Isn't this the exact thing people used to argue was necessary in order to save the comics industry...?

I've been blogging about comics here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday for about 20 years now but even before that I used to read about and very occasionally talk about comics online, mostly on the DC Comics message boards and the handful of comics news sites that were around at the time. One thing I used to hear said an awful lot back then was that the one thing that could save the comics industry* would be if publishers could just get their books back in grocery stores and drugstores, where they could be seen and purchased by kids and other new readers, thus growing the market beyond those that already patronize their local comics specialty shops.

Well guess what I saw in the checkout aisle at the grocery store?

Shelved among the latest issues of People and Woman's World and, um, some books of word searches was a magazine simply entitled Justice League, the cover featuring a Jim Lee drawing of the New 52 League (note the presence of Cyborg, and Superman's lack of red briefs) and the words "Four acclaimed comic book stories by all-star writers and artists!"

I was surprised to see it there, although I suppose I shouldn't be. I had previously seen similar magazine format collections of reprints focused on Batman and Superman in the same store, although those were in the magazine section, rather than right here in the checkout aisle, where a kid could presumably spot it and ask his or her parent if they could get it.

This was for a very long time Archie Comics' whole business model, selling digest collections of their comics in grocery store check-out lines and, according to Tim Hanley's book Betty and Veronica, it was a model that helped save the publisher when the comics market was contracting and specialty shops started to replace newsstands and spinner racks as the places that people bought comics. 

Of course, this collection costs $14.99, which seems like a fairly steep price for an impulse buy, although I suppose that's about what magazines tend to cost these days. (There weren't any Archie digests on sale there to compare it to, but according to the publisher's online store, one of their upcoming digests costs $9.99 for about 100 pages). 

Comics readers will likely find that price point pretty high, though, as that's $15 for only 84 pages of comics, all of them reprints. That price is approaching trade paperback level. I mean, Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, the latest trade paperback collection featuring the Justice League, costs $17.99, and that collects six issues, or about 120 pages.  

I did ask my sister if she would buy a $15 magazine for my nephew if he asked for it in the checkout line of the grocery store, and she said she would, as she encourages any kind of reading. Given that this is a survey of just one parent though, I can't be sure how representative she is of the average parent. 

So, what are the four acclaimed stories by all-star writers and artists collected within? A quartet of timeless, evergreen done-in-ones? Ha ha, no don't be silly. Rather, they are the first issues from four different Justice League titles from the last 30 years or so, and I couldn't discern the logic for the order in which they appear; they are neither chronological (that is, oldest to newest) nor reverse chronological (newest to oldest). 

Also, somewhat surprisingly, though the magazine is magazine-sized rather than comic book sized, the comics pages within have been blown-up or reformatted in anyway. They're at comic book page-sized, they just all have wide borders that fill up the rest of the extra space. 

Anyway, here's what $15 will get you at the grocery store...

Justice League Unlimited #1 (2025) by Mark Waid and Dan Mora This seems to be a smart, even obvious choice, as this is the first issue of the current Justice League title, one that's only about a year old at this point (DC has only published one, maybe one and a half collections of it so far, depending on how you want to count Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday).

It introduces various plot elements that won't be resolved for a while (the mysterious villain team Inferno, for example) and it ends on a fairly potent cliffhanger (with point-of-view character Airwave confessing to the readers in a narration box that he's only joined the Justice League in order to kill them all). But, at the same time, the first half or so of the issue pretty thoroughly introduces the premise of this particular Justice League book, that of a massive, army-like super-League consisting of pretty much every superhero in the DC Universe.

The early scenes, in which Airwave arrives on the new team's new satellite Watchtower headquarters, is chock-full of appearances by various heroes, making this story a pretty strong introduction to the breadth of the DC Universe. Skimming through the book again as I pound this post out (I had previously reviewed the first trade paperback collection of the series in this column), I counted over 50 heroes appearing in some fashion, including those you might expect in a modern Justice League comic (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, a The Flash), some less likely candidates (Firestorm, Black Lightning, Star Sapphire, a Kid Flash) and some pretty deep cuts (Tuatara, for example; he doesn't just cameo, but is name-dropped as well, as Red Tornado sends him off on an off-panel mission with a few others). 

The issue, and the next five, are collected in the aforementioned Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, which was then followed by Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday. Other characters and concepts introduced in these 20 pages are followed up on in various spin-offs too, like Challengers of the Unknown, The Question: All Along the Watchtower and Justice League: The Atom Project. The JLU title is still ongoing, and the last issue to ship as of this writing seems to be #16.

I have some concerns about JLU—mainly that the book seems to offer a status quo rather than a story or stories, and, increasingly, that it's meant to serve as a bridge between various big event series like Absolute Power and DC K.O.—but in terms of quality, that first issue was solid. 

There are certainly worse creators a new DC reader could choose to follow after this series than Waid and Mora, too. The former has decades of quality series and miniseries on his resume (including various Justice League-related books), and Mora is one of the best artists drawing super-comics for DC at the moment...or drawing them for anyone else, for that matter. 

Justice League #1 (2011) by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Scott Williams I was a little surprised to see this one in here. Not just because this was the first chapter of The New 52 version of the Justice League's origin and the New 52 continuity has since been rebooted away (Although according to New History of the DC Universe, this story, or at least some version of it, still happened in current continuity, it just would have had to happen fairly differently). No, I was mostly surprised because it's not really much of a Justice League story. Despite the whole team appearing on the cover, the issue itself is basically just a Batman/Green Lantern team-up; the only other Leaguers to appear at all are Superman, who is one panel, and a pre-Cyborg Victor Stone, who is on a couple of pages.

This issue (and the story arc it is a part of) has been collected and recollected several times now, starting with 2012's Justice League Vol. 1: Origin (There have also been deluxe, "Absolute" and "Unwrapped" editions since). This iteration of the title would last 52 issues, with Johns writing the first 50 of them (Lee would draw two arcs, the first one and "The Villain's Journey"). 

As I was a Justice League fan, I wasn't exactly enamored with this story or this run (or the New 52 in general), which jettisoned DC comics history/continuity to offer a new "Ultimate" style reboot. 

Johns' greatest strength as a DC writer was his ability to finesse thorny continuity into things that mostly made sense, solving the storytelling problems that occurred when various writers over the decades took turns on the characters, synthesizing past, sometimes contradictory stories into something that felt natural, even intentional. The New 52 stripped him of that, of course. 

Lee is, obviously, a pretty great artist, and this arc was a decent showcase for him—although the number of splash pages in this first issue is striking and, if you happened to have bought the issue in 2011, annoying—but he's not the best character designer, and the New 52 Justice League notoriously had him redesigning some of the best and most iconic characters in history. I mean, can one really improve on Superman's costume? No, but Lee tried and, well, you can see what that looked like. (Even the costumes he left mostly alone, like Carmine Infantino's Flash costume and Gil Kane's Green Lantern costume, were given more, fussier lines.)

