Comic Reviews Week of 7/29/09

Let's do it to it:



Justice Society of America (v2) #29
Written By Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges
Art By Jesus Merino

Now, it's always a bit tricky to complain about the first issue of a new writer's run because even great writers sometimes need a bit of time to feel things out. I seem to recall the first Geoff Johns arc in the Flash wasn't particularly good, and Paul Levitz's famed Legion run also had something of a false start.

That said, I'm not impressed. One of the reasons that the last volume of JSA was so good was the character development. Recently, however, that's fallen by the wayside as Geoff Johns felt compelled to create as many legacy characters as possible and jam them all into the book at once. And that'd be fine if the new characters were any good...but well, not so much. (By the way, in an utterly insane decision by DC, Magog is getting his own ongoing, if it is not dead within a year of its debut, I will resign from comic fandom in protest.)

This issue features the debut of the new All-American Kid and King, who are successors to two Golden Age characters that no one ever heard of, because if there was one thing that the JSA was lacking, it was that. (Although the smart money says that at least one of them will be gone by the end of the arc.) It's one thing to have a sense of history, it's another to have more legacies than Yale in the '50s. But this is Willingham and Sturges' first issue, so it's probably wise to wait a bit before dumping this comic.



Justice League of America (v2) #35
Written By Len Wein
Art By Tom Berenick and Pow Rodrix

That's a pretty misleading cover, although given the current status of this title, I can see why DC would want to do everything it could to promote this book. Anyway, this is a guest arc leading up to the new permanent writer who is....James Robinson....great.

Anyway, before that potential calamity strikes, the team consists of Vixen, Firestorm, Dr. Light and Red Tornado, with special guest star Plastic Man. On the one hand, there's a part of me that really enjoys this sort of underdog, makeshift team. On the other hand, that only works if such a team contains characters I actually like. While I do like the new Firestorm, my memories of Vixen and Red Tornado were poisoned by Meltzer's run, and I'm pretty sure Dr. Light is there to fill space more than anything else.

Actually, this whole comic is just filling space created by McDuffie's acrimonius departure, but by the standards of fill-in comics it's not bad. (Ironically, McDuffie was fired because he publicly complained about the quality of characters he was allowed to use.) So if you're a completist or just a comic fan with too much money, this is the comic for you. Otherwise, save your money.


Teen Titans (v3) #73
Written By Brian Q. Miller
Art By Joe Bennett

This is one of those 'next issue a Titan will DIE' type of story arcs, which works better than these arcs usually do for a couple of reasons. First, there's a good set-up with the Titans spending a night out on the town. This is essential because no one's heard of the vast majority of these characters, so you need to do something to get people to care when you kill one of them. The second reason is that almost all of these characters are expendable, so Miller can afford to kill one of them off without having to resort to some sort of easy out.

Mini-Review

Ultimatum #5: Some more people die in gruesome ways! How the hell this is supposed to reinvigorate the Ultimate Universe is beyond me, although it does raise the question: was "The Long Halloween" the biggest fluke in comics history?


Retraux Revieux



Written By Len Strazewski
Art By Mike Parobeck
Cover Date August 1992

Sometimes innovation just doesn't work out. For example, no one had ever tried to write a comic book about senior citizen superheroes until Len Strazewski came up with this comic. In fairness, it's not badly written and it's an original idea, even to this day, with the elderly members of the JSA have serious health problems and mainly being cranky old men.

Of course, the problem is that Strazewski takes the idea of elderly superheroes and then dials it up to eleven. Sandman has a heart attack within the first few pages, Dr. Mid-Nite is going blind and the rest of the characters are forced to confront their severely diminished capabilities. Again, that's new territory, but a comic about a bunch of old guys coming to terms with aging did about as well as you might imagine during the heart of the Image era.

Still, you have to give Strazewski a certain amount of credit. When Johns essentially took over the Golden Age characters a few years later, he mainly danced around the issue of the characters' age by killing off some of them and making the rest look and act decades younger than they actually were. (Right now the Golden Age JSAers would be in their nineties, as their participation in World War II precludes them from being part of the same sliding timeline as the rest of the DC universe)

It was a noble experiment that had not chance in hell of working, and it was unceremoniously cancelled after ten issues.