Geoff Johns

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The fourth (and final) volume of JSA by Geoff Johns finally catches events up to what was collected back in book two; in that book, Captain Marvel and the Rick Tyler Hourman were members of the team, and we finally see them join here! If you're making a definitive series of collections, I feel like you could make a much better effort at getting the order right.

Collecting issues aside, the series finally hit its groove for show more me in this collection. I've struggled with it up until now, but I enjoyed most every storyline in this volume. It opens with "Stealing Thunder," where the Ultra-Humanite has put his brain into Johnny Thunder's body in order to access the power of the Thunderbolt. First there's a pretty decent character-focused prologue (which nicely wrongfoots you about what has happened to Johnny), and the story itself does a good job of focusing on the personalities of individual JSA members. It jumps ahead several months, to when the Earth is an Ultra-Humanite-controlled dystopia, and a small group of heroes remains free of his control. So we follow the members of this group, and it's all handled pretty well. We even get an issue that focuses on former Injustice Society member Icicle, a villain who's immune to the Ultra-Humanite's control and becomes an uneasy ally of the JSA. It's nice to see Rick Tyler (formerly of Infinity, Inc.) again, and the thing about him being able to spend one last hour with his dad, the original Hourman, is pretty neat.

After this, we get some character-focused one-offs. A Father's Day story parallels Rick meeting with his father, and Jakeem Thunder trying to track down his. I enjoyed this one. Then there's a story about a villain lusting after Power Girl, and it's as bad as all Geoff Johns–penned Power Girl stories. But then there's a decent story about an old Dr. Mid-Nite villain getting his grandson to commit crimes, and the JSA working together to stop him.

Finally, there's a multi-part story about time travel. Some characters go back to the 1940s and meet the original Mr. Terrific; this I really liked, especially the way Mr. Terrific immediately cottoned on to what was happening. Some other characters end up in Ancient Egypt with the original Hawkman and Black Adam, and this I found much less interesting. It does seem like the series is moving back in the direction of having Hawkgirl hook up with Hawkman, which I find profoundly dull and kind of creepy. The stuff about Black Adam's tortured past I don't really care for, because I know it goes pretty unpleasant places in stories like World War III.

Also the Hector-Hall-looking-for-Lyta subplot continues to be dead dull. It's a succession of plot beats, not a story about characters.

But overall, this is an effective team comic at this point. It helps that Leonard Kirk is an absolutely solid artist. Not "flashy," but good personality and good storytelling and good action, the exact kind of artist a nuts-and-bolts team title like this needs. I've liked him ever since his Captain Britain and MI13 days for Marvel. The real shame is that this series of collections ended with this volume; even though DC did collect all of JSA and Justice Society of America vol. 3 in a set of three JSA by Geoff Johns Omnibuses, their "re-cutting" of the run as a series of trade paperbacks ended here, only partway through the contents of what had been JSA by Geoff Johns Omnibus, Volume Two. So having read issues #1-45 of this series via Hoopla, I am going to need to track down #46-87 some other way! (Also it seems clearly criminal that this series was called JSA by Geoff Johns when in the end, David Goyer wrote as many of the collected issues as Johns did... if not more!)

The Justice Society and Earth-Two: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

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

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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Wow. There’s a lot going on in this. We start out by following the story of Simon Baz, a character who I definitely thought I wouldn’t like, and now I really, really like, which surprised me (because really I only really really like the John Stewart Green Lantern (and Guy Gardner is sorta growing on me). He manages to blow up an abandoned factory, and then get shipped off to who knows where (Guantanomo Bay?) because he’s Muslim and so everyone is assuming that the bomb in the back of show more the van he stole was his. But, then there’s the twist (which I assumed was going to come at some point or another), the ring, in this case Hal/Sinestro’s ring, chose him and suddenly, he’s a Green Lantern.

So, we get to see a bit of B’DG who comes looking for Hal’s ring and finds Simon. We also get to meet an interesting Agent Coulson type guy named Franklin Fed, a cool character who I would have liked to see more of. There’s a bit of the Third Army storyline, but, for the most part the baddie in this particular collection of issues is The First Lantern, Volthoom (awesome name). He has awesome powers, he can mess with time, make and unmake people’s lives, and boy is he pissed because The Guardians have been using his power (and therefore also keeping him in an energy bubble, yes, where can that go wrong) to fuel the Third Army.

Hal and Sinestro meanwhile are stuck in something called the Chamber of Shadows, or perhaps they’re in Black Hand’s Black Lantern Ring, I was fuzzy on that. But, they’re somewhere where there are lots and lots of dead people. I won’t spoil what comes after that, and how Sinestro and Hal get out (two different ways). But, I really liked that part of the story.

As usual, since this is a Green Lantern story there’s the big ole fight at the end, with the Earth Lanterns playing a pivotal role, (I am very glad that Kyle has his own series, ‘cause, I do like the idea of a White Lantern), not to mention Sinestro switching sides at least ten times (okay, maybe a bit of an exageration, only five or six times…).

I wasn’t sure what to think of the very end of everything. Does DC really want to hook those characters into those futures, for sure? I guess since they had someone else telling the Earth Lanterns’ future stories they can take it back, but, I always worry when a writer or writers set a character’s future in stone, it makes the character suddenly less malleable.

