Review: Justice League Red trade paperback (DC Comics)

To raise the specter of Justice League: Cry for Justice is certainly to besmirch Saladin Ahmed’s Justice League Red more than it deserves.

Rest assured that Red is not nearly so dark or ill-conceived as Cry for Justice. It is only that, in the positing of a new Justice League sub-team right at the cusp of a major crossover event — and in my sense that Red’s team, like the team in James Robinson’s Cry, will ultimately come to nothing — we see a similar struggle for traction.

DC All In/DC Next Level, especially as building on Dawn of DC before it, has been a curious exercise. This phase has pulled away from the serial sub-crossovers of Dawn of DC, Knight Terrors and Beast World and such, though the pervading narrative has still been ongoing — in Superman, in Aquaman, and so on.

But around the foundational root of Justice League Unlimited, there’s been a lot of swings and misses — Challengers of the Unknown, Question: All Along the Watchtower, Black Lighting: The Standard, and so on. These, I’m not so sure I “get” — were they branches that, had they landed better with readers, would have borne further fruit? Or were these always just fluff for the publishing line, sold as tie-ins by DC to juice sales but never meant to amount to anything?

Which is to say, Justice League Red is another one of these, not great and not bad but off on its own and pretty clearly dead on arrival, that would be great as an ongoing plotline within Justice League Unlimited proper. As I’ve discussed before, DC’s got a flagship Justice League Unlimited where basically nothing is happening and then all these scattered miniseries that are at least doing some character work but otherwise can’t break the big time. Maybe what’s missing in the DC All In era is some combination of the two.

[Review contains spoilers]

Among good things about Ahmed’s Red is an eclectic combination of characters that honestly feels like it could work. His Power Girl is his biggest triumph, back in form after her naif depiction in Leah Williams' Power Girl series — now team leader, tough as nails, and a tech whiz to boot.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

That gives her some commonality with teammate Cyborg, as when they examine some potentially world-shaking data together; at the same time, Cyborg and Green Lantern Simon Baz realize they share Detroit in common, and thereby a sense of hands-in-the-gears engineering. I can’t extend that much farther, but with Red Tornado, young Red Canary, Deadman, and even Black Adam, this is a team that not so much belongs in a spy book as that you could easily see how this hardscrabble group of semi-B-list heroes could inadvertently end up among morally gray adventures.

And what I want, at least, is a Justice League spy book a la Checkmate (or maybe I just want Greg Rucka’s Checkmate back), which is the direction Red aims to go. It does not get there, because between Ahmed and artist Clayton Henry, the book is just too bright, boisterous, superheroic, and generally lacking in suspense to be a spy book, but I appreciate at least the confluence between what I’m looking for and what DC’s marketing, at least.

That Justice League Red won’t get where it’s trying to go is apparent almost from the beginning. We do get a chilling scene of Red Tornado ripping his organic body apart, but swiftly we’re on to Power Girl stopping a threat so fearsome as a regular ol' street gang, and then when Tornado sends Power Girl and Green Lantern to an alien planet, they’re faced with the cheeriest-looking of Transformer rip-offs. Next Ahmed digresses to focus on Cyborg alone for eight pages, a scene too where Vic Stone is hardly in any danger and that really just establishes who Cyborg is, something most audiences don’t need. The cliffhanger sees Power Girl faced with her late Earth 2 parents, as if anyone (including Power Girl) believes they’ve actually come back to life.

And so it goes. There’s some excellent variant covers here — by Jorge Fornes, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Cully Hamner, and such — that suggest this to be a tougher-themed book than it is, but ultimately the straits are just not that dire. Black Adam could kill them all … but decides not to. Red Canary apparently develops a connection to the Red animal force (awfully coincidental), but Ahmed and Henry don’t manifest that as anything more than nondescript power bursts. What little bad that Red Tornado tricks his covert team into doing really isn’t that bad, and there never turn out to be any consequences.

The book does have some connection to DC K.O., in that among the futures Red Tornado is attempting to prevent is the one where Darkseid wins the King Omega tournament, and that future remains prevalent as other potential futures fall away. Were you following the DCU week to week, with no knowledge of what was coming in DC K.O., I imagine this would be intriguing, but the eventual result is that Red builds up a bit of intrigue paying homage to DC K.O. while the larger series otherwise ignores it.

There’s an intention here, I gather, for Red to be “a book for our time.” In Red Tornado processing data toward battling potential outcomes, pre-preventing crimes a la Minority Report, there’s themes of AI run amok and biased predictive algorithms, criminal profiling and mass surveillance. That’s timely, sure, but Ahmed spends so much time with the team in space or off on goofy missions that the places where the audience might feel this viscerally — Simon’s cousin being falsely arrested, for instance — get lost in the shuffle.

I’d be happy to see Saladin Ahmed’s Justice League Red again; it’s a place to go and a thing to do for Power Girl, at least, if not the others. But I haven’t heard this book made much of a splash and I don’t see the Red mentioned in upcoming solicitations; this is one of those I expect ends up a footnote or a trivia answer more than anything else. (Though someone please take pity on us and pit the Justice League Red against Jeremy Adams' Aquaman Justice League Blue before both concepts are forgotten.)

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25