#changnesia

If someone wants to dust off the Giffen/Dematteis JLI for modern continuity (in a similar vein to Not Quite the JLI, or I Can’t Believe it’s Not the JLI), the only way to bring Maxwell Lord back into the team is by copying Ben Chang from Community. If you’ve seen the first four seasons of Community, Chang’s escalation to full on super-villain in season three kind of maps over Lord in Infinite Crisis pretty well. Imagine then, a broadly comedic Justice League sub-series starts (maybe they are a subsection of the current JLU) and at the end of the first issue Maxwell Lord just shows up like, “hi my names is Kevin and I have Changnesia.” Within the absurd tone of the book, and the usual comic retcon bs, even Martian Manhunter can’t tell if Lord actually has any memories of his time as a villain. So we get to have another sequel to the JLI with the full cast despite Max having allegedly killed Ted (Ted’s fine now). Think of the narrative and comedic potential.