Monthly (Comic) Book Club - January - Justice18945
 If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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| #11 reveals the other tricks that the heroes had up their sleeves, like Superman actually being Shazam and Green Lantern using the yellow ring from Grodd. The payoff is that they can defeat some of the heavy-hitter villains easily. The downside, to me, is that John Stewart makes me wonder why all this happened at all. He just clears everyone of Brainiac's nanobots; why didn't Hal do it? Despite beating the villains, there are still obstacles to overcome. Brainiac is still missing with Aquaman's son, and Scarecrow has turned a city worth of normal people into a riot against the heroes and themselves. Although again I wonder about the logic of the situation. 'Every defensive blow will create a cripple!', says a villain who doesn't remember that very hero has bagged a run-of-the-mill bank robber at some point. To have Robin and a bunch of Bat-folks be concerned about if they can not maim or kill seems a bit much. |
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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xkonk private msg quote post Address this user | |
| #12 ends with the heroes saving the day, of course. And no one dies, not even Wonder Woman who is reborn from fresh clay. But on the whole I think the series disappoints. It set up such a compelling idea at the beginning and never followed up on it. And while it turned out to be in service of Brainiac's plan, the villains certainly seemed to do a pretty good job of turning things around for lots of people. If Batman's final monologue is meant to say that people can't have things given to them because they have to go through hardship to inspire others, that seems awfully cynical. It's only a step away from Luthor, who was willing to give Brainiac all the 'takers' if it left Earth with the best/toughest humans available. Ross' art is a saving grace, as usual. While I had some complaints here and there, there are also lots of great panels. The story is what's lacking here. |
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| The battle illustrations in issue 10 really shine but I agree that the new costumes make it difficult to recognize everyone. Unless you get a good look at their logo, most characters just look like metallic humanoids. Again, though, the book seems to brush against interesting themes but never takes the time to explore them. The issue begins with a letter from one of the healed civilians living in one of the villains’ cities. She tells us that she knows the leader was a villain but feels that what they’re doing now kind of makes up for it. That’s something the heroes have never provided an adequate response for in this series. I think the big sin was that Braniac will basically be kidnapping half the population and turning them into cyborgs or machines? It’s a danger that the series never really defined or driven home. The heroes have yet to address why they haven’t healed the sick or revived deserts. I!stead they find out that the villains are putting themselves in leadership of the cities, that by all accounts seem like great places, and that simply cannot stand. There is a bit of focus on the villains being unable to function as a group but it also feels like that’s not necessarily why they failed. It feels like they could just have easily succeeded and then gone their separate ways but instead they have a big throne room or something where they all hang out together so the heroes could attack them all at once. Oh and the Joker’s there just blowing stuff up for no real reason. |
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| There’s definitely a lot of stuff going on in issue 11 and I don’t feel like a lot of it was properly set up for the payoff to be as impactful as it is meant to be. Jon Stewart has been mentioned a few times but I have no idea why he is special as a Green Lantern and why it had to be him to eradicate the mind control worms. Hell, I don’t think he’s spoken more than a few words in the whole series, including this issue where he basically saves the world single-handedly. Oh and not only that, but he also wipes away the villains’ memory of the heroes’ identities. Talk about a Deus Ex Machina! No hard consequences there! The fight between Hal and Sinestro feels like it should be a big deal but this is like the second time they’ve seen each other in the series. Then you have smaller moments getting lost in all the noise, like that moment between Marvel and Black Adam. I hadn’t realized that Parasite had drained him and had to go back a few pages to find it. The story also seems to throw stuff at the reader because it would seem cool but without really devoting the time needed to explore it. We had the Plastic Man/Elongated man thing a few issues ago that didn’t amount to much. Then Scarecrow turns the city against the heroes. I agree that the threat of the heroes harming the civilians was a bit much but the heroes facing hundreds or even thousands of regular people is still a formidable challenge, except that it lasts all of a page and a half because Stewart magically clears their heads And now we have Braniac apparently turning the world’s weapons against the planet but the significance threat itself gets lost in all noise of the , again beautifully illustrated, battles. |
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| Yeah, Issue 12 wraps things up and the world is ready for a brighter future…I guess. It has a somewhat silver age feel, which I’m not surprised since a lot of Ross’s work seems to be a tribute to that time period, in the way everything gets wrapped up and the heroes win the day and everyone is okay. I agree that, barring mostly Brainiac’s transforming the general population into robots, the villains didn’t do a terrible job improving people’s lives. The heroes seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater and seem to dismiss any point the villains may have had just for the fact that they’re seen as villains. I agree that I’m not entirely sure what to take away from Batman’s final monologue. Is it that argument that things shouldn’t get easier because hardships build character? I’m reminded of that one meme  Then again, I don’t think anyone would accuse Batman of having turned out fine. The book touched upon a ton of potentially interesting themes but failed to explore them because it had to include so many characters on account of it being a Justice League book and to over-complicate the conspiracy to turn it into an event. Looking at the book’s release, this came out about 10 years after Ross’ Kingdom Come, which the collected edition covers draw a lot of inspiration from, and about five years after Earth X, which Ross didn’t illustrate but was involved with the story development. This is definitely the weakest of the three with more focus being paid to the story’s messy conspiracy plot than to any significant theme throughout the book. Again, I’m reminded a lot about Identity Crisis. However controversial some elements were, it had a theme and it hade stakes and it made them both clear to the reader. It was also a Justice League book so it also had a large cast but they weren’t spread so thinly as I felt they were here. Part of that was that this book wanted to follow the villains just as much as the heroes. The story didn’t really follow the JLA until about halfway through. Before then we were just watching the villains’ plan develop from the point of view of the heroes trying to stop them. |
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| Post 30 • IP flag post | ||
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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xkonk private msg quote post Address this user | |
Quote:Originally Posted by dielinfinite Identity Crisis, even given the things I didn't like, was a compelling read. I wanted to know what was going to happen, and the plot felt like it was moving forward. I was excited about the plot in Justice for about the first half of the series until it became clear they weren't going to touch on any of the interesting parts. I feel that having the whole thing be a Luthor/Brainiac plot took away from the story, because it lets everyone dismiss the whole thing as supervillain stuff. Astro City was much more thoughtful about topics like these and it rarely covered anything for more than an issue. |
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| @xkonk Totally agree. And speaking of Luthor and Braniac, I thought it was a little disappointing that the main villains ended up being some generic, bald, white guys. It’s a minor quibble but talk about visually uninteresting. I eas flipping through the bonus features and there was one sketch of Braniac with half his skin melted off revealing the robot inside. I really wish we could’ve seen something like that. And then there was the Joker that served absolutely no purpose in the book. He was just there because the joker is such a popular character. The promotional artwork depicts the Joker either front and center or apart from both the heroes and the villains. I guess in the end he was separate from the two but so much so that he didn’t matter. Hell, I don’t think any of the heroes even realized he was there   In the end, I guess we can both go on and on but the short of it is that the story disappointed. It had potential to explore something interesting but it never committed to it in favor of smashing heroes and villains together. The illustrations were gorgeous, as Ross’ work always is. I was not aware that the art was Ross’ painting over Doug Braithwaite’s pencils. |
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| Post 32 • IP flag post | ||
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If the viagra is working you should be well over a 9.8.
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xkonk private msg quote post Address this user | |
| I don't much care for the Joker either way, so I wouldn't have missed him if they left him out completely. But I'm sure there would have been a fan contingent that wondered why you had everyone in the DC universe there, including everyone's main villain, and not the Joker. | ||
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