I can still remember the day I picked up Kingdom Come. I had heard about it, but never really gravitated too much towards it. On a rainy day, I found myself a copy and read it. I couldn’t put it down. Not only was the writing phenomenal (Mark Waid), but the art blew my mind. It still does. And after reading that book, I would never ever forget the name Alex Ross. Ever. I just couldn’t. I sought out more of his work and read all the little things I could. Heck, at this point, I can tell when something is done by him from a mile away. So, while I had heard a lot about a book entitled Justice, I had never actually seen a copy of it until one random day in a Borders. I immediately flipped through it’s three volumes. After that, I knew this was a book I had to read.
Justice is a truly epic tale of humongous proportions. Taking place on an alternate Earth with primarily the Silver Age cast of characters (despite it being a relatively new book by a few years), Justice is a story in which all the world’s villains rise up as the world’s saviors. Lex Luthor, Braniac, and Gorilla Grodd have organized every villain ever to be a part of the Legion of Doom, and all of them have coordinated their attacks to take out all of Earth’s humans while emerging as the saviors of the human race. They heal the wounded, allow the blind to see, and even create brand new floating cities for the human race to live in. All the while, all of our known heroes are alone and disbanded. Aquaman is completely missing, brutally beaten up by Black Manta. Green Lantern is completely off the grid. The Flash has been put into super speed and can’t stop running. And Superman? Superman is being triple teamed by Bizarro, Parasite, and Metallo. Meanwhile, all of the secret identity’s that were on Batman’s super computer have leaked, and the Dark Knight himself has been compromised in a mysterious way. Needless to say – our heroes? Totally screwed.
Of course, as the good always triumph, the heroes do eventually make their way through the darkness to rise up against the “good” villains. Joined by an impressively ginormous cast including Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Elongated Man, Elastic Man, Red Tornado, the Doom Patrol, the Metal Men, and Captain Marvel (one of Ross’ favorites), the heroes eventually beat back all the villains in one of the single most bad ass ways I’ve ever read in my entire life. Believe me – this book defines triumphant. Originally, I had a different image at the top of the review, but I deemed it as too spoilerly and replaced it with the one you now see (featured near the beginning of the book). But how they triumph… this, you gotta see. The book also pulls a queue from Infinite Crisis, and for those that remember the Joker’s role in the book, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about,.
Now, I should make a big note that those events I talked about took place back in August. It’s almost the end of October now. It has taken me about two months to read this book, and that’s really odd. Like I said, I worship the man’s artwork. But his writing style… oh, man. I don’t know what it is about it. He didn’t even actually write the script either. He wrote the story with Jim Krueger, and Krueger took over writing the script. But as awesome as it ended being in the end, I had such a hard time pushing through it. I really am not sure why. Now that I’m all done with it, I can easily say that I absolutely loved it. It just starts off so slowly. When it picks up, it picks up in full furious force and it doesn’t let you go, but until that point it sort of slowly trudges along. I think the reason for that is it’s entirely too wordy. There is a lot of description in the book of inner monologues, and as I spend at least a good minute gazing at Ross’ artwork (as in the example above) to take things in, all the extra thoughts make it move at a slower pace.
Continued belowThe writing is my only real complaint, though, and in all honesty, look at that art. The story ends up being great, and I kick myself for taking so long to finish it, but that’s not why I picked up the book. I picked up the book because of the artwork. So let’s take a minute and just look at Ross’ rendition of the Bat Cave at the top. Can you pick out everything he’s included in there? It’s astounding. My favorite favorite favorite thing is Thomas Wayne’s Bat costume framed in the lower right. That was such an amazing touch, and really speaks to Ross’ fandom of the old comics. The story itself is strictly a continuation of ideals from the Silver Age, and it’s apparent with Barry Allen still alive and kicking in the Flash suit. Each issue ends with a write-up titled “Secrets from Batman’s Computer” in which Ross gives sketches and full drawings of each of the heroes and villains, as well as a write-up of their origin told from Batman’s perspective. It’s in this that Ross and Krueger really display their knowledge of all the characters, and it makes it absolutely clear why they have such excellent handles on the characters. ESPECIALLY Captain Marvel, who I have recently developed a great appreciation for (although I do not look forward to reading The Trials of Shazam).
Now, you might be wondering why I both pan and adore the story in the book. As I say, on the one hand, it starts off pretty slow. On the other hand, the end pay off is incredible. It’s in this that I fully forgive a slow start. The book is in three trades (also a tad annoying, seeing as a 12 issue series can be put in one book easily), and as long as you remember the second two trades are incredible, pushing through the first shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve read further pieces of Ross’ work, and believe me, it’s not all as good as this. This is a truly wonderful superhero story featuring so much classic DC material in it, you’d sworn that it was actually commissioned by an over the top fanboy who was just dying to see all these characters tied to one another. But it’s not. It’s simply an ode to all these classic origins and stories of heroic that Krueger and Ross had loved, brought to us in a simply wonderful presentation. And needless to say, I want the Green Lantern image to the right as a poster on my wall somewhere. Good God, that’s gorgeous.
If you loved Kingdom Come as much as I did, then you’ll love Justice. It’s a story of loss and defeat as well as redemption and battles won. It’s an absolutely glorious super hero epic in 3 volumes and is definitely worth a read, especially if you’re already a fan of Ross’ artwork a la KC. As I said, the ending of the book gets truly epic, and while I don’t want to ruin anything for people who don’t yet know it – trust me. It’s 100% worth it.
