Justice League #7: Review

While most reviews of last week's Justice League #7, the kickoff of a guest-artist arc and prelude to the upcoming "Villain's Journey" story, have focused on fill-in artist Gene Ha, it was in fact writer Geoff Johns who seemed a bit off his game this month. While Ha's style is markedly different from regular series artist Jim Lee, a fact that leaves the issue feeling maybe a bit jarring, his work was fluid and his page structures were dynamic and exciting. Years ago, my first experience with Ha was when he guest-penciled an issue of Gerard Jones' much-reviled Green Lantern series, featuring Hal Jordan facing off against Dr. Light. Again, his work was nothing like then-regular Green Lantern artist Mark "M.D." Bright and again he managed to leave his unique stamp on the issue without distracting from the script. Admittedly, Johns' script is generally stronger than Jones' was back in the day, but it has its issues. The heavy hand of the narrator's voice occasionally nudges its way over the line from "show" to tell" as it is guiding the story from point A to B. That said, he narrator in question appears to be the titular "villain" of the upcoming "Villain's Journey," and it's implied that, somehow, it's also the man whose book on the Justice League helped to catapult them to global fame and almost universal acceptance, as seen at the end of the last arc. This is quite a clever device on Johns' part, as those final pages of #6 were rather confusing. Why, I thought at the time, introduce a new and seemingly-important character in the final few pages of the story arc? As has been pointed out everywhere else on the Internet, Batman inexplicably rants about the "embarrassment" known as the Justice League International, demanding the team be shut down. For those keeping score at home, Batman is not only a member of the JLI but its biggest cheerleader, keeping characters like Booster Gold and Guy Gardner from shuttering the clubhouse and going back to their day jobs when things look bleak. It's a minor plot point but a major inconsistency for the character, and one I hope will be addressed in a future story. His comments, for example, are made to the Justice League's United Nations liaison (the issue's main character, onetime Wonder Woman beau Steve Trevor). Maybe the endgame is obscuring his own relationship with the JLI, which per their UN charter cannot have heroes with secret identities? Just an idea.

That aside, the practical side of the Justice League is explored well in the issue. In spite of the Justice League having been elevated in the five years since last month's story to a point where society trusts and relies on them, they rely on help from the world back home and it's Steve Trevor's job to simultaneously fend off charges that Superman could run the country better than the President could, while dealing with Green Lantern's immaturity--and, well, grocery shopping. It evoked, ironically, the days of Giffen and DeMatteis' Justice League International, where the characters were more human than gods--and that might have been the goal, given the frequency with which we're reminded that people see the League more as the latter. Johns certainly has done well in the past planting subtle seeds to follow up later, so there's no reason to assume anything he writes can be taken purely at face value. While the main feature had some minor issues (outweighed, mostly, by the promise of what's to come), it was the much-anticipated Shazam! backup feature that really left many readers flat, this critic included. The story began with a really inspired idea--that people all over the world were being abducted and considered as the next Shazam, and then reporting their rejection and the entire surreal experience to the press. Dr. Sivana--now buff and sylish enough to be confused with a Calvin Klein glasses-wearing Lex Luthor--seeks to prove that this is somehow all tied to the legend of Black Adam. Ignoring the fact that, once again, anyone without a traditional superhero body type has been reinvented to conform to the artists' comfort zone, it's an interesting take on the characters. Science has failed the good doctor, he says, and it's time to try magic. This jives with the overall promotional theme of the backup features, which is that it's time for magic to make a comeback in the DC Universe. Billy Batson has been reinvented as a problem child who will have to overcome his natural naughtiness in order to embrace the power of the old wizard. Given that every effort DC has made to "darken" the Fawcett characters in order to make them "edgier" or more "accessible" has failed miserably, this seems like a deeply misguided take on the most angelic of them all--but the New 52's motto is that change is inevtiable, and so it can probably be excused by all but the most hardcore fans of the now-not-Marvel family. The place where it fails, though, is that it takes away so much of what made Billy unique. As they've done with Blue Beetle, DC seems to have removed what made Billy Batson...well, Billy Batson. They did so in order to make him cooler and more marketable, one assumes, but the end result is just that they've turned him into Risk from the '90s Teen Titans. That's not a knock on Risk, except to say that he was a variation on a popular-at-the-time archetype of the troubled young hero (see almost everyone in Gen 13 or DV8). It's a trope of the genre into which Billy Batson really doesn't fit, and it feels to me as though they've taken away what made him unique in order to make him "fit" better with the DC Universe. It's not a good strategy and, given the small and very vocal fan base that the character has it seems destined to fail. Next month sees the introduction of Green Arrow to the team, fresh off a critically-acclaimed debut by new series writer Ann Nocenti. We'll see what fill-in artist Carlos D'Anda, whose style is much more similar to Lee's, can bring to the table.