Jesùs Merino

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This volume of JSA by Geoff Johns (where every story is co-written by David Goyer, but I guess he doesn't rate) collects two story arcs from the main JSA comic and also the graphic novel JLA/JSA: Virtue and Vice and then some other stuff. What I am realizing is that I don't really care for Johns's approach to this book. First we have the seemingly obligatory storyline about a new Injustice Society, which like a lot of Geoff show more Johns stuff, is full of seemingly gratuitous violence in order to prove the situation is serious: he invents a whole Chicago superteam just to torture and brutally murder them, there's an evil Flash who runs through kids so fast they explode. It's just like... it's juvenile, and I don't read superhero comics to read about kids being murdered. I found it very hard to care.

The second big storyline is about a trip to Thanagar to resurrect Hawkman. I did really like Hawkworld, but Johns ignores any of its interesting complexities in favor of a melodramatic sub-Darkseid villain and a subplot about how a teenage girl just needs to give in and be romanced by an eighty-year-old man for the good of the universe.

This book isn't totally unlikeable. In between those two storylines, there's a decent done-in-one that gives us some much-needed character focus, and actually the Our Worlds at War tie-in issue was pretty good too. And I also enjoyed the Secret Files & Origins issue that leads into Virtue and Vice, as well as the early parts of Virtue and Vice itself. When Johns (and Goyer) want to write these characters hanging out and talking about things, they do a decent job... but it seems they rarely do. If you compare this to the characterful and deft way that Len Strazewski wrote the last JSA ongoing, this just doesn't compare; I have very little sense of these people as, well, people. Like I said, Virtue and Vice starts good, but it soon becomes Yet Another Apocalyptic Battle with huge masses of people dying violently... which I am sure will promptly never be mentioned again. I also don't care much for stories where heroes are mind-controlled to be evil, especially if they promptly become stupid.

Some other thoughts: I think Secret Files & Origins and Virtue and Vice are included out of sequence; suddenly Mr. Terrific is JSA chair, and Stargirl is living in Metropolis, and Captain Marvel is a member, and there's a new Hourman who I don't think is the new Hourman from the previous book. None of these things have happened in the actual JSA series yet. It amused me that suddenly Green Arrow is alive again, so he has to contend with the fact that Black Canary has moved on romantically since his death. Virtue and Vice had some good President Luthor stuff. The way the heroes swap places with the statues in the Rock of Eternity is pretty neat.

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Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

I picked this up because it covers some of the backstory of the New 52 version of Black Canary, and was released alongside volumes 2 and 3 of the New 52 Birds of Prey. The first and only volume of Team 7 is set five years in the past relative to them, and chronicles Dinah Drake's membership on the U.S. government special ops team known as Team 7. If you're looking to pick up this volume for backstory on Dinah, what you get show more here is a mixed bag. On the one hand, I liked the glimpses we get of between Dinah and her boyfriend Kurt Lance, especially in the first couple issues, where they go on a few missions together. They have a fun, playful banter, and the convince as a pair who like to both work and play together. Unfortunately, as the team assembles, the focus goes off their relationship, to the extent that it is revealed in an offhand comment from a teammate that they got married between issues.

An ongoing thread of Birds of Prey has been that Dinah is wanted for the murder of Kurt, which happened three years prior. Here, he dies five years ago in the heat of battle, when the team pours all its energy into Dinah's canary cry, and Kurt is among those killed in the blast. I can see why she would feel guilty, but there's no logical way she could have ended up wanted for murder based on what happened here. Plus, from a storytelling perspective, the death of Kurt just doesn't have the weight it needs to be effective, their relationship being too underdeveloped and the moment itself being too tossed off.

Aside from that, though, there's little to get out of reading Team 7. The team has too many members with too little personality; if I didn't already know the characters already from something else (Dinah, Amanda Waller, my least favorite DC character Deathstroke the Terminator), it was difficult for me to keep track of who they were or why I should care about them. Justin Jordan seems to assume you have some preestablished knowledge of them, too, such as in some confusing flashforwards about Deathstroke, and in some weird crosscutting between Team 7's base and a cybernetics research facility, which it took me over an issue to figure out were actually different places. (I think.)

The plotting is weird too. The first story has Team 7 discover a chemical formula based on the work of Dr. Jekyll(!) that turns people evil, i.e., into Eclipsos; they fight its victims on a floating prison, only to learn that Eclipso is gathering power on an island where he's imprisoned. How are these modern, science-based Eclipsos connected to the ancient, all-powerful Eclipso trapped inside a jewel? Who knows. Similarly, the jumps in the second storyline, about evil cybernetic organisms and the terrorist island of Gamorra, render it nearly incomprehensible. Like, why did some guy I don't care about suddenly become the superhero Majestic? How did Kurt Lance realize he had the power to enhance Dinah's powers? Where did this whole Gamorra thing come from anyway? It's a blur of pointless, baffling action.

Ultimately, this book has little to recommend itself beyond being a confusing piece in the puzzle of DC continuity; as a standalone tale, there's nothing in the storytelling or the characters to make it worth reading.

Stepping back for a second, can I say that I don't really care for what the New 52 did to Dinah? I understand why the legacy backstory of the post-Crisis universe may have been more complicated than was wanted for the streamlined New 52, but just making her into an ex-government agent is uninteresting and too like too many other New 52 DC characters. If nothing else, I would have liked to have seen the original Dinah Drake, black-haired florist by day, blond crimefighter by night, flirting with hapless detective Larry Lance, reinstated: it's fun and unique. (Why was Lance's name changed, anyway?) I don't mind revising continuity, but if you're going to nix an old backstory, you'd better have something at least just as interesting to replace it. What was done with Black Canary later in the New 52, making her into a crimefighting band leader (and giving her a much more stylish visual appearance) succeeds where the Team 7 reboot did not, even though it is also entirely different from what went before.

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I am so glad that I read the Action Comics book before this one, as unbeknownst to me it takes place five years earlier than the SUperman/Supergirl?Superboy comics.
George Perez spins a good yarn and would have gotten a fifth star out of me had this voume and its story been comprised of five issues instead of six. Since it was 144 pages, it would have been nicer to see some of this taken up with character development for a couple of minor characters, who instead develop in a page or show more two.
Still, worth reading and I look forward to the further adventures... show less

I, lover of all things Superman, a Superman apologist extraordinaire, gave this TPB two stars. *sigh* Yes, it was just that bad. Where to start. Perhaps with the good stuff. The new uniform is growing on me. I really liked the character of Miko (a reporter) and Perry's pretty much still Perry.

This was an Eradicator sort of story. I've never liked those, so maybe that made me be a bit harder on it than usual. But I agreed with Clark about tearing down the Daily Planet building. It was just show more plain wrong (is nothing sacred?). Not to mention the characters of Superman and Lois are just totally wrong too.

I do get that Superman can't stay in the fifties forever, but one of the things that I loved about Superman pre-New 52 reboot was that in a lot of ways his stories were timeless. This story is anything but timeless. show less