I don't know which page I would have picked as a favorite from Justice League America Annual #7 when I first read it in 1993.

I like the Hitchcockian horror-influenced sequences of Booster Gold's talking head running through pages 5, 6, 7, and 9, but none of those pages quite come together as a whole for me. Gene D'Angelo's garish colors combine with Greg LaRocque's loose layouts to create an almost hallucinogenic environment which bothers me more the longer I look at them.

So instead I think I'll choose page 16, where a powerless, line-swinging Fire saves the JLA's resident idiot, Guy Gardner, on the world's largest jungle gym:

I cannot deny it: I enjoy cheesecake "Good Girl" images of Fire. But I also think this example of lurid, sexually suggestive posing works particularly well, thematically, in this dark horror story in which the alien parasites use lust to manipulate their prey, like a page from Dracula, and the protagonist's runaway id creates monsters, like scenes from Forbidden Planet. Cheesecake images here can inspire similar feelings in the viewer, deepening a connection with the story.

(Unfortunately, this particular issue meanders too much to really take advantage of such atmosphere. Too many subplots, too many pages to fill, too many inkers. But still. It's nice to know that Greg LaRocque was trying.)

Horror and sex, working together since man first discovered Fire.

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