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Malk tells you what he thinks of The New 52 Justice League.
A lot of people have contentions with the New 52, but I feel like it was a good choice. I could take or leave the continuity reboot, but the announcing of new comics like that with the proper publicity was a good choice. The success of the project has simply proven that continuity and accessibility isn't an issue with comics so much as publicity and image is.
And the big winner in this has been Geoff Johns Justice League. Topping the charts every time, there's no doubt this book has been a financial success. No doubt it's due to it's star power. I'm not just talking about having some of the world's finest heroes (and Aquaman) in it. This book is written by Geoff Johns, one of the biggest writers in the business, and drawn by Jim Lee whose art has practically become the standard for comics since he impressed the world with his work on x-men. So, how does this star-studded book hold out?
You know when you see a movie where a kid is reading a comic and the comic is lots drawings of people punching each other with garish bright colors and panels that are really disjointed to each other? That's pretty much what this comic is. It's the epitome of what people who don't read superhero comics think superhero comics are.
When asked about his comic 'Nextwave' Warren Ellis said that it was a pure distillation of superhero comics, all action and lacking emotion. What was affectionate irony from Ellis is sad reality here. There's no emotional weight or sense to what is happening. It's exemplified in a truly baffling scene where Batman unmasks himself for Green Lantern for no adequate reason. The dialogue states that it's because they're the two normal ones in the group (so long as you don't count several billion dollars in gadgets and a magic ring which is only limited by your imagination) and they have to stick together. An unmasking can be a powerful moment in a comic book, especially when you're dealing with a character so wrapped in dual identity as Batman, but there's no real build-up or character exploration for why this happens. It just happens because it does. This is also topped off with a statement from Batman that the Justice League 'needs to stop playing baseball and start playing football.' What the hell does that even mean?
The character work is wonky and awkward all around. Attempts to characterize each of the Justice League members is shoe-horned in around action scenes which make no sense. In the middle of an action scene Hal brushes his hand against Wonder Woman's lasso and starts babbling on about his father issues in the middle of a fight scene. The only real establishing aspects of Superman as a character we get are from him beating the crap out of parademons with a gleeful smile on his face which is actually kind of creepy. Batman inexplicably figures out exactly how the Green Lantern ring works from a single look after palming that particular piece of semi-sentient hyper technology bonded to a particular person right off of Hal's hand. There's also a ridiculous line given by Hal Jordan where he berates the Flash for giving away clues about his secret identity and calls him 'Barry' in the same sentence. This isn't establishing characters. This is making a mess with a pen.
Darkseid is probably the worst off because while all the other have terrible, awkward dialogue at least it's something. Darkseid's only role in this entire comic is to punch things. It's like Geoff Johns was told he was writing for Doomsday and then hurried just scribbled a replacement name when he found out the villain was supposed to be Darkseid. Why he's come to earth or what his exact goals are never get explored, so you only know what he's doing if you've read previous comics. Did no one see a problem with this?
The dialogue is consistently turgid as Johns tries to push in character-establishing lines as often as quickly as possible in between all the punching going on. Subtlety was never Johns' strong point but Stan Lee after three bottles of absinthe would write more subtle dialogue than this. The dialogue is filled with the same kind of quick-fire lines that Stan Lee (and to a lesser extent Chris Claremont) were known for, but their awkward dialogue had something of a charm to it and at least sounded like things human beings would say most of the time. It's all summed up in Issue 6 to where, after the day is saved, a child calls the group the Superfriends. Why would the child call them that? What reason is there other than to remind us of the old cartoon and instill nostalgia? In this comic that is a valid story reason to put something in.
The high point is definitely the art, which isn't saying as much as it should. While Lee's artwork is still as slick and eye-catching as ever, it's hard to make these designs look good. The armor-designs of the suits are aesthetically unappealing, and in the case of Aquaman and Superman don't actually make any sense. On the top of that, there's just a cognitive disconnect between each panel where I lose my bearings and have to look at the page for a few minutes to completely understand what's going on. Admittedly, this might be because Lee has to work around Johns' script. I'd say at times they're trying to go for story compression but that doesn't work for a story that only has three of the Justice League appear in the first book.
The book has nothing to it. In my mind, it's actually worse than the misogynist tripe that is Winnick's Catwoman and Red Hood & The Outlaws. At least there was a substance to those comics: A terrible substance but a subtance nonetheless. As much as I hate the choices, it makes a certain amount of logic for Catwoman to be a softcore porn comic and Red Hood to be something cooked from the mind of thirteen-year-old who thinks Gears of War is really deep. There's no logic whatsoever to why Justice League is the way it is. Nothing memorable or coherent happens and the only reason the Justice League actually gets formed is because it's an origin story and the Justice League needs to be formed.
This book is a disservice to the characters in it, the skill of writer Geoff Johns who has done much better work, a disservice to the talent of Jim Lee, a disservice to the much better team books DC is releasing, a disservice to superhero comics, and a disservice to the very concept of storytelling. This is not how comic books should be viewed by the general public and it certainly isn't the way comic books should be.
Comments
As far as I can parse it means working as a team instead of going up to bat fight one by one like a shonen anime. But yeah it's stuff like this that makes me only give a shit about Batman, Animal Man, and Swamp thing in the new 52.
As for the whole continuity thing, well I've gripped before about how DC has dropped the ball with the reboot. Because really it didn't reboot things, so much as slap new costumes on folks and bring back a few bits of the Silver Age.
Thank you, dear guinea pigs.
What he said, but with more Juan-style snideness.
I've said before that there are really good comics out there in the New 52.
Just not... you know... this one.
Oh there are. Scott Snyder's Batman's pretty damn good so far.
But a lot of the problems with the reboot is simply that it's exactly the kind of thing that later down the line makes people less likely to buy DC comics. Not just that, but I also feel that it simply would have been better to do something akin to Marvel's Ultimate universe, without fucking up previous continuity, events and series and which would normally get more readers.
Except Ultimate wasn't as successful as this was, initially at least.
And really, I think worrying about continuity is something that things can get too anal about. While I don't want to ditch it altogether I'm much more concerned with if a story's actually good.
Very little earnestly changed with New 52. It was just a marketing ploy.
I can accept stories not following the big cosmical schemes that DC sets up. I barely care about stuff like the Multiverse, or universe, or whatever it is now. But it's kind of hard to enjoy a story or a series knowing it will go nowhere when the editors decide they need to make it all go away in order to attain a new public. Somehow.
See the thing about the reboot that annoys me is that it's the nth time in the last few years the DC universe has decided it needs some big fundamental shake up and changing of things that have come before. Which is fine if they had actually decided to stick to that idea instead of picking and choosing bits of continuity that they like. Like Batman and Green Lantern #1s? They don't read like a new issue into the series, they read like Batman and Gl #745, continuations of all the stuff that has gone before. If they had just called it a relaunch I could get behind that, but calling it a reboot is disengenious when it will be the same stuff as before as long as that stuff was selling well. Which is even more confusing when you look at stuff like Wonder Woman or Justice League or Batgirl or Flash, stuff that actually has received an overhaul to some extent.
But I digress. The whole reboot and big cosmic shake up leading up to it felt incredibly unnecessary. We all know continuity doesn't matter as much as people like to gripe about, but picking and choosing what people like for a reboot and then resetting things to silver age standards is irksome. Especially when at the rate DC is going, you know they will get pull another cosmic reboot dealy in a few years to try to boost series.
If DC had just wrapped up previous plotlines last summer and then relaunched everything at #1 and just called it a relaunch, I could have gotten behind that idea.