And, again, because The New 52 continuity is now over, I'm not sure there's a whole lot to really recommend this iteration of the Justice League book to new readers. Although if you are a Jim Lee fan, then there are at least two trade collections of him drawing a Justice League you might want to check out.

Justice League #1 (2018) by Scott Snyder, Jim Cheung and Mark Morales The Scott Snyder-written iteration of the Justice League book spun out of his Dark Nights: Metal event series and Justice League: No Justice miniseries, and his line-up seemed to be an in-comics re-creation of the that in the old Justice League cartoon series, with Hawkgirl, Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern John Stewart rejoining after pretty long absences from each. (You'll note Cyborg is on the cover, and, in this issue at least, he is presented as a member of the current team, while John is called in as a secret weapon at one point; Cyborg will pretty immediately leave this "main" league, joining the splinter team in the spin-off Justice League Odyssey, while John will essentially replace him on the team.)

In this issue, the already formed Justice League, headquartered in the Hall of Justice, fight a long-term scheme of Vandal Savage's, the heroes keeping in touch via J'onn's telepathy while they fight against Savage's armies on various mini-missions. Each is assisted by a guest-star or two—Green Arrow, Adam Strange, Plastic Man, Mister Terrific, Swamp Thing, etc.—although these do little more than cameo. While the League staves off that threat, it's actually Lex Luthor and his new (rather small) Legion of Doom that ultimately confront Savage. 

Meanwhile, a mysterious threat from beyond the Source Wall streaks like a comet towards Earth, space-time swirling "like road dust" behind it, while various other cameos look on (The 853rd Century's Justice Legion-A, Kamandi, a Monitor, The Quintessence).

Like the previous issue collected in the magazine, this issue has been collected and re-collected plenty of times; I just re-read it in a library-borrowed electronic copy of Justice League by Scott Snyder Book One The Deluxe Edition. 

Snyder's run, which featured a few fill-in issues from writer James Tynion IV and art from a whole bunch of different artists, lasted about 39 issues. The title continued for another 36 issues though, with writers Robert Venditti, Simon Spurrier, Jeff Loveness, Joshua Williamson, Brian Michael Bendis and the team of Andy Lanning and Ron Marz all following Snyder, some of them writing enough issues to constitute a "run", others only writing a story arc. The title was then cancelled with issue #75, as part of the lead-up to Williamsons Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

I read all of the Snyder issues (and the rest of the title more sporadically), so I guess it was good enough that I never dropped it. It was well-written, and the art was never terrible (although it would have been nice if Snyder had a true, regular, consistent partner on his run). What is both noteworthy—and really weird—about Snyder's run is that it is essentially just one big, long story arc, about the Justice League fighting the Legion of Doom (Luthor, Grodd, Sinestro, Black Manta and Cheetah...The Joker, who is in this first issue, would leave almost immediately) over fundamental forces of the universe, and the direction that the universe was to take...towards justice, or towards doom. 

Snyder also introduced some cosmic beings that played into his own messing around with the nature of DC continuity and the multiverse.

It had its moments (most of them revolving around Starro and Jarro), but, seen from the remove of years, it now seems a lot like an ongoing series devoted to marking time, acting as a bridge between Snyder's Dark Nights: Metal and his Dark Nights: Death Metal. Because of that, I can't really remember the specifics of any single issue or arc within the overall narrative, nor have I ever been tempted to revisit it. 

JLA #1 (1997) By Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell The final issue collected in here is the first of the Morrison/Porter/Dell JLA, which took the then novel (if obvious) approach of re-teaming the Justice League's founders (with the legacy versions of The Flash and Green Lantern taking the places of their then-dead predecessors). It was the first time that some version of these seven heroes had starred in a Justice League title together since the early 1980s, and thus seemed pretty fresh, new and exciting then.

I do wonder how readers seeing this comic for the very first time might react to certain aspects of it. Would they know who this Kyle Rayner character was? Would they wonder at all about Aquaman's design, with the gladiator armor and harpoon hand? Or why Superman has a mullet? Or perhaps why Martian Manhunter seems so nude?

The issue opens with a UFO landing on the White House lawn. Out of it steps a golden, caped man named Protex and his superhero team The Hyperclan, who say have come to save the world and deal with all of its problems...even if they do so in a much harsher way than any Justice League ever has (At one point, they execute supervillains tied to posts with their eyebeams; Porter draws one of them to resemble Marvel's Wolverine). They are met by Superman, and he and various other heroes aren't so sure about the Hyperclan's methods or promises of quick fixes to long-term problems.

At one point, mysterious assailants assault the then-Justice League America's satellite base, knocking it out of the sky, and forcing Leaguers Metamorpho, Ice Maiden, Obsidian and Nuklon to a desperate gamble to save their own lives (Metamorpho, who transforms himself into an escape capsule, dies in the process, or at least seems to die in the process; his funeral is then held in JLA #5 but, like all superheroes, and like Morrison hints during the funeral, he will eventually get better).

In this first issue, all of the incoming Leaguers appear, except Aquaman, who will be reluctantly drafted into the brewing fight against the Hyperclan in JLA #2. Superman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman (who was leading the previous League, the team who flee the satellite, in Justice League America, the title that JLA would replace) get the most panel time, while Martian Manhunter and Batman get the least, the latter showing up in the last five panels, and uttering "HH!" for the first time.

(I love how Potrter poses Batman there, melodramatically stalking around, gesturing like a vampire; this is pretty consistent with how then Batman artist Kelley Jones was drawing him.)

Frankly, I could talk about this title, and this particular story arc, for thousands of words, but that's probably enough for this post. 

This issue, and this arc, has also been collected and recollected over and over. If you've never read it and would like to, basically just look for any book with "JLA", "Grant Morrison" and a "1" on the cover. 

Morrison's run would last through issue #41, with maybe a half-dozen fill-in issues, and include JLA/WildC.A.T.s (did I spell that right?), original graphic novel JLA: Earth-2 and event series DC One Million.  Porter and Dell drew most of it, with fill-in artists needed here and there to meet deadlines (These include Oscar Jimenez on #8 and #9, Mark Pajarillo here and there and, surprisingly, the likes of Greg Land and Gary Frank, among a few others). 

Morrison was followed by Mark Waid and Joe Kelly on JLA, which would ultimately run 125 issues, and, after Kelly's run, the book became an anthology series with rotating creative teams until it was finally canceled in 2006 as part of the events of Infinite Crisis. 

I am likely prejudiced and influenced by nostalgia to some degree, as this was my first introduction to the Justice League, but Morrison and company's JLA was (and is) one of my favorite comic book runs ever; revisiting it now and then, I still think it holds up as one of the best superhero comics ever.

