Justice Society of America #49 – Review

By: Marc Guggenheim (writer), Scott Kolins (artist), Mike Atiyeh (colorist)

The Story: What’s better than the JSA?  Double the JSA.

The Review: As the short-lived Heroes demonstrated, a massive cast can be a great thing for a series to have: the mix of personalities and storylines do a lot to grab and sustain your interest.  But cross a certain threshold, and an inflated cast quickly becomes a burden: the difficulty of giving each character enough attention or a sizable role to play easily dilutes the pace and substance of the overall plot, leaving little for you to be invested in.

The return of the JSA All-Stars to the fold will likely do precisely the latter.  You can see the warning signs in this issue’s action sequences alone.  Rather than creating order to how the teamwork use their various abilities in tandem, Guggenheim tosses them almost randomly in Dr. Chaos’ and Scythe’s paths.  With the JSA lacking serious firepower, it feels like the All-Stars had to be brought in to get the job done—it’s not as if they contribute to the story any other way.

With all the action being so aimless, it serves only to distract from the core element of the story arc, which is Guggenheim’s concept of an actual city-society dedicated to justice.  It’s a potentially interesting idea that he’s not even begun to describe or execute in any way, but is still trying to convince you it’s this great idea.  He has characters like Red Beetle saying things like, “What you guys’re doing here, fixing things…that’s holy work,” as if by having it said, it’ll convince you it’s so.

But then there’s a lot of empty talk to this series.  Most of the conversations between the characters are very roundabout, where they’re just hammering the same talking points (Lightning’s comatose state, Green Lantern’s trauma, Mr. Terrific’s degrading intelligence, etc.) to death.  It takes up more than half the issue, and none of it shows character or develops relationships.  Despite their interaction, they all remain a little flat and one-track-minded.

Justice Society of America #48 – Review

By: Marc Guggenheim (writer), Scott Kolins (artist), Mike Atiyeh (colorist)

The Story: Dr. Chaos shows exactly how he got his credentials in all-out crazy-making.

The Review: Every now and then you’ll hear DC getting some flak for not providing a handy recap page the way Marvel does for all its titles.  You can’t really deny the usefulness of such a feature, as it allows new readers to jump onboard even in the middle of a story arc.  DC’s usual response is something along the lines of a recap page taking a page away from the story, and if a writer’s strong enough, a recap’s not necessary.  True enough.

In this case, Guggenheim devotes the issue’s opening to recapping an event two issues before.  There are several major problems with this move, the most obvious being he ripped the scene and dialogue straight from Justice Society of America #46.  Second problem: it was weak when it first appeared, so reading it again just seems painful.  Third: instead of using one page to sum up the event, he has now used three—and with the dropped page count, that’s three too many.

And if you notice these flaws right off, that puts you in a discouraged frame of mind from the very start—truly unfortunate, as the rest of the issue requires a lot of forgiveness.  The pace of this story has become unearthly, stretching the limits of decompression technique.  Thanks to the time captions Guggenheim inserts to mark scene-jumps, you can easily deduce that over three issues, only forty-five minutes have passed.

Of course, as 24 demonstrates, decompression isn’t so bad as long as you fill the time with enough interest to keep the tension high.  But considering most of the story has been Dr. Chaos further reducing an already ruined city to rubble and a rematch between the team and Scythe—a villain they literally just defeated in the last story arc—you can’t really call such stuff interesting.

Guggenheim does offer a few good lines (Wildcat: “Sonofa—”  Dr. Chaos: “Yes.  How’d you know?”) and moments, but for every one of those, there’s a cringe-worthy scene like Mr. Terrific’s dumbing down.  Now, I’m sure it’s not intended this way, but the idea of making Michael illiterate—it’s just slightly racist, or at least an unfortunate coincidental reflection of a pervasive, negative, racial stereotype.  Is that politically correct enough?

Justice Society of America #47 – Review

By: Marc Guggenheim (writer), Scott Kolins (artist), Mike Ativeh (colorist)

The Story: Green Lantern in space!  Dr. Fate wrestles for Lightning’s soul!  Mr. Terrific experiences Flowers for Algernon firsthand!

The Review: When DC announced that it’d be holding the price line at $2.99 at the cost of cutting some pages from its titles, there was certainly a mix of emotions.  The jubilance over the savings was marred by the concern that each issue would have less substance to be engaging.  So far, most titles have taken the impact pretty easily, some even improving from the compression.  Others, however, have suffered from being forced to squeeze their stories into the more limited space.

Among the suffering seems to be Marc Guggenheim’s Justice Society of America.  This issue sees the team split up across literally cosmic distances, each with their own particular conflict to handle.  On the one hand, this sets things up so there’s no short supply of storylines filling up the pages.  On the other hand, with less page-time devoted to each, you’re left unsatisfied by all of them.  There’s just a strong sense that crucial parts of each plotline have been sacrificed at some point to fit them all in.

So instead of showing what’s going on, Guggenheim has to tell it to you instead.  Take Dr. Fate and Lightning in the spirit realm.  You don’t get to see how they get there; Jay Garrick catches Dr. Midnight up to speed and then Fate himself gives a thoroughly unsatisfying explanation of his work (“I took a few shortcuts, acted on instinct mostly.  I sort of…pushed things along…”).  And once all that talk is done, you get cut away to the next storyline, leaving you to wonder what the point of it all is.

Then you have Mr. Terrific’s supposedly degrading intelligence.  Instead of seeing symptoms of his dire situation, you get treated to two solid pages of Dr. Chaos’ obnoxious, know-it-all gloating.  Without actually seeing real signs of Mr. Terrific losing his smarts, the emotional impact of it is lost, making you feel as if he’s in no real danger.  But the worst handling has to be Alan Scott’s sudden jump into space.  Not only does it come out of nowhere, but it gets exactly one page to vaguely hint at the reason why it happens (the Starheart is in trouble—or something).