Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

Look, everybody else and their grandmother has already reviewed Justice League #1. So this isn't a review of the issue, it's not a post about what I think of the story.

[OK, if you must know, it was pretty standard Johns-Lee: too many splashes; too few panels on most pages; loaded with more testosterone then an entire NFL team and a complete lack of any female presence; what plot there was could have taken place in the first 4 pages of a 1970s issue of Marvel Two-In-One, when the heroes would realize that they were both heroes and would spend the next 18 pages actually accomplishing something.]

[And, not to be too harsh on Johns' script, but it borrowed so heavily from other sources that it needed a few "story by" credits. This type of Batman/Green Lantern interaction, if it's what you like, was done far better in All-Star Batman & Robin--I know, I can't believe I just said that; the "we hate super beings" was done better in Legends, and yeah, that was a Darkseid story, too; and the ending was completely lifted from Cosmic Odyssey (arrogant GL locks up accompanying hero behind because he knows he can handle the problem by himself, surprise, he can't).]

[Plus, Johns doesn't seem to grasp the concept "note to self":

Note to self, Geoff: that's not how it works.]

No, what I'd like to talk about here is what JL #1 was supposed to accomplish (aside from "huge" sales that are probably actually less than what the combined sales of 13 regular books would have been that week, had DC not pulled a stunt...go figure).

After all the hype, all of the carelessly throwing around words like "historic" and "game-changing", there's almost no way the book couldn't have disappointed. Hell, JL #1 could have cured cancer, and it would have lived up to the massive propaganda blitz DC engaged in.

But is it what we were promised? Way back in May, DC VP Of Sales Bob Wayne said, in a letter to retailers, that "(a)ll stories will be grounded in each character's legend -- but will relate to real world situations, interactions, tragedy and triumph." [Emphasis added]

Was Justice League #1 anything like that? Did we see any real world situations or interactions? Was there anything in JL#1 that couldn't have been done without a line-wide reboot? Anything different in storytelling style, in story construction, in tone or content, that couldn't have been done in a "The Secret Origin Of The Justice League" 6-part mini-series, as Johns did with GL and Superman when he wished to adjust their continuity in the old DCU?

At this point, I would normally do a pullback here, and say that it wasn't fair to blame the creators of this particular comic, because the hype wasn't their fault, and they didn't choose to make their comic the debut of the nu52, etc.

But, in this case, the creators ARE just as responsible for the hype, and they DID decide that this book would be the first showing for the bright, happy shiny nu52. And either the co-publishers of DC were just over-hyping beyond belief, or (much more troubling) the co-publishers of DC had no idea that this masterwork they produced was not really in any way different than what DC has been doing for the past few years.

Of course that's no surprise. When the people in charge of the company come out and say "the comics we've been producing for the past few years have failed," without any questioning of who was responsible for that; and then, with essentially zero changes at the top, say "but now we're going to do it better" without any self-awareness at all, well, what do you expect? The self-aggrandizement of putting their own book first resulted in big sales, sure, but the complete disconnect between what they're saying and what they're actually publishing is not reassuring.

Still, it was better than Flashpoint #5, which Johns obviously deliberately wrote as badly as possible, in order to make JL #1 look good, right? I mean, he couldn't actually have thought that was a good conclusion, could he?

Meanwhile, enjoy the completely unrelated music video: