With “Justice League of America”, Geoff Johns has been looking to give some B-level heroes a chance to shine and a title that can sell well with them in it. How much the book has succeeded thus far depends on how tired you are of superheroes going at each others throats rather than the bad guys.
Written by Geoff Johns
Illustrated by David Finch• A new Secret Society is forming-—but which of its members has the power to attack the Justice League from within?
Poor Stargirl. She just wants to go out and be a hero, but Amanda Waller’s stuck her with the press. She’s the face of the team. And it’s a face that Waller wants to protect from harm rather than face a public disaster. It’s actually sort of fitting that she’s kept apart from the JLA, because the team she is supposed to be representing is not the one that has appeared in the pages of this comic for 3 issues now. That is, they don’t seem interested in acting like a team. (More on that later.) The JLA is out fighting robotic facsimiles of the real “Justice League” members, because if you’re not going to have the JLA actually fight the Justice League just yet, you might as well make it look like they are. The whole while, and for the rest of the issue, they’re at each others throats or punching one another to work through their differences. And when it comes time for them to stage a conflict with one of their members, they can’t even accomplish that without accidentally causing another in-fight.
In recent years over at Marvel Comics, it has been extremely vogue to pit hero against hero. Whether they were Skrulls in the form of heroes, on either side of the Civil War, or literally ‘Avengers vs. X-Men’, it seems like you can’t read a big event these days without “hero vs. hero” being a major draw. There’s plenty of drama to be culled from heroes who don’t see eye-to-eye having to team-up against a greater evil, but the current flavor of the decade seems to be interpersonal conflict. DC is gearing up to the ‘Trinity War’, which seems to be yet another event based around the idea that these heroes just can’t get along. But really, this sort of conflict has been ubiquitous throughout ‘The New 52’. We’ve already had a Batman/Green Lantern vs. Superman fistfight in the early issues of “Justice League”, a war that put Aquaman in a fulcrum position with “Throne of Atlantis”, and the disagreements caused by the Superman/Wonder Woman relationship coupled with Batman’s stylishly appointed briefcases of team weaknesses. It’s getting to the point where you can’t read a team book without one hero punching another one in the face. So when Steve Trevor gasps, eyes wide, and says, “The Justice League…versus the Justice League?!” – it comes off as comical. It just happens so damn often.
If this sort of thing is your bag, then there’s plenty for you in “JLA” #3. For the rest of us, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before in much more effective ways. Writers like Mark Waid and Grant Morrison have written these characters before, highlighting their differences without having them at each others throats all the time. Johns himself has even accomplished the same thing with “JSA” in the pre-Flashpoint years. That said, the market must bear out for these kind of stories. It’s a shame that it all feels so cyclical at this point. It’s a shame that Johns is stuck resorting to this to create conflict, when he could be spending more time fleshing out this “Secret Society” being formed. The decompression trend in comic books is alarming enough, but when you haven’t really introduced the true threat by the end of issue #3 it just feels like the book has no idea where its going.
The art from David Finch is his standard fare, but with some very odd things going on here and there. To highlight his strengths, his character work and ability to stage a fight scene are among the best in comics. He draws muscle-bound men and women getting into high velocity scraps with the best of them. Much like Bryan Hitch drawing cities reduced to rubble over on “Age of Ultron”, if you’re going to have a superteam just beating the crap out of everything, you might as well hire Finch to draw it. His action sequences tend to be sprawling, but extremely logical in that you can place every character in the scene. That said, I guess the colorist couldn’t, because here is robo-Superman fighting Martian Manhunter, who is colored the way Batman would be colored for one solitary panel:
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Later, when Vibe attacks the robots with his vibration powers, the recently beheaded robo-Wonder Woman is seen completely intact. It’s rare to see mistakes that glaring in a comic book and although one can mentally adjust, it’s still something that shouldn’t be overlooked. Note that this issue came out later than it was supposed to (seeing as it’s the only WTF-cover that we had yet to see). It’s hard to say whether art changes, delays, or errors were the cause, but these examples sure stuck out like a sore thumb.
Geoff Johns and David Finch seem to be attempting to make a darker team book. A place where misfits, B-listers, and morally questionable “heroes” will get together to take on problems that the Justice League can’t. The problem is two-fold. For one, Johns’ “Justice League” is already darkened with the ever-present tone of ‘The New 52’. “JLA” really doesn’t feel significantly darker than that. For two, the conflict is born out of hot-headed heroes having itchy trigger fingers, rather than true disagreements and honest-to-goodness conflicts of interest. In that way, “Justice League of America” will satisfy those that still get a kick out of the gimmick of seeing heroes tee off on one another. For everyone else, check back in when the Secret Society actually shows up.
Final Verdict: 3.8 – Pass.
