Jeff Lemire’s JSA Vol. 1: Infinity, Inc. vs. the Justice Society reminds me of some of the post-Geoff Johns Justice Society runs, Jerry Ordway and Bill Willingham and Marc Guggenheim and Paul Levitz. The Justice Society is here, it’s clear Lemire and those previous writers had affection for the team, but there’s a certain verve that’s lacking, some sense of why the audience should want to read about this particular group of heroes — classics, sure, but increasingly out of the mainstream. That the art, then as now, isn’t quite at the top of DC’s standard, also doesn’t help.

I appreciate that Lemire starts the book in medias res, with the Justice Society already in a doomsday scenario; the drama is immediately ramped up and it never ramps down. Equally there’s a lot of characters here, enough so that some even fall out of the narrative for a while, but this positively reminded me of good Legion of Super-Heroes stories; Lemire’s got a soapy Society here, storylines bubbling in and out.

But in the choice to have some of the heroes act counter-character for the specific needs of the plot, I think Lemire makes the team appear collectively argumentative and individually unlikable, and it hurts the nascent book here at the beginning. Equally, it seems Lemire trades on the poor idea that the audience is already familiar with both these heroes and the villains, hardly introducing a few of them, and that makes it harder to care about the less familiar ones.

[Review contains spoilers]

There’s a fine sense of crisis and danger in Lemire starting with the elder members of the Justice Society having been kidnapped and a conglomeration of Infinitors and prominent second-generation JSAers picking up the pieces. Infinity, Inc. is a team that interests me perhaps because I don’t have much experience with them, their adventures having been spottily collected and a few of the members deceased or in limbo most of my comics reading time. So it’s a thrill for Lemire to have on the page Jade and Obsidian, Hourman Rick Tyler, Dr. Mid-Nite Beth Chapel, and Wildcat Yolanda Montez, plus popular Johns JSA-era characters Sand and Jesse Quick, and honestly I’d as soon read a book about them as I would Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, and the rest.

What’s ultimately revealed is that Obsidian is actually bad guy Johnny Sorrow, and by the end it’s suggested Jesse and Wildcat are being manipulated, too. So what seems in the beginning to be a team who can’t get along — Yolanda outrageously angry, Jesse and Rick letting marital spats spill over into work — might simply be a plot point. The problem is, as someone who never read Infinity, Inc., I have no idea if Yolanda is acting typically or not, nor whether her friendship with Jade is deep enough that I as the reader should feel badly when they fight, nor what’s Yolanda’s relationship to Ted Grant, nor do I even think Lemire ever has Yolanda take her mask off. This pervades — mostly what we’re given to understand about these characters is they act like children.

That extends to Lemire’s new Injustice Society, too. There’s plenty of potential — The Fog and Doctor Elemental from the recent Wesley Dodds: Sandman and Jay Garrick: Flash miniseries, plus Ruby, daughter of Alan Scott’s villainous love interest. But Lemire doesn’t put much depth on any of them — Ruby is just suddenly bad; there’s a Shadow Thief who barely gets a speaking role; and Wotan, who I have no idea what his current beef with the Justice Society is.

Leading the group is Scandal Savage, though I think Lemire overestimates her recognizability (I’m not sure he actually uses her name until very late in the book), nor does he explain why, after Scandal took a villain turn in Gotham War but was back to a hero in Catwoman, she’s now back to villain again (what would Liana and Knockout think?). A new Kobra is so important as to kill Wildcat Ted Grant, but we know nothing about her either. And the Injustice Society acts fairly inept overall, such that the audience doesn’t see them as much of a suspenseful, dangerous threat.

There’s a lot here of the Justice Society elders worrying about the demonic army at the doorstep of the Tower of Fate, Jay running around looking for a solution while Alan bids him to hurry, Dr. Fate Khalid Nassour thinking he can’t save them and Ted assuring him he can, and repeat. I was most taken by the book the few times I was surprised, like when a new Kid Eternity shows up to rescue Hawkman. That’s out of nowhere — though Lemire wrote a Kid Eternity one-shot and a different Eternity did cameo in Johns' JSA — but it reminded me of how Johns brought Dove Dawn Granger into his JSA, not because she’s a Justice Society character but just because JSA was sometimes the site of Johns using oddball characters as it suited him (Captain Marvel, and Gog, too). Among a book that’s fairly predictable, I wanted more of that kind of thing.

I thought artist Diego Olortegui started off the book well with a particularly horrific depiction of Obsidian’s shadows. All Orlotegui’s women have pointed, shadowed button noses that I liked at first in an Archie way but that eventually began to grate, not to mention how very strangely Orlotegui draws Jade’s anatomy. Too, when Hawkman is tied up, Orlotegui demonstrates Carter straining against his bonds by drawing the muscles in his neck distended absurdly, a bit of melodrama that again I thought took away from the book’s seriousness.

Though the book is called JSA Vol. 1: Infinity, Inc. vs. the Justice Society (really a misnomer), Jeff Lemire’s issues within are “Ragnarok” parts one through six. Obviously Lemire knows that’s a loaded term in Justice Society continuity, a reference to when the characters battled in Ragnarok (or a Ragnarok-type battle) to explain away their absence early post-Crisis. Continuity doesn’t make much of that, though; rarely if ever do we hear Jay and Alan talking about that time the fire giant nearly got them. I’m interested then in what Lemire might do, since there are fire giants here (unremarked upon), the book ends on a cliffhanger, and the next volume is indeed called Ragnarok — maybe Lemire might address it yet.

At the very least, with all the villains' machinations revealed, maybe Lemire can get down to introducing this Justice Society to us, again for the first time. A second chance to make a first impression, as it were.

[Includes original and variant covers, character sketches]