Rebound: Justice League #12 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ve had the blues, the reds and the pinks; one thing’s for sure: love spoils.

Well, that’s the end of the first year of the first post-reboot Justice League since Crisis On Infinite Earths back in 1986. That Justice League, at the end of its first year, had established itself as a solid action book with an interesting character-based humor element… and was already on its way to becoming far more focused on the comedy than it was on the action. It short, its best days were already gone by that first anniversary, having given or on its way to giving Guy Gardner a 70s sitcom level personality change, The Martian Manhunter an Oreo fetish, and Booster and Beetle a harebrained get-rich-quick scheme of the month.

So how does Justice League #12 compete? Well, by going in the opposite direction, coming out of an only okay character-based story while promising, in a Geoff Johns patented epilogue, action-packed tales including an attack by Atlantis, battles between Superman and Batman and Shazam, and a possible conflict between The Justice League and the recently-announced Johns and David Finch produced Justice League of America.

Oh, and it seems that we will spend some time witnessing Superman boning Wonder Woman. But you already knew that, and we’ll get back to that in a minute.

This issue is the conclusion of the David Graves makes The Justice League fight each other storyline, which to my mind is probably a good thing. The arc didn’t really grab me; coming off the action of the first Darkseid arc, it felt a little small scale for a world-building team like the Justice League. I get the point of the whole thing – after showing this disparate group of the world’s first superheroes coming together despite their differences to save the world as they did in the first arc, this was built to show a team that is still just a group of individuals and stress them to demonstrate that they’re still not really a team – but it simply didn’t work for me.

This issue, closing out the arc, starts with the world reacting negatively to the visuals of the League stomping on each other in prior issues, jumping swiftly into showing the League being coerced by hazy images of their loved ones into lying down on the job. It works too, until Steve Trevor (the Anglo Saxon translation of “Deus Ex Machina”) shows up to show Wonder Woman that he’d not really dead, which breaks the spell on everyone, who then discover that the shades are conveniently susceptible to their particular powersets.

Ultimately, this issue is about resolutions and new beginnings. Beyond the resolution of the Graves storyline, we get what appears to be the final word on the Wonder Woman / Steve Trevor relationship, which forces me to ask: oh Geoff… who hurt you? Seeing Trevor, who DC has clearly spent a year trying to build up into their Nick Fury, passive aggressively shouting at Wonder Woman that she needs him before telling her he doesn’t want to talk anymore is just sad for the character. As a dude who’s been known to pine on the odd girl (mostly in high school, but maybe Steve’s just immature that way), the sequence rings true to me, which is a testament to Johns’s writing… but do you think that Nick Fucking Fury whimpers and stalks chicks that way? Fuck that; if Nick Fury feels like boning, say, Medusa? She gets boned. That’s the Howling Commando way!

And then there’s the resolution of the negative public perception of the League. Initially I really dug this sequence; seeing Green Lantern stepping up to resign as scapegoat so the League can recover its public image demonstrated a real character growth from the half-cocked glory hound of early issues, and Flash’s reaction to Lantern’s resignation helped hammer home that at least a couple of legitimate friendships have been born from the League’s association. However – and this might not occur to someone who doesn’t write about comics every day – it made me start thinking about topics that are inside baseball. Did Johns have Lantern resign because it made sense for the story? Or was it because he needed Lantern unencumbered for the upcoming Third Army event? And come to think of it, was the teased confrontation between the League and the Justice League of America always part of Johns’s plans? Because if it was, that means the Justice League International comic was doomed from the day of the New 52 launch… but if it’s a recent idea, then Johns killed that book just as surely as if he used a gun. All of this is not a particularly positive sign; if your story can’t prevent me from seeing the man behind the curtain not only for the story, but for the entire fucking publisher? Some cylinder just isn’t firing right.

And then there’s the Superman / Wonder Woman kiss. While this started me thinking about more workings behind the scenes at DC Editorial – was Lois Lane shown as already being in a committed relationship in Superman #1 because editors knew this was coming? – and while I know a lot of fandom is up in arms over the story, I actually think it’s gonna be interesting, and that it makes a lot of sense. Look at it this way: in the post-reboot DC, both characters are in their mid-20s. They work together a lot and don’t spend a lot of time around other people; of course they’re gonna hook up. Superpowers or no, they’re not old enough to know that it’s just gonna end badly. Shit, in my 20s, I got involved in office romances with people who on paper seemed like a perfect match for me (mostly because they just happened to be right there), and until I did those things and learned that they end in tears, recriminations and sometimes herpes, I just didn’t know they were bad fucking ideas.

So the hookup opens the doors on a ton of potentