Writer Geoff John’s The New Golden Age tries to straddle the line of being frustratingly impenetrable for casual reads and just compelling enough for people to check out the new Justice Society of America series, Stargirl and whatever big DC events are coming down the line. But even if you’ve done all the required reading this comic connects to—Flashpoint, Flashpoint Beyond, Doomsday Clock, a passing knowledge of Helena Wayne as Huntress, the JSA, various Doctor Fates and whatever the hell is going on with Watchmen—you’re still going to need to draw out a chart to make sense of it all.
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In an effort to extend the story’s reach across centuries, Johns has the book jump across a dozen different time periods with a wide variety of characters. But he only provides a specific year some of the time, while elsewhere simply giving readers lines like “Thirteen Years Ago” and “Eighteen Years From Now” while you’re left to guess when “now” is supposed to be relative to “then.” Does that sound confusing enough yet? Now try piecing that together without having done all of the required reading.
On the one hand, I can’t entirely blame Johns for taking his own crack at timeline-spanning “Dawn of X”-style storytelling. Even as the most casual of X-Men fans, I remember just how much praise was heaped on Jonathan Hickman for how he constructed that run. But all of that was performed across the span of 12 issues and two series before breaking off into nearly a dozen others. All of this is attempted in just one issue and all of it effectively boils down to “someone is kidnapping the children of superheroes and trying to kill every Doctor Fate” and “we’re focusing on Helena Wayne’s Huntress again.” Everything else feels like static readers must drown out to focus.
If there’s any saving grace to the comic it’s that its team of artists does a great job differentiating the different time periods. And there are some legitimately excellent panels ranging from the hyper-violent to the serene to the bizarre. So if you can’t make heads or tails of this comic book for its first 25 pages, at least it looks great.
Perhaps to some The New Golden Age will be the same kind of refreshing one-shot DC Rebirth was years ago. But if you’re not particularly familiar or emotionally connected to these characters, you might tap out long before the comic tries to make its point.
Published by DC Comics
On November 8, 2022
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Diego Olortegui, JP Mayer, Scott Hanna, Jerry Ordway, Steve Lieber, Todd Nauck, Scott Kolins, Vikto Bogdanovic, Brandon Peterson and Gray Frank
Colors by Nick Filardi, John Kalisz, Matt Herms, Jordan Boyd, and Brad Anderson
Letters by Rob Leigh
Cover by Mikel Janin
