Early in Mark Waid’s DC K.O.: Justice League Unlimited, there’s a reference to the various Suicide Squads. It’s an early indication of where the story is going, a book rife with gore uncharacteristic of both Unlimited and Waid, indeed invoking John Ostrander’s original series.
That’s not bad on its face. But Waid, self-professed new historian of the DC Universe, makes a few missteps in his use of time-lost historical characters here. That, plus killing them off bloodily, combines to rankle me perhaps more than it should.
We’re on the fourth volume of JLU now (three plus a crossover book). It is on one hand fantastic, with superheroic art by Dan Mora, Blue Beetle Ted Kord mouthing off to Question Renee Montoya in the hallways, bombast and explosions and near-misses for days. But over a dozen issues in, on the other hand, it’s also been about nothing, the first volume a feint to lead into the crossover, the second volume simply biding time until DC K.O., the third volume surprisingly hindered by having none of its regular characters available.
This is Mark Waid, who wrote a string of brilliant two-part JLA stories even before the “Tower of Babel” that still gets referenced to this day. He should not be having this much trouble with a gimmie concept like Justice League Unlimited. We should not have sixteen issues of this series already largely indistinguishable from one another.
[Review contains spoilers]
With all due respect to the “bwa-ha-ha” era, it wasn’t long before Green Lantern Guy Gardner became not the joke, but the punchline. He was deserving of some ridicule, with his often ribald macho posturing, but at some point Guy making a fool of himself in every appearance became a cliche. That wasn’t apparent at the time, however; it wouldn’t be until Chuck Dixon started writing Guy’s eponymous title until I realized, at least, that a different path was possible.
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
The “Justice League International” books, to an extent, were a battle between the jocks (Guy) and the nerds (Blue Beetle Ted Kord). With Dixon’s run, through to Beau Smith after him, we saw a way in which the two could coincide — or, at least, with some alien mind-probe therapy and a bunch of soul searching, Guy Gardner could be tough as nails and still a decent man.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Waid pulled Guy from this era among the JLU’s time-lost heroes (specifically, a brief depiction between a few costume changes in Guy Gardner: Warrior #17–18). But then, in a series of sequences meant to color the heroes before Waid kills them off, what we get is a lewd “Guy tries to hook up with Ice” scene of a kind just about anyone could have written. It’s demonstrably off-base given that we actually see Guy approach Ice more sensitively (relatively) in that very Warrior #18.
Clearly I have a lot of esteem for that earlier run, so perhaps my expectations are outsized that Waid (or the editors) would know the nuances of Guy’s personality at every moment. At the same time, isn’t that the fun (and expectation) for using time-lost heroes? Better is when the hook-handed Aquaman looks to a photo of Dolphin, something true to the original era for which the audience can say, “I know what’s going on there.”
But then, Arthur looks to a photo of his deceased son and falls to tears. Not to downplay the tragedy, but it’s not as though this Aquaman is from before his son died, nor that he’s been out of pocket in some way as to not have thought about it for a while. Surely, Waid’s intention is the next beat, in which Martian Manhunter can tell Arthur that now he has a daughter, but the way Waid got there didn’t quite parse.
Nor, too, the Heroes in Crisis-esque eight-panel page (always tenuous ground) of Power Girl telling herself not to be so angry. True, Power Girl did have a reputation for being angry, especially in the 1990s and 2000s of Waid’s first DC stint. But this Power Girl seems to be from before much of that, just after Crisis on Infinite Earths (when, possibly, she ought believe herself to be Atlantean in origin). And she’s telling herself not to be angry not due to any life experience, as today’s Kara might tell her past self, but rather that she’s let go of her anger because Mr. Terrific has told her she’s going on a suicide mission.
It makes sense, it’s understandable, but it also doesn’t parse well, being less about using the historical character than just what Waid can do in the moment.
With that, the time-lost heroes are off to Hell, where they’re killed off one-by-one fighting monsters for five issues before Mr. Terrific faces Neron by himself. It’s cute, of course, Waid writing Neron again after his successful Underworld Unleashed event 40 years ago, and again, Mora draws it all with energetic aplomb.
But the plot feels, and rather seems, secondary. Based almost solely on the fact that minor villains are powering up, Waid has Terrific suddenly conclude Neron must be to blame, and then Terrific gathers the heroes and takes them all to Hell with no other evidence supporting his theory at all. Waid’s not doing much to make this a story necessarily, so much as a vehicle.
Maybe DC K.O.: Justice League Unlimited is the beginning of Mark Waid really getting started on this title; maybe next we’ll see Mr. Terrific dealing with the trauma of having just led nine other heroes to their deaths. I’m skeptical, however. Having the Electric Superman and the hook-handed Aquaman together on the page together is pretty cool, but I wonder if it would have been quite as cool as a consequential mission for Justice League International-ers Martian Manhunter, Blue Beetle, Fire, and Ice, all of whom are also here. In looks, JLU is DC’s flagship title, but in story I don’t think we’ve hit the JLA peak just yet.
[Includes original and variant covers]
You're right -- this should be better. Mark Waid writing the Justice League, with an 'unlimited' roster, should be a slam-dunk. But I fear Waid has baked himself a cake that is too large to eat.
ReplyDeleteFor better or for worse, this book reads like "What's going on in the DC Universe," which could be really engaging if it's the spine of the entire All-In line, but too frequently it's starting to read like COUNTDOWN. Eight million plot threads, most spinning off into other books, with nothing really advancing or resolving within the pages of this book.
My biggest grievance with this arc in particular is that it feels too nakedly like dumping out the toybox and playing around for a few issues. On the face of it, that's what this is /all/ about, but once Waid reveals these are just time-traveling xeroxes, not quite the characters they're meant to resemble and without the dramatic necessity of reinserting them into a timeline. When I got to that bit of exposition, I had to choose between caring or enjoying. It used to be that Waid could let me do both.
But at the end of the day, it's usually a book written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Dan Mora. That's often worth the price of admission, even if the whole is drastically less than the sum of its parts.
I take that final point, but also it's a bit like junk food — delicious, yes, but it's yet necessarily to make me feel "full" (or however we want to slice this metaphor).
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