In 2002, the Joke Comic League faced one of the darkest moments in its history — an event that would forever reshape its leadership and reputation. The top governing board, a group of ten powerful businessmen who had seized administrative control decades earlier, ordered a classified operation under the codename Project Fireline. Reports had emerged of a rapidly spreading infection within a densely populated apartment neighborhood on the outskirts of Chicago. Without consulting Jewman, who was away on an international mission with Gayifier at the time, the board authorized Division Bravo to handle containment through any means necessary. The soldiers were armed with military-grade flamethrowers, instructed to incinerate all “potentially infected individuals” and prevent the disease from escaping the quarantine zone.
When Jewman and Gayifier returned from their mission, they found the neighborhood reduced to ash and ruin — men, women, and children burned where they stood, many of them not infected at all. The scene was described in later reports as “a hellscape of melted concrete and screams that never had the chance to fade.” Furious beyond words, Jewman invoked his original founder’s right of command, a clause still written in the JCL charter since its creation, and immediately dismantled the board’s authority. Within forty-eight hours, the ten members responsible for the order were arrested under internal tribunal, stripped of all assets, and sentenced to life imprisonment in a secured JCL containment facility for crimes against humanity. Several Division Bravo soldiers who had followed the orders willingly — without questioning them — were also tried and imprisoned.
The fallout from Project Fireline led to the complete return of the JCL’s leadership to Jewman, marking the end of corporate interference in hero command. Public trust had been shaken, but Jewman’s swift and decisive action restored moral order and reminded the world what the League truly stood for. Many later remarked that Richard Halden Cross, the original industrialist who had brokered the JCL expansion deal in 1971, would have been horrified to see what the organization had become under the board’s corruption. The 2002 purge became known internally as “The Cleansing of the Board” — the day the Joke Comic League was reclaimed from greed and returned to justice.