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Previous to the comics portion of this magazine, there's a two-page introduction by a Jim McLaughlin, under the headline "Top Heroes. Top Talent." It's maybe 500-800 words, tops, and seems to do a decent enough job of offering a sort of elevator pitch to the Justice League concept and then introducing the writers, pencil artists and concepts for each of the issues included. The thesis seems to be that the idea of the Justice League was to unite the best DC characters into one book, which naturally produced the best comics by the best creators.

It's a decent piece given its brevity and I wouldn't argue with its main points, publisher boosterism aside, although I will nitpick it (I also would have attached the names Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky when mentioning 1960's Brave and the Bold #28). I mean, you know how wordy I am; I would struggle mightily to produce a piece that hit all these points in so few words.

The parts I found most interesting, maybe even revealing, were the ways in which McLaughlin described the writers and pencillers.

Mark Waid isn't just "one of comics' most acclaimed and award-winning scribes," but he is also "the scholar, the teacher." And Dan Mora? Well, he's "a 30-something hotshot who burst out of Costa Rica to become one of comics' most dazzling talents almost overnight." (Overnight, I guess, if you don't count his pre-DC work for the likes of Boom, although you should count it; it's also great!).

Upon relaunching the League for the New 52, Geoff Johns was "writer and executive producer of DC's The Flash TV show and Wonder Woman movies", rather than one of super-comics' most popular writers, who then had a decade of experience writing most of DC's biggest heroes, teams and events, and had even managed to make books starring less-than topline characters like Hal Jordan and the Justice Society into hits. (As for the New 52, that was "a groundbreaking slate" of comics "that grabbed both critical acclaim and massive sales success." Sales? Sure. Acclaim? Eh...the fan press sure like Scott Snyder's Batman, but I'm having trouble thinking of many—or any—critical darlings among that mess. Refresh my memory, if you do.)

Scott Snyder's run on Batman was also "groundbreaking", according to McLaughlin, and Jim Cheung is an excellent draftsman. Together, their book—which Cheung didn't last all that long on, intentionally built a lineup to "echo" that of "the smash-hit Justice League animated series."

And finally, we get to Grant Morrison, "a madman-with-a-plan writer who cut his teeth on DC Imprints books." (McLaughlin also refers to Morrison as "he" here, rather than Morrison's preferred pronoun "they", which I can definitely relate to, as EDILW readers have repeatedly had to call me out for doing so here and on Bluesky; still, it's probably embarrassing to do so in print, rather than online, where it's so easily fixed).

I found the "DC Imprints" phrase...weird. Yes, Morrison wrote some Vertigo books (And why not just say "Vertigo" instead of "DC Imprints", with a capital "I" in "Imprints"?). These included Sebastian O, The Mystery Play, Kill Your Boyfriend and Flex Mentallo. But before that, Morrison had written Animal Man and Doom Patrol (Morrison's runs on each title concluding before these books were absorbed into the new Vertigo imprint in 1993, although certainly Morrison's work helped establish the Vertigo aesthetic). And, of course, there was Morrison's earlier Batman work, the original graphic novel Arkham Asylum and the Legends of the Dark Knight arc "Gothic" (the latter of which was collected into a trade paperback, back when such collections were relatively rare). That's just the DC stuff, though; prior to that Morrison "cut his teeth" (or "their teeth") on comics in the UK, of course.

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Anyway, it's nice to see that DC Comics' Justice League comic is finally taking its place in the grocery store checkout aisle, alongside such other important pieces of American pop culture, like, let's see here...

...ground beef, Sydney Sweeney's breasts and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's "epic" romance, I guess. 

*And by "comics industry", I think they just meant "the direct market" or "DC and Marvel as publishers that release series as floppies once a month".

On The Immortal Men #1

*As I've noted previously, Immortal Men probably should have been the first of DC's "The New Age of Heroes" line of books to be released, in order to get the line's roll-out started off on the right foot as a proper spin-off of the Dark Nights: Metal event series.

In terms of personnel, Immortal Men is co-written by one of the co-writers of various Metal tie-ins, James Tynion, as well as being drawn by Metal variant cover artist Jim Lee. In terms of plot, it seems to involve various immortal characters, and a cabal of pre-existing DC Universe immortals were somewhat prominently featured in the early parts of the Metal event and, of course, one the event's more popular characters--The Batman Who Laughs, with his crowing pack of leashed, cannibal Robins--appears on about page of this issue, briefly consulting with what appears to be the new series' main villain.

In terms of business, this issue is pencilled entirely by Jim Lee (with Scott Williams and Richard Friend inking), and thus was always going to do pretty decent sales; I'm not sure what draw Tynion and his co-writer Ryan Benjamin are in the direct market, but certainly Tynion's Detective Comics has long been DC's second best-selling ongoing series (after Tom King and company's Batman; in both cases, I suppose one can argue whether it's the Batman or the people making the Batman that make those books the hits they are). In other words, Immortal Men was poised to move a lot more copies than, say, Sideways or The Silencer.

Wouldn't it therefore have been better for the health of the entire line to start with Immortal Men? Instead, it's the sixth of the "New Age" books to debut, and it's taken so long to arrive--Damage #1 was released in January, remember--that we were seeing estimates of how well the line was doing before Immortal Men even showed up in comics shops. And it didn't look good; The Terrifics seemed to be a decent mid-list seller for DC, with everything else far below that and seemingly steaming ahead towards cancellation (Remember too that these books were apparently designed to launch big and drop off precipitously, as the artist/creators responsible for coming up with the new characters were only scheduled to draw the first few issues and then bolt).

Might the whole line not be doing a bit better right now if Immortal Men had launched in January or February...?


*If not the first book, then Immortal Men should maybe have been the second. There's definitely an argument to be made for writer Scott Snyder's New Challengers having kicked off the line. Challengers Mountain may have only played a small-ish role in Metal, but then, Snyder wrote the damn thing, so if his was the first "New Age" spin-off, it would definitely sent a signal that maybe the folks who dug Metal should be trying out all these books with the words "Dark Knights: Metal" emblazoned in their corner boxes. Instead, it looks like No Justice is being viewed as the real follow-up to Metal...


*The title seems to be derived from that of a minor-ish Silver Age DC character, the imaginatively named immortal man, Immortal Man. He first appeared in a 1965 issue of Strange Adventures drawn by Jack Sparling, and then appeared in a few more issues of that series.

Good question, Immortal Man.

He later showing up as part of The Forgotten Heroes in the 1980s, and more randomly in the pages of Animal Man, The Flash and Resurrection Man in the 1990s.


*I haven't really liked any of these covers, which have all been vertical gate-folds. This one is no different. The main image, the middle third (seen above), features the title team. We will get to them in a bit, but for now I just wanted to note that the posing of the one character, who looks a bit like a bolt of green lightning dressed as a mystery man character, seems to indicate that he is their leader, or perhaps a villain, neither of which really seems to be the case.

The top third features another rather mystery man-like character in an action pose, a series of floating heads behind him. These seem to belong to Hawkman (or a Thanagarian with a helmet like Hawkman's), Ra's al Ghul, Barbatos (?), a guy who looks like Vandal Savage but is apparently Immortal Man and..someone I don't recognize who is much better groomed than Ra's or Immortal Man.

The bottom third features a group of characters with spears made of light, one of whom has the rather Saga-esque name of The Hunt and appears within these pages.. There's also a...thing that looks like Hawkman's mask if it came to life in a 1980s horror movie. The three images don't really go together; this scans more like a vertical triptych than a single image.


*This is the plot of the first issue: A teenager name Caden Park has a recurring dream in which he finds some sort of underground superhero school referred to as "The Campus" based around a pyramid structure. All around him, other teens with super-powers are being killed, but he is rescued by the guy with the green energy body and wide-brimmed hate on the cover, and sees a mysterious man  who we will soon learn is Immortal Man. The dream is dramatized for the reader, but Caden is telling the story to his therapist Dr. Calendar, as the last time he had it he woke up on the ground at Grand Central Station. Additionally, he's lately discovered that he may have some kind of latent but growing psychic powers, as when he touches someone he sees a brief image from their life.

Meanwhile, The Hunt kills a surviving super-hero in the ruins of the real Campus, where he is met by The Infinite Woman, the apparent sister to The Immortal Man, who she is warring against. The pair are then joined by The Batman Who Laughs. They are after Caden, who a group of four agents of the Immortal Man are also seeking. These four are the characters on the cover, and they make a point of saying one another's names during their scene, to let readers know who they are.

In the book's final scene, Caden is attacked on the train. He thinks he sees the Immortal Man from his dreams, but it turns out to be a hologram luring him into an attack by The Infinite Woman's "Bloodless," which appear to be some sort of big, red monsters that resemble, from different angles, either a human embryo or a beluga. The quartet of super-people come to his rescue and announce themselves as "The Immortal Men." Yes, they are 50% female, but hey, The X-Men all call themselves "X-Men" regardless of gender.

*So who are these Immortal Men? They certainly seem like Jim Lee creations! They are:

Ghost Fist: This is the character who is drawn extra-large and seems to be presenting or clutching at the others on the cover, the one who looks a little like a lightning bolt dressed like The Green Hornet. He appears to be a dude in a trench coat with a fedora and old-school domino mask. He lights up when using his electrical powers. They aren't really explained here, but I didn't think the name fit the design all that well. I was honestly expecting him to be called Doctor Zzzap (with three z's because that's how many are in his sound effect) or Mr. Shock or something. 

Stray: This is the bestial character whose head looks to be borrowed from Jeff Smith's stupid, stupid rat creatures. I kind of like the jack o' lantern like mouth, although the particular design seems somewhat strange in the otherwise realistic Lee-drawn world.

Reload: I actually didn't catch this guy's name the first time through the book. He's the one dressed all in white with the red eyes. If he has any powers, they weren't demonstrated. He does have a gun though, to go with his lame G.I. Joe-esque name. Under his hood he wears a full-face mask, and those lines stretch over its entirety. Based on the cover image, in which much of his face is in shadow, I thought perhaps that was supposed to be a big smile. 

Timber: This is the Native American character. It's difficult to get any real sense of scale from the cover images, but I think she is supposed to be giant in size all of the time. Even within the book, though, there isn't really a good demonstration of this. As she was a very large Native American super-lady appearing in a DC comic, I was afraid she would end up being a New 52 answer to Apache Chief, or at least Manitou Raven or Manitou Dawn, the Apache Chief-inspired ancient shaman characters Joe Kelly and Doug Mahnke introduced during their JLA/Justice League Elite run/s. Again, we know next to nothing about her save for her name and basic appearance, but if she has a DCU antecedent, it may be Tall Tree, one of four Native American shamans who made up The Renegades in 1977's Freedom Fighters #11, by Bob Rozakias, Dick Ayers and Jack Abel (and reappeared in a different form in Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray and company's 2010 Freedom Fighters). Tall Tree's power was to grow into giant size.

*There are a few panels that look particularly rough around the edges. Look at Caden and, especially, his parents on the fourth panel of page six, for example. Or the fifth panel on page five, where Dr. Calendar is shown sitting at home in front of...a giant bong? A dehumidifier? A hookah? Maybe the sort of bottle that the title character of I Dream of Jeanie was trapped in...?


*It's a fairly solid first issue, introducing a bunch of new characters and various elements (like "houses" of immortals with certain spheres of influence, for example) and offers just enough of them to let a reader get a pretty good idea of whether or not this is the sort of book they are going to want to keep reading. I think if I had to follow one of the six "New Age" books that have debuted so far, this would be the one I would follow.



Previously...

On The Curse of Brimstone #1

On The Terrifics #1

On Sideways #1

On The Silencer #1

On Damage #1

A little more on Superman Unchained

I reviewed Superman Unchained, Scott Snyder, Jim Lee, Dustin Nguyen and Scott Williams' Superman story line, for Robot 6 this week. You can read the piece by clicking here. Overall, I thought it was a pretty great Superman story, despite all the quibbles one might have about how it was marketed and sold, from its goofy title to it's ridiculous number of variant covers (58, by my count) to a few plot points that, were I an editor, I likely would have suggested changing or even just tweaking.

The biggest "problem" with the book is, however, also one of its virtues—Jim Lee's artwork. I like Lee a lot more than many critics who have been reading and writing about comics as long as I have, but sometimes he works on particular projects better than other times, and sometimes he meshes better with particular writers than he does with other writers. And Snyder and Lee aren't the match made in heaven that Frank Miller and Lee were, nor does his style seem to fit that of Superman Unchained as well as it did with All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, or even "Hush."

One could say that Lee's artwork is the main reason this book was such a big deal in the first place, and there's probably something to that, but I found it quite interesting how low the sales of the book slipped during its run. After the first issue or three, it was being outsold by Snyder and Greg Capullo's regular old Batman monthly, despite significant incentives in the form of so many goddam variant covers.

I don't think that's necessarily because Capullo is more popular than Lee now, and may have more to do with Batman being more popular than Superman, but I do think its significant, and I wonder if the market doesn't more eagerly embrace a talented, punctual artist who meshes well with his or her writer more readily than it does a superstar artist with a bad reputation for hitting deadlines these days.

Anyway, I had a few more thoughts about Superman Unchained I didn't quite fit into the review in anyway that wouldn't have made what probably wasn't all that well-written a piece read worse still, so I thought I'd pull them out and address them here.

1.) JIM LEE'S DESIGN WORK As talented as Lee may be, and as popular as his work may be, I don't think anyone's ever claimed he was the world's greatest costume designer...at least not since he was drawing the X-Men for Marvel in his pre-Image days. I know a lot of people have claimed the exact opposite regarding his costume design skills, however, as is evident from the less-than-enthusiastic reception Superman, The Justice League and so many of the New 52 superheroes got when their new costumes started being unveiled (And, those with longer memories my recall his redesign of The Huntress' costume during "Hush" or his Green Lantern Kyle Rayner redesign in those long ago, pre-Green Lantern: Rebirth days. See also the entire WildStorm universe).

