Not quite sure how he got in there.  But he did.  They want to try to take Queen Bee in, but apparently the Bialyans love her and want her in power, so they have to leave her.

But what about the space-bound JLI members?  They get a couple pages here, too.  Barda manages to rig up a boom tube so their non-hyperspace space ship can follow the cluster ships.  Off they go...

I've been getting weird looks when I read these books in public.  I am incapable of not giggling when reading these.