Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire had previously created the tongue-in-cheek Justice League International comic book in the 1990s, and revived a similar style of comedy as that series featured.

Most of the Super Buddies recruited by Maxwell Lord and his robot sidekick L-Ron are former members of Justice League International when Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire worked on the series: Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire, Ralph Dibny (The Elongated Man) and his wife Sue, and Captain Atom.

The Super Buddies do not and cannot get along: Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, formerly the self-proclaimed "Abbott and Costello" of the JLI, now find themselves constantly arguing and fruitlessly attempting to prove to one another that they have matured.

While Beetle and Booster rush a seriously injured (and radioactively leaking) Captain Atom to a hospital, the others find that Manga Khan, L-Ron's former master, has come to Earth to reclaim the robot.

Only by the intervention of the real Justice League (who have been spying on the Super Buddies all this time in anticipation of such a faux pas) is an intergalactic crisis avoided.

Gardner causes several problems of his own: he is opening a bar next door to the Super Buddies' strip mall headquarters, and he takes delight in sexually harassing Fire, Sue, Power Girl, and Mary Marvel.

While visiting the Justice Society of America headquarters, Booster Gold begins messing around with Doctor Fate's talisman and inadvertently wishes the team to Hell.

The group makes its way out of Hell, but soon find themselves trapped in an alternate universe populated by a team of sinister versions of themselves and their fellow heroes called the "Power Posse".

It was revealed in the eighty-page one shot Countdown to Infinite Crisis (2005) that Maxwell Lord was in fact Checkmate's latest Black King, and had been collecting information on the Justice League members' weaknesses so that he could annihilate them.