He brings some pretty lousy designs to play in this storyline. The first time I rolled my eyes was when I saw what Lois Lane was wearing to the office. I guess I'm not sure what material her glove-like dress is made of, but it's tight enough you can see her abs through it, so it sure doesn't look business casual. Also, that color!

The bigger disappointment is in the look of the new character, who is a Superman analogue who has worked closely with the United States military in secret since the late 1930s. He is basically a Superman analogue who made different choices than Superman, and while they attempt to be friends—or at least allies—it's clear from his first appearance he's going to end up spending most of the book in conflict with Superman.

Snyder gives him the not-very-friendly nickname of "Wraith," which was mean to be an acronym of "William Rudolph's Ace In The Hole," which makes me wonder what they called him upon first meeting him, before they knew he'd be their "Ace In The Hole," or their "Aith," as it were (Because he's been "invisible" all this time though, the name does function as an appropriate one for him).

Here's our first look at him:

Lee draws Wraith as big, gray and monstrous in proportion. He has the big, broad face of a Mongul or a Darkseid (particularly as Lee draws Jack Kirby's evil god), and that gray, rocky skin further suggests Darkseid...and, of course, Doomsday (Lee has created at least one good guy with that very visage, if not the glowing red eyes, in his WILDC.A.T.s character Maul, the guy with horns that grow out of his shoulder blades.)

It's never discussed, and you can only see it very clearly in a few instances, but the pattern of red energy that covers the character forms the shape of an Eagle clutching talons of arrows around his chest. Turns out that even in the New 52, a world without a Golden Age of superheroes, Superman still wasn't the first guy with superpowers to wear a logo/sigil on his chest!

Lee has Wraith change shape to various degrees in various situations throughout the book; I think these changes are meant to suggest his body adapting to different circumstances and/or reflecting his moods and mental states, but at several points throughout the book he grows spikes all over his body, making him look still more like Doomsday.

The Superman analogue that Geoff Johns, John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson are confronting the Man of Steel with over in Superman meanwhile, looks perfectly human, save for a weird head of hair, and doesn't look much more inherently evil than Superman or any other superhero might. Superman may or may not end up coming into conflict with that guy, but his nature isn't so thoroughly telegraphed as Wraith's is.

Also, at one point, Wraith puts on this stupid looking armor/girdle, that renders him immune to a "synthetic mineral" that works on Wraith the same way kryptonite works on Superman:

That image is by Nguyen, not Lee, but note how stocky and Darkseid-like Nguyen draws the character, as if he's working from a description of "Darkseid, but nude, save for a goofy glowing red 'armor' that looks a little like football shoulder pads or something."

Wraith's not the only one who puts on armor during the course of the storyline. Batman appears throughout, and most of his scenes find him wearing a specially-designed "stealth suit" that renders him invisible to Superman's many super-senses. And what does a stealth suit look like?

Well, it glows bright yellow, for one thing.

I might have gone for an all-black Bat-suit, either one that rendered Batman as completely featureless shadow, with a cowl that covered his eyes and mouth as well, giving him a creepy, feature-less face (think Black Panther without eyes), or at least an all-black suit, with black triangle lenses for eyes instead of white or yellow ones, and a black bat-symbol over a black bat-suit.

At the very least, I wouldn't have had it glow.

But then, I'm not a comic book artist or a stealth suit designer.

Then there's a scene where General Sam Lane and the military forces he commands attacks The Fortress of Solitude with these neat giant dog droid tanks bristling with anti-Superman weaponry. Superman meets them in a suit of armor with special weaponry of his own and he looks like this:

I think his plan was to make the soldiers laugh so hard that they would be incapacitated long enough for him to round them up at super-speed, but it doesn't work, and he's forced to fight them using his shield and laser ninja sickle and wire thingee.

Poor Superman. And to think, people used to laugh at your mullet!

2.) WONDER WOMAN Much of Superman's expected supporting cast appears, playing roles of various importance—Lois Lane, Lex Luthor, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, General Lane—and, of course, Batman plays a pretty big role. Essentially, Batman's there for Superman to bounce ideas off of and to supply him with research and development help (The stealth suit is used to answer a question regarding whether or not one can elude all of Superman's super-senses, and it's Batman that makes the Wraith kryptonite for Superman).

While various Justice Leaguers get mentioned in passing, particularly near the climax, where every nuclear weapon on Earth is launched at the same time and, later, when an alien armada prepares to invade, the only other Leaguer to appear on-panel aside from Batman is Wonder Woman.

She's instrumental in a scene in which Wraith attacks Batman in the Bat-cave (see above; and note the panel before has Batman asking Wraith, "Penny for your thoughts?").

Wonder Woman's relationship with the Man of Steel and The Dark Knight, as individuals and as a pair, has been portrayed in many different ways over the decades, and she's been romantically entangled with both...just barely with Batman during Joe Kelly's run on JLA (and in the Justice League cartoons), and she is currently dating Superman in DC's comics.

My favorite version of the trio's relationship is the one suggested in the Batman: The Brave and The Bold cartoon, where the three of them are essentially super-best friends. Wonder Woman is just one of the guys...not by being essentially guy-like, but because the three friends' relationship has nothing to do with their genders at all. It's a little like they just swapped out Robin Dick Grayson for Wonder Woman in the relationship suggested by all those fun old World's Finest comic book covers, you know?

As I mentioned in my Robot 6 review, Snyder focuses on Superman's relationship with Lois Lane throughout the book, most intensely at the climax, where he gets a few pages with Lois and only a few short words of strategy over a Justice League communicator with Wonder Woman. Now, Superman's relationship with Lois is just one of great friends here, and it's possible that Superman's keeping his game face on with Wonder Woman at the moment, but it's an odd note to strike.

In fact, I almost wonder if the book would be better without Wonder Woman in at all. She only gets a few lines, lines like:

•"They accessed silos around the world. It's bad."

•"I'll do what I can to help Green Lantern. Still, we're looking at a sixty percent stop rate at best."

•"Superman...it's Batman's servers, they're picking something up in the current running through the cave. An energy pattern."

•"Is it Wraith? Does he have some link to the Earthstone?"

•"So what do we do, Superman? I can tell you have a plan by your tone. Whatever it is, we're helping."

And that's it. Those are all of Wonder Woman's lines in the whole book. Even in the scene where she plays the most prominent role (above), stopping Wraith from kill Batman, she's just playing the role that anyone stronger than Batman could have played. She could have been swapped out for Cyborg, Green Lantern or the New 52 version of Aquaman in that same scene. And she doesn't have any lines at all throughout it.

Superman shows up shortly after to save her from Wraith.

