Mark Waid

This was billed as an “event” by Marvel, but it kinda isn’t. Technically, three different Marvel teams do cross: Avengers (led by Captain America/Falcon), Avengers Unity Division (Captain America’s Uncanny Avengers), and the U.S. Avengers (fka Avengers Idea Mechanics).

The Earth has been stolen by two Elders, who have chosen it as a battlefield for a contest between the mysterious Challenger’s resurrected Black Order and the Grandmaster’s Lethal Legion. Being moved from its orbit show more has thrown the planet into chaos and the various teams are called upon for near-constant search and rescue, but they are seriously undermanned when many of their number are somehow frozen in stasis. The heroes are “obstacles” on the playing field for the two competing teams who are trying, naturally, to capture four MacGuffins.

Funny enough, No Surrender was more like the original Secret Wars than the 2015 Secret Wars, and it was far more entertaining. The three teams are not used to working together, there was a lot of clashing personalities, and then there’s the question of who should lead. And, who is this new “founding” member of the Avengers, Voyager? The reveal of who she really is was predictable right from the start, but how she was woven into the story was still clever. The teams do finally figure out what is happening and begin working together against ALL the villains. And this is why I thought the story was so good – seeing our heroes do what they do best. Plus, I have always liked the character of Quicksilver, but he so rarely gets a good story to work in. Here, he's not only important to the story, there is still more to come for him in the forthcoming "Quicksilver: No Surrender".

Overall, I thought this was a fantastic read. I loved the character interactions, the fights were inventive and had good use of character abilities, and the story was solid without the doom & gloom/end of the universe pall hanging over everything like so much of the last few years of Marvel. I want to escape, see the heroes save the day – and they did. show less

You know a series is creatively bankrupt when it starts bringing in secret relatives for the characters to fluff out the story. And this volume doubles down on that concept. Oof.

Everything happening in the book right now feels like it is intended to simply stretch it out. I'm glad the next volume will bring it all to a close.

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations (and discussion of the book's relevance to the Blackhawks) on my blog.

This book comes from a (somewhat odd, in retrospect) period of DC history where Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman were not founding members of the Justice League, thanks to various changes in continuity introduced following Crisis on Infinite Earths. Thus, the main characters are the Flash (Barry Allen), Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Black Canary (Dinah Laurel show more Lance), Aquaman, and the Martian Manhunter. The story chronicles the first year of the JLA, picking up from them fighting off an alien invasion. They organize as a group, face various crises, discover that the alien invasion they fought off is not quite over, try (and fail) to recruit Superman, and learn about each other and themselves and how to work as a team.

I loved it. This is, as far as I am concerned, perfect superhero comics. This should be of little surprise to anyone familiar with the other work of the creative team; Mark Waid is, in my opinion, one of the all-time greats, able to unite continuity with characterization in really compelling ways. I haven't read much by his frequent collaborator Brian Augustyn, but Waid sings his praises in the intro, so clearly they are simpatico. Definitely also simpatico is Barry Kitson; Kitson came out of the UK comics scene (specifically, of course, Transformers), but really won himself over to me with his amazing five-year run on L.E.G.I.O.N., where he went from pencilling the title to plotting it and then scripting it. That was, I believe, where he first worked with Waid, who scripted the title for a year. After JLA: Year One, the two would work together on the excellent Legion of Super-Heroes "threeboot".

All of this is to say, I think this creative team was entirely on the same page, and what was on that page is beautiful. I like my superhero comics to be character-driven and fun, and this is undoubtedly both. One of the benefits of this odd team is that they have a lot of good hooks for characterization, especially early in their superheroic careers. Aquaman is trying to adjust to living on the surface world, where he feels like an alien of sorts; I liked the idea that he mumbles compared to people from the surface because of how sound propagates more loudly underwater.

I think Hal is probably the one who gets the fewest character moments, actually, but he's fine, even if the playboy thing is laid on a bit thick. (I do, however, think the decision to call Tom Kalmaku "Pie" was not really any better than "Pieface" surely.)

Black Canary is a real highlight of the book, which as a Dinah Laurel Lance stan I very much appreciated. Post-Crisis, Black Canary was split into two characters: Dinah Drake (later Dinah Drake Lance), who was the Justice Society's Black Canary, and Dinah Laurel Lance, her daughter. But in most of the comics I've read, this is a fact of backstory, not something dealt with in the narrative; one of the benefits of going back to Black Canary's origin is actually seeing how she relates to her mother. The elder Dinah wants to mold the younger into her own image, but the younger Dinah must find her own path. There is a lot of good JSA stuff in the book; Dinah is often comparing her new colleagues to the heroes she grew up alongside, but also she discovers that those heroes weren't so perfect, as Waid and Augustyn make good use of the revelation from Starman that the elder Dinah had an affair with Ted Knight, the original Starman.

I think Barry Allen's thread is less involved than either Black Canary's or Martian Manhunter's, but Waid and Augustyn and Kitson do well by him. (Which I guess makes sense, as they cowrote an acclaimed and long run on The Flash, even if it was about Wally West.)

The other real highlight is Martian Manhunter, even more of an outsider than Aquaman, but also able to pass thanks to his shapeshifting and telepathy. His discomfort at seeing the way his teammates treat the aliens they fight, his need to better understand them that goes places that violate their privacy, his belief that they and humanity can do better, they're all very well done.

What really makes the characterization sing, though, is the interactions. There are lots of moments between them all: John and Aquaman, Hal and Barry, Barry and Dinah, and so on, all the permutations you can think of, perfectly rendered. This is a team of people, in their highs and their lows; you understand why the team (briefly) turns on Martian Manhunter, but the moment where he needs to tune himself telepathically into an alien device, and the whole team comes together to help him do it is a genuine punch-the-air moment, I loved it.

Beyond that, the book is just fun and inventive, taking those old Silver Age stories and filtering them through a modern perspective without being either overly nostalgic or cynical. (Weird to think, actually, that this book is now thirty years old, which is about how old the original Justice League stuff was when this was written.) We see Vandal Savage, we see the Doom Patrol, we see Snapper Carr, we get cameos from Oliver Queen and Maxwell Lord. At the end of the book, the invading aliens trap every superhero on Earth in a prison, which gives the JLA its chance to shine—but also means that once the JLA liberates the others, we get glimpses of all the superheroes of the Earth at this time. (In some cases, I suspect the continuity timing doesn't add up, but who cares.) I found that each issue of this series just flew by, perfect superhero comics. show less

Kingdom Come is kind of like Watchmen, only with real DC superheroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and all the rest. It was published in 1997, is less than half the size of Watchmen, and is absolutely fantastic.

The story takes place some time after the classic "metahumans" have retired, and the world is now being overrun by a new breed of superhero. The kind that America asked for, the kind that doesn't have any rules about not killing its enemies. Unfortunately, they also don't care show more about human collateral damage. The old superheroes come out of retirement to try to set things to right. The story is told in the form of a Christmas Carol-esque journey taken by a pastor and a cloaked spirit who demands that he judge the superheroes and say who will be punished in the end.

The characterization is very good. My favorite character is Batman, which comes as no surprise to me. The art is very good too, not drawing attention to itself while being colorful and descriptive. There are a lot of large panels that I really loved looking at.

The plot is amazing, really grabs you by the throat and makes you listen to what it's saying... It asks questions like "Why do we fight?" "Why should we?" "Who is a part of the human race, and what does that mean?" I was on the edge of my seat the entire book, desperate to know how it ended, and it certainly delivered on its promise of a grand finale.

Reread: It's just as good the second time through, if not better, especially now that I'm more familiar with the minor DC characters that make appearances. One of my favorite graphic novels of all time. show less