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).