So I'm a little torn. It's nice she's in the book at all, but it's weird how little she has to do, or even say. During the Trinity's fight with Wraith, for example, Batman fights Wraith one-on-one for about seven pages, before Wonder Woman saves him, fighting for about three pages alongside Batman, until Superman arrives for the next issues Superman vs. Wraith throwdown. Throughout it all, Batman gets all the quips.

3.) THE VARIANTS So yeah, they went a little super-overboard with those, huh?

That said, there was work from a lot of my favorite superhero artists, some of whom just don't seem to get the amount of work they deserve from DC anymore (provided they even want it, of course), and many of whom probably could have really made Superman Unchained sing in a way that Lee couldn't.

These are broken into various categories, and it was especially fun to see the first appearance and Golden Age versions of Superman. Gary Frank, for example, is hardly one of my favorite artists, but I did love his Golden Age style cover, from the look on Superman's face and the particular costume he wore, to the look on Lois' face as she cheers the bemused Superman on in his fight with a lion.

It was also great to see favorite characters I haven't seen in their original, superior forms in so long, like Superboy as drawn by Tom Grummet and Steel as drawn by Jon Bogdanove.

These are probably my favorite of them all though, because each suggests a super-compelling story all on it's own. There are a lot of great covers in this massive variant cover gallery, but these are the three I wish had stories to accompany them:

Especially that Super-Noah story. I love the idea of Superman going back in time to save the dinosaurs be relocating two of each to a different planet, thus saving their lives but also not altering the history of life on Earth. And who else would be there with him but Jimmy Olsen?

And Amanda Conner's...oh boy, that's gotta push a lot of Superman's buttons in some rather uncomfortable ways, huh?

Finally, I just wanted to highlight this wonderful Sean Murphy from the "Superman Reborn" era:

Murphy is maybe the all-around best artist Snyder has collaborated with in the last few years (On The Wake), and I'd love to see the pair work on something again soon. I just wanted to pull this one out though to note how cool Murphy's version of the very 1990s Superboy is. It's tweaked just enough that that particular costume looks like it would work out just fine today, and doesn't seem the least bit dated.

There's a fine line between homage and swipe.

Jim Lee's cover to Batman #615

Panel from Jason Fabok's Batman Eternal #1 

I'm honestly not sure which this is.

So exactly how long has DC been working on (and tinkering with) "Trinity War"...?

Here's a badly-scanned image of one of the four double-page splashes in today's Justice League #23, the climactic chapter of the "Trinity War" storyline:

Does the Ivan Reis-penciled image of Superman ramming a column into Green Lantern Simon Baz while Batman scampers about with Pandora's skull-shaped box and various Justice Leaguers all fight one another look familiar to you?

If so, then you've probably read DC's 2012 Free Comic Book Day offering DC Comics—The New 52 FCBD Edition, which included this four-page, gatefold image drawn by Jim Lee as part of Geoff Johns-written story:

(Or maybe you didn't, but remember seeing the image online at places like, oh, Robot 6 or ComicsAlliance, to randomly pick to comic book blogs I contribute to).

I think there's a couple of significant differences worth pointing out, aside from the fact that the Reis image from the mid-2013 JLA #23 is only two pages and includes about ten more heroes than the four-page, early 2012 image from Lee, some of which may hint at things that have changed about the story and the comic books it played out in during the year and a half or so since the two artists drew the two images.

1.) Lee didn't draw the one that appeared in JLA #23; I wonder if, in 2012, DC expected Lee to still be drawing Justice League by the time "Trinity War" reached its climax? Because he only lasted about two story arcs (the initial six-issue origin story and "Teh Villain's Journe"), with some fill-in issues between them.

2.) The sheer number of heroes involved has grown considerably; it looks like the original image reflected a fight between two rather than three Leagues (Deadman is the only member of Justice League Dark in the Lee image), and the Justice League of America line-up might have consisted of different characters at one point (Of the JLoA, Katana, Catwoman, Steve Trevor, Stargirl and Martian Manhunter are all missing).

3.) Mera is in the Lee image, but doesn't appear at all during "Trinity War"...save for about a two-panel cameo, including her appearance in the Reis image. That's not Mera in the Reis image, though; it's Martian Manhunter who apparently decided to take Mera's form to sneak up on and clobber Aquaman rather than just, you know, turning invisible. I assume the scene was written to explain Mera's presence in the Lee image.

When Justice League first launched, it seemed like Mera was one of the characters who were supposed to join the team shortly after the first arc: She appears on the cover of the first issue of the series, along with Deadman, a male version of The Atom that has yet to be introduced into The New 52, Element Woman, Hawkman and a female character identified in interviews as Will Eisner's Lady Luck, whom I don't think has ever appeared yet either.

Of those, only Element Woman actually joined this team. (Mera's the floating female head in the lower right corner; the one that's wearing a vaguely crustacean-looking tiara).

Of course that cover image, which was used on two of the eleven variant covers for Justice League #1, also featured an earlier version of Wonder Woman's redesigned costume that didn't actually make it into any of the comics either.

4.) The Jim Lee image features an obviously male version of The Atom, while The Atom who would join the Justice League and appear in the Reis version was female and had a fairly different costume, which allowed her long hair to flow out the back of the cowl.

5.) Captain Marvel/Shazam's costume in the Lee image—that is Cap and not Black Adam, despite the colors—is wearing a not final version of his redesigned costume. The one in the Lee image has the more traditional collar instead of the hood that he would ultimately end up with.

6.) Superman's looking awfully healthy in that Lee version, rather than as gray as he does in the Reis version. In fact, looked-at completely out of context, the Reis version looks like it could be depicting Bizarro in a backwards Bizarro costume.

7.) Released in May of 2012, the Lee image was the first appearance of both Green Lantern Simon Baz (who debuted in September 2012's Green Lantern #0) and the New 52 version of Vibe (Justice League of America's Vibe #1 launched in February of 2013).

Clearly Johns has been working on this storyline for quite a while, and had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen at the end, at least in so far as a few key elements of the action were written in one form or another quite a long time ago (Batman having the box, everyone fighting regardless of team affiliation, Deadman attempting to possess Shazam, Superman smashing the new Lantern with a column).

And just as clearly a lot has changed since Lee put pencil to paper to draw that gatefold image teasing "Trinity War."

Meanwhile, a bunch of words about ten panels of Superman Unchained #2...

I'm going to list the links to the reviews I wrote at other sites this week in reverse order, because the one I have the most to say about here is the one that was published latest in the week. That would be my piece at Robot 6 this week, in which I review four second issues of a couple of big, newish series (It occurred to me that I—and, I think, a lot of individuals and outlets—understandably focus only on the first issues of new series, or "event" issues, in which something happens, but there's always an element of "I guess we'll wait and see" when discussing the first issues of serial comics, so I thought it might be interesting to focus on #2 instead).

Anyway, I wanted to take a closer look at this one particular scene from Superman Unchained, which I kind of made fun of a bit at Robot 6, but did not feel it was a good use of my space or readers' time to discuss too deeply what I found really rather weird about that sequence. That's what blogs are for, after all!

