Bad Character Designs: JSA Edition

Here's the thing, sometimes Geoff Johns writes excellent comics, like the first volume of JSA or the first half of his Flash run and the like, but sometimes....not so much. I mean, here's some of the great characters introduced in the pages of JSA over the last year:


Amazing Man III:
Now, you may ask yourself, "Wait, who the hell is Amazing Man, and why are there three of them?" Well, the first one was created by Roy Thomas because otherwise his All-Star Squadron would have had a conspicuously all-white super-team fighting the Nazis, plus it was probably worth exploring how a African-American super-hero would deal with the racism of the 1940s.

The second Amazing Man was a mainstay of the Justice League in the painful period between Giffen/DeMatteis and Morrison....and that should tell you all you need to know about him.

But here we are again, with a new Amazing Man, who's a black guy...from New Orleans, and based on his costume, I'm going to go ahead and guess his portrayal will be downright Winickian in its subtlety.

Lance:
First of all, Lance is a pretty terrible name for a super-hero, by pretty much any measure.

Second, his hook is that he's the great-grandson of FDR which seems kind of stupid, if only because it makes the JSA out to be some sort of aristocratic coalition that determines membership based on bloodline, which doesn't quite seem right. I mean, is really only getting in because of who his ancestors were?

Finally, he is enlisted soldier, fighting in one of America's real-life wars who wears some mysterious device on his arm, and he's being brought into an organization concerned with educating young super-heroes in the proper use of their powers....and that's a problem because that happens to be the exact description of the Gauntlet from Avengers: The Initiative.