Paul Kupperberg

Ragnarok is a prose novel originally intended for publication in early 2006, supposed to be the first part of a JSA trilogy from iBooks. However, the owner of iBooks died in a car crash and his company limped on for a bit before going into bankruptcy. The manuscript was due to go to the printers when everything came to a halt. Fourteen years later, the author, Paul Kupperberg (writer of many DC comics, but most relevant to this project, a couple issues of All-Star Squadron) was able to finally get the book released through indie publisher Crazy 8 Press.

It is actually set during Geoff Johns’s JSA, a bit before the events of Infinite Crisis (more on that later, though), and it features the JSA line-up of that time: Green Lantern, the Flash, Mr. Terrific, Power Girl, Jakeem Thunder, Sand, Wildcat, Stargirl, and so on. The book chronicles an encounter between the Justice Society and the Injustice Society, here led by the Wizard. The Injustice Society is trying to hunt down the Spear of Destiny and release a Norse god; the Spear of Destiny is of course the artifact Hitler used to keep American superheroes out of Nazi-occupied Europe according to All-Star Squadron, and there's an extended flashback in the middle of the book chronicling what happened to the Spear after the end of the war. It also ties into Last Days of the Justice Society of America, as part of the Wizard's plan is to send the JSA back into Ragnarok.

Kupperberg is primarily, I believe, a comics writer, and overall a solid one, the kind of comics writer who is not distinctive enough to be a favorite, but who typically turns in work that, well, works. I do have fond memories of his Starfleet Corps of Engineers novella Sargasso Sector, which would have been written around this same time, but I didn't find this book very gripping.

Superheroes in prose is a very tricky thing, and I've found that few have managed it well (just Elliot S. Maggin and Marv Wolfman, to be honest). Overall, basically, the book is fine. Many of the characters have little moments of development, but they are pretty generic and don't really feel like they arise out of the plot and themes of the novel, nor does it feel like much is ever at stake for them. The story is a bit slow considering how long it is, and the action doesn't jump off the page. This isn't to say it's terrible or anything; I found it a diverting way to spend a couple days. But it did feel to me like the promise of a JSA novel is a bit more than what we got here: these are characters with more depth and history than your average DC superhero, and I would have liked to have seen that explored in a more novelistic way, while what we have here feels more like a comic on the page, not really playing to the strengths of the medium.

I did enjoy, though perhaps it was a bit too long, a flashback to the JSA after V-E Day, drawing a lot on retcons established in All-Star Squadron and other post-Crisis stories. (For example, the Hippolyta Wonder Woman turns up, and her affair with Ted Grant is mentioned.) That period stuff is always a win for me. There's another flashback that didn't work for me, though, which is to the events of Last Days. Near the end of the novel, the Wizard tries to send the JSA back into Ragnarok, so we get a flashback showing us the original events of that story. Specifically, the flashback tries to emphasize why Alan Scott would really really not want to go into this. But a flashback only a couple chapters before the climax of your novel really disrupts the pacing, and the groundwork it lays would have been better laid earlier, in more detail. A good idea, but needed more to support it.

The book as a book is clearly small press, and could have used some better typesetting and proofreading: some em-dashes are left as two hyphens, for example, and sometimes the book shifts into the present tense for a single paragraph.

I do, of course, have some continuity issues. The book has to take place after JSA #50, because Power Girl knows that her Atlantean backstory is false, which is something she learns in that issue. It has to take place before JSA #59, because that's the issue where Captain Marvel leaves the team. However, from issue #50 to #64, Sand isn't present in the JSA because he's been turned into actual sand—so there's no actual time where the line-up present in this book all exists.

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