So, in this issue, Superman saves a skyscraper from collapse in Dubai and has a meeting with Batman. Then he flies off to the Salt Flats in Utah to have a tense conversation with Lois Lane's estranged father, General Lane:

Look at that first panel.

That's a pretty good example of Jim Lee being a good draftsman and drawer-of-superheroes-being-super, but not a great comics storyteller (I think he and Snyder are feeling each other out and not gelling yet, and I think there's probably a reason All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder is Lee's best work—it was written by a great cartoonist with great storytelling chops, so all Lee really had to do was draw the script and it all "worked" like a comic should).

Anyway, note those directional speedlines, that make it look like Superman is flying into the panel with Lane. That's pretty awesome. On the previous page, there's a big-ass panel of Superman flying in the desert, with his fist (he's flying fist first) and pat of his arm bleeding over the border of the next tier of panels, as if Superman is flying out of this panel and, in the turn of a page, into the next one—it's a nice, super-subtle demonstration of Superman's super-speed and fight; he's not bound (or "chained") by the limits of conventional space and physics.

But then Lee goes and screw is up, drawing Superman's left foot and crossing over the panel border as well, so that it looks like rather than flying into the panel, landing in a scene in the desert with General Lane, he's just passing through, having the first part of their conversation while flying by him, to land in a super-tiny, horizontal, just-there-to-have-some-place-to-stick-some-more-dialogue-bubbles panel (And he seems to be landing far to the right of...himself in it...? What the fuck is going on here?).

It's well-drawn and looks cool enough, until you really start looking at it, and then you notice, "Oh wow, Jim Lee was doing something kinda cool and clever here, wasn't he?" And then, a split-second later, you realize that it was either by accident, or he tried doing something cool and clever and then fucked it up.

He's the best-selling, most-popular comics artist in the U.S. though, and he's co-publisher in the company; what's an editor like Matt Idelson or Chris Conroy supposed to tell their boss? "Pretty good try, but can you move the Superman figure so he looks like he's landing in the panel, rather than diagonally floating past it? And maybe make it smaller, so the second panel has at least as much detail and impact as one of those little incidental cartoons Sergio Aragones doodles in the borders of our Mad magazine? Thanks boss!"

Anyway, those panels really stuck in my head.

What initially drew my attention to them, though, was Lane and his coffee.

Lee draws a really nice paper coffee cup and a really nice black plastic spoon, but he draws terrible coffee. Look at the way it sticks to the spoon, like beef gravy or chocolate sauce.

I also puzzled over the dialogue in this scene. See, Lane's at some super top-secret military installation in the middle of nowhere, building anti-Superman tanks and what not. He brags about the quality of the coffee. And I was thinking, isn't it weird that Lane uses a paper cup and plastic spoon? Wouldn't he have his own mug, if he's on a military base and drinks a lot of coffee? Otherwise, they gotta keep brining in paper coffee cups. But no, I thought, maybe that is the way the military thinks. They've got all that money, might as well spend it on paper coffee cups and plastic spoons rather than just buying Lane a reusable mug.

Finally, there's the bit with the spoon. Now, I understand, narratively, why Snyder and Lee have him drop it, although I have a lot of questions about how Lane and the coffee got there (It's still steaming hot; he's apparently just put sugar in it, but I don't see any sugar packets, and he's in the middle of a desert, with no, like, cafe's or tables or tents nearby. Where did his coffee come from? Where did the sweetener come from? Why is it still so hot?).

It's to draw the eye of the reader (And Superman) to the desert floor, which we see ominously opening, to (rather poorly, from a structural sense) reveal Lane's anti-Superman arsenal.

But, within the story, why would Lane just throw his spoon on the ground like that? Just straight-up, cold littering, man! He's supposed to be a disciplined military man, right? Running a top-secret facility, underground in order to hide it? Well, plastic spoons covered in viscous coffee lying around prove someone was around there recently, right? Scooby-Doo woulda smelled that, Velma would said "Jinkies!" and the gang would know there's something not quite right in the desert there.

Or maybe Lane knew exactly where he was dropping that spoon, and that when his secret trapdoors opened up to reveal his super-tanks, the spoon would fall down below into the base, leaving no clues behind. Hell, maybe the only reason he had the spoon and was stirring his viscous coffee was so that he could drop it on the crack in the desert floor to draw Superman's eyes to it. I think I have now officially over-thought those panels.

I really liked the opening scene, but this whole exchange with the coffee and the spoon stuck in my head just as strongly as that of the positives of the opening scene.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if Lee wouldn't benefit from another artist doing breakdowns for him...not necessarily sketching things out into the panels for him, but at least, like, determining the number of panels and the way they're arranged on the page. Like, what if Snyder gave his script to, say, Keith Giffen, Giffen translated it into less-detailed versions of the breakdowns he did for 52, and then had Lee do his thing?

I imagine it would speed up the process, and thus allow Lee to stay on a title longer, and I imagine it would improve the overall quality of the storytelling quite a bit.

But then, like I said earlier, I don't think anyone cares all that much. Everyone loves Jim Lee, and I don't think DC's biggest priorities right now are (nor should they be) making Lee a better, more perfect comics story-teller. Of the whole line, Superman Unchained is hardly the comic that needs, like, tinkered with. But then, I suppose if I were Lee, I'd want to keep getting better and better, and I'd want to be remembered for drawing great Superman comics, rather than comics with great drawings of Superman in them.

Hmmm. You know, I think when the first trade of Superman Unchained is released, I'd like to read it and then re-read Brian Azzarello and Lee's "For Tomorrow" Superman arc in trade and compare the two...

Also at Robot 6 this week, but not by me, is a pretty great column by Tom Bondurant on the Grant Morrison era of Batman comics, which just officially ended this week. The fact that Morrison was given a kind of pass on the New 52, and continued telling a story the New 52 pretty much directly contradicted and made impossible (save for only tiny tweaks being enforced, like Tim Drake's costume changing, for example) was sort of obvious, as was the fact that Morrison and Snyder's different takes and directions were overlapping one another in a way that didn't flatter either creator (Ideally, Morrison would have finished his run before Snyder began his), but Bondurant sees Morrison offering a positive influence on Snyder (Personally, I thought Snyder was doing a great job with the Dick Grayson-as-Batman Detective Comics, during the period in which Morrison was still the primary Batman writer, and his storyline was the dominant one—which lasted until the New 52 reboot scuttled it and put it on hold while DC figured out how to go forward with it...and Morrison tried reinventing Superman on-the-fly for them).

Bondurant points out that some of Morrison's many changes were "ratified" by their appearances across the DCU line—Damian Wayne, for example, Dick Gryason as Batman, Dick and Bruce as simultaneous Batmen—but the Batman Inc concept never enjoyed such an embrace by the rest of the DCU, rarely if ever getting mentioned (In retrospect, beyond that neat Knight and Squire miniseries and Batwing, there wasn't much acknowledgement in the wider DCU of many of these characters. I hold out hope for a Club of Heroes series written as a Justice League of all Batmen in the future, post-Morrison DCU though).

