Justice Society of America #50 – Review

By: Too many to list—check out the review.

The Story: Look out Haggar of Metro City—the Flash is giving you a run for the money in the superhero mayor department.

The Review: This has been a good week for oversized, anniversary issues.  Like Action Comics #900, you get a good chunk of the title’s running events and then a healthy serving of short features a là the “annual” format.  In this case, regular writer Marc Guggenheim takes care of scripting duties for every piece, with a variety of artists to back him up.

“Cornerstone” feels more like a continuation of the DC Universe Legacies series, with its talk of the generational aspect between the Justice Society and Justice League of America.  It’s an old idea, one other writers have played with before, and with much greater deft than Guggenheim, who doesn’t really succeed in giving a new spin to the whole thing.  At least the script gets art treatment from George Pérez (with help from Scott Khoblish), whose style looks dated on most comics now, but really works with retro-stories like this one.

In “Infinitum”, which ties in with the main events on Justice Society, Guggenheim uses a dramatic style of narration to amp up the epic tone of his story, but it just comes off heavy-handed and not a little bit dumb: “The battle rages.  As it always does.  A never-ending battle.  Or so they say.”  Besides, the feature doesn’t tell you much about bald-and-bearded Degaton’s ultimate objectives with merging himself with his parallel Degatons (exactly as weird as it sounds), so it seems like a throwaway tale.  Freddie Williams II’s cartoony style doesn’t exactly help sell the drama Guggenheim’s going for, either.

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?