JLA: The Age of Wonder – Review

By: Adisakdi Tantimedh (writer), Galen Showman & P. Craig Russell (artists), Dave McCaig (colorist)

The Story: I say, up in the sky!  It’s a bird, it’s a plane—oh, wait, those don’t exist yet.

The Review: I wasn’t sure how to classify these DC Comics Presents books.  Even though they’re released as “issues,” they really represent a collection of previously printed series, like a trade or graphic novel.  Function trumps form in my book, so graphic novels they will be.  Now that DC’s reaching out to a wider audience, it’s an ideal opportunity to showcase some of their great storylines of the past, and remind us why they’ve remained relevant for so many years.

The very concept of the Elseworlds imprint reveals how deeply rooted in the social conscious DC’s characters are.  Most people are well acquainted with their iconography and origins, and writers can use that familiarity to their advantage by crafting stories where we know from the start who the characters are and what motivates them.  This leaves our attention free to focus on the story’s premise and its underlying message.

To that, we must look first to the period, which spans the Second Industrial Revolution, one where America was at the very forefront.  It is significant that this technological era was the last to be characterized as a “revolution.”  While later decades yielded undoubtedly remarkable products, these largely built upon inventions inspired into being in the late 19^th century.  Never before had progress advanced so quickly and with such enthusiastic acceptance and popularity.

Now imagine the introduction of superhumans to this equation.  In any circumstance, they’d have a destabilizing effect on the world, but here, in a clever twist by Tantimedh, Superman and his ilk seem more like sideshows to an age that had more than enough marvels to wonder at.  If anything, our heroes only accelerate these groundbreaking events, and even then, not by much.  Even though in this world the Germans launch the first atom bomb against another nation, they do so in 1911, less than forty years before us Americans did the same thing for real in WWII.