Overall I really loved the TPB. I’m slowly appreciating the police force of the galaxy stories just a little more, they’ll never be above the Batman (or Woman/Girl/Bat Family) stories, or the Superman stories, or Green Arrow stories, but, I like what they’ve done with them so far in this New 52 reboot.

I got this advanced galley through Netgalley on behalf of DC Entertainment. show less

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The Book as a Whole
This book ties into Forever Evil, an event where the Crime Syndicate (i.e., the Evil Justice League) temporarily took over the Earth. As a result, most of DC's monthly titles were "taken over" by supervillains-- like, Action Comics #23.2 featured General Zod. Yes, there were decimals in the numbering. Some series were taken over four times, some just once. One presumes this was in proportion to show more popularity; it's easier to get someone to buy four extra issues of Action Comics than of Swamp Thing. These vary in type: some show what the villain in question was doing during Forever Evil, some show random other adventures of the villain, some show the origin story of the villain, some do more than one. I'd guess that more than half aren't even stories, but just set-up: leading into Forever Evil itself, or a Forever Evil spin-off, or just leading into a forthcoming issue of an ongoing where said villain is going to turn up. Like when I reviewed The New 52 omnibus, I'm going to tackle each individual grouping of issues, since there are too many to look at each on its own.

Justice League (Darkseid, Lobo, Dial E, Secret Society, Deadshot, Killer Frost, Shadow Thief, Black Adam, the Creeper, Eclipso, Black Manta, Ocean Master, Desaad, Solomon Grundy, Grodd, Reverse-Flash, the Rogues, Count Vertigo, Arcane, Trigon, Deathstroke, the Cheetah, First Born)
If I learned anything from this section, it's how few people should be allowed to touch the New Gods: to stories featuring Darkseid and Desaad are so mundane as to completely miss the point of the characters. Darkseid doesn't need an origin story, he's "the Tiger-Force at the core of all things! When you cry out in your dreams-- it is Darkseid that you see!" How can such a character have a youth and a backstory? It makes him mundane to give him a motivation, and Darkseid should never be mundane.

The stories that stuck out to me positively in this section were the Dial E one-- I didn't get it, but it sure was imaginative, with a battle of constantly transforming hero and villain, accompanied by constantly changing art style-- and the Shadow Thief one. I'd never even heard of this character, but this was surprisingly interesting and nuanced origin for her, accompanied by some great art. On the other hand, I wish Geoff Johns would leave Black Adam well alone and give someone else a chance with him; surely, ten years of dominating the character's depiction is enough.

Superman (Cyborg Superman, Zod, Lex Luthor, Metallo, Bizarro, Brainiac, H'el, Parasite, Doomsday)
Superman villains with links to Krypton get old fast, because Krypton gets old fast. I want to see Superman blazing a light for the future, not fighting the ghosts of his past. So Cyborg Superman or Zod or H'el or Doomsday alone might have been fine, but reading all four in quick succession was dull-- I was dead tired of seeing Jor-El pontificate shit. Most everything here ranged from boring to incomprehensible, but I was surprised to enjoy the Parasite story, I guess because of Aaron Kuder's unification of art and story, and the Lex Luthor tale was a decent example of its genre, even if dealing with old ground (some beats were straight out of Brian Azzarello's old Lex Luthor mini).

Green Lantern (Relic, Mongul, Black Hand, Sinestro)
Evidence continues to mount for my thesis that the more Geoff Johns Green Lantern comics I read, the less I want to read them all. Mongul is still dumb, the Sinestro comic was dull, and the two new-to-me villains were completely uninteresting.

Batman (the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, Bane, Two-Face, the Court of Owls, Ra's al Ghul and the League of Assassins, Killer Croc, the Ventriloquist, Mr. Freeze, Clayface, the Joker's Daughter, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, the Scarecrow, Man-Bat)
These stories are more dependent on the Forever Evil set-up than most in this book, making them less interesting than most. Many of them have Batman's villains being given chunks of Gotham city to control, but none really do anything interesting with it. I did like the Riddler story, which captured the genuine inquisitiveness I like about the character, and the cameo of the Riddler in the largely incomprehensible Scarecrow tale was another high point. But so many of these were warmed-over origin stories or pointless brutality or both-- the Ventriloquist and Harley Quinn and Joker's Daughter stories were particularly bad on this point. (Especially the Joker's Daughter... ugh.) I also enjoyed the Killer Croc story for him making his own subterranean community he genuinely seemed to care about.

The State of Villainy
Speaking of "pointless brutality," I get that these are all villains... but do they have to be so dark? So many of them are ridiculous murder machines, killing hundreds at a stroke, which makes DC's heroes look awful for not being able to catch them. So many have deep traumas in their childhoods, especially abuse, in a way that stops being explanatory and starts just becoming lazy. Obviously villains are going to do bad things, but so many DC villains are just sadists who are excessively violent, and the sameness begins to get dull after a while. Trying to make me take all of your villains seriously eventually makes me take none of them seriously. What I wouldn't give for a Condiment King or a Wurstwaffe among this bunch. Or even many of these same characters as they existed in the 1980s, before they became murder machines.

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