Anyway, a good piece contextualizing Morrison and his work within DC as a universe and a publisher.

Hey! Look at this! It's a Mort Drucker drawing of Christopher Reeves as Superman, from his Mad magazine parody of the first Superman movie, "Superduperman."

I was really struck by how much it looks like Gary Frank's version of Superman, from his recent-ish run on the Superman comics with writer Geoff Johns. I mean, it was obvious at the time that Frank was trying to model his Superman off of Reeves', but holy smokes it was weird seeing a caricature of Reeves drawn in the late seventies by Drucker, and being reminded so strongly of Gary Frank's Superman.

"Superduperman" is just one of the many Superman parodies and gag pieces you'll find in the Mad Super Spectacular: Superman, Man of Steel special that DC released in June to tie-in to the latest Superman movie. I reviewed it for Good Comics For Kids here, if you're interested, and returned to some of the jokes that didn't age well here.

And hey, speaking of that Mad special, what did you think of Superman's costume in the new movie? Didn't care for it?

Well, according to Sergio Aragones, you can blame Wonder Woman.


And finally...

I also reviewed The Malevolent Mr. Burns for Good Comics For Kids this week (Of special note to a few of you may be the fact that the first story in this issue is written by Ms. Gail Simone).

The above two panels were my favorite gag in the issue. They're from a story by Ian Boothby and Chris Houghton.

Review: Justice League Vol. 2: The Villain's Journey

With the second volume of the relaunched Justice League, the problem of Geoff Johns replacing a shared, public continuity with a secret continuity only he himself knows is only compounded.

It is now five years after the events of Origin, but it might as well be the next day. The seven Leaguers haven't changed much physically (Aquaman shaved his sideburns and took off his necklace) or emotionally, and the team doesn't seem to have evolved much at all. Most of them still don't know one another very well, and most of them don't seem to like one another at all. No one has joined the team, or even been on the their satellite headquarters, not even Steve Trevor, Agent of ARGUS, who has become their one man PR-team/support staff/government liaison (Last night I kept going back in forth in my mind over whether it would be more or less hilarious if instead of Steve Trevor Johns and Lee used a grizzled, bad-ass version of Snapper Carr in this role).

The only exception to the no-one-but-us rule was, apparently, The Martian Manhunter. "We all know what happened when we let someone else onto this satellite and into the Justice League," Batman says in one panel, which leads directly to a two-page splash of Manhunter fighting the entire League by himself (Hey, in the New 52 J'onn can apparently use his Martian vision, make part of his body intangible and part of his body super-strong, all at the same time!).

What was that all about? It's one more of those little snippets of a secret history that is so often referred to, along with what the League has been up to for five years, what happened with Barbara Minerva, the untold story of Aquaman's hatred of Green Arrow, why Superman has a special enmity for The Key and so on. The idea seems to be to tease readers with these little flashes of a story, but it's a strategy that only really works if anything at all of interest is going on around it. Like, that sort of storytelling might have worked on Lost (I didn't watch Lost; did it work on Lost...?) because people wanted to know what was up with that fucking island.

Do people want to know why Martian Manhunter wears a loincloth and lost his spot on the League to a Teen Titan?

I don't know.

This is also the volume where Lee's presence can be seen starting to evaporate completely, and it's odd that he leaves the title without giving it much of a look...beyond the characters' terrible new costumes, of course. There isn't, for example, a single exterior or establishing shot of the Justice League's satellite watchtower headquarters; not that he drew, anyway (There's one, by I think Ivan Reis, who just draws three pages of one issue, and it's in the second issue of the collection, after scenes set on the satellite). That's sort of weird, isn't it?

(Maybe it's simply a matter of my living with them longer, or because DC used to publish maps and suchlike, but I can tell you what the tables they used to sit around in in the original cave HQ, the Bronze Age Satellite HQ, the JLI Embassy or the lunar Watchtower looked like; I can picture the rooms of those bases, but all we get here are a couple of generic interior drawings of metallic rooms.)

This volume contains the second six issues of Justice League, two standlone done-in-ones by guest-artists leading into the four-issue title story.

The first is by artist Gene Ha, which lays out the relationship between the U.S. government, Trevor and the Justice League and doesn't make any goddam sense. Apparently, the U.S. funds the League, but is angry they have no control over it. So why don't they just stop funding it? I don't know.

Nor do I know why Etta Candy looks like this now, aside from The New 52's unspoken "No Fat Chicks" rule:

Nor do I know why Supereme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a member of congress all of a sudden:

The second is by Carlos D'Anda, whose smooth, clean art is a welcome respite from all the little lines of Lee and even Ha's work—it's a stubble-free issue!

Probably the highlight of the volume, D'Anda's issue #7 involves Green Arrow's attempts to join the Justice League (which really seems more like a "Year One" rather than "Year Five or Six" story, but maybe I'm just thinking that because Mark Waid and company had Green Arrow attempting to to join the Justice League in their first year during Justice League: Year One), mostly by showing up at their various conflicts and lending a hand, only to be told to buzz off in various ways.

Lee returns for the "Villains' Journey," in which the David Graves character kinda sorta introduced in the previous volume is reintroduced as a supervillain that looks a bit like a white Martian crossed with a devil (he gets more and more devilish-looking as the arc progresses) and who and goes by the villain name of, um, Graves.

He was a Justice League fan who lost his family and developed cancer during the Darkseid invasion (they caught a rare form of cancer by inhaling the ashes of the destruction; you know, like the real-world malady suffered by many 9/11 first responders, only made silly), and while fashioning himself into a villain discovered a strange place that gave him a strange power involving the creation of pseudo-ghosts.

Props to Johns and Lee for creating a new villain (old ones, like The Weapons Master, Amazo and the previously mentioned Key appear in passing), and for coming up with one with a fairly distinct look, motivation and power-set, but at the end of its first year worth of issues, the Justice League book still doesn't seem like it's coalesced yet.

I can't shake the feeling that I'm reading something akin to an Elseworlds project, an Ultimate Justice League, and I realize that there's a very strong possibility that that is simply me as a reader. That said, however, the fact remains that this isn't a very good comic book—there's a talented writer, but he's producing probably his worst scripts ever, and there's a talented artist (three, in this volume, actually), but he's playing fast and loose with basic storytelling conventions, producing decent art that doesn't function as it should.

Giving Johns and Lee and company a year on the title seems like a more than fair amount of time by which to judge it, and I've read it in its final, collected form, the form it was apparently being written for, and I'm sad to say it still doesn't really work.

This volume concludes with another "What's up with this Pandora lady?" story, this one involving what looks like The New 52 Wizard Shazam and The Question, as well as a few "trailer" pages for future Justice League stories and a two-page ad for Justice League of America.