Joshua Middleton's cover for this issue.

Writer Roger Stern and artist John Byrne are a fan-favorite creative team, probably best known for their nine-issue run on Captain America in 1980 (#247-255), and to a lesser degree for the 12-issue maxi-series, Marvel: The Lost Generation.  They’ve reunited for a story arc on JLA: Classified entitled “That was Now, This is Then.”

JLA: Classified #50, “High Frontier” opens on a tranquil day at the Watchtower of the Justice League of America.  What seems like an innocuous meteor shower turns into an assault on the Watchtower by a golden behemoth that promptly dispatches Flash, Green Lantern, and Martian Manhunter.  When the cavalry arrives in the form of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Atom, the invader manages to do more than hold his own.  He claims to have faced the Justice League before this attack.  Can the League discover his identity before he destroys them all?

JLA: Classified #50 is an entertaining story, even if it may come across as an unspectacular creative effort.  “That was Now…” is, however, the kind of serviceable action/adventure story that work so well in superhero comics.  Stern successfully creates an appealing mystery dilemma, and then, builds the conflict to an exciting crescendo of super-powered confrontations.

The art by John Byrne (pencils) and Mark Farmer (inks) is good storytelling.  Byrne composes this issue’s two battle scenes with an impressive display of power on the part of the combatants.  These fisticuffs are similar to the kind of action that made the Cartoon Network’s “Justice League” television series so appealing to viewers.  Byrne draws the golden monster as bursting with awesome power – to the point that the villain seems to assault the very borders of the panels in which he appears.  That’s what makes this solid, straightforward superhero fun that would entertain Justice League of America fans, whether they discovered the JLA in comic shops and or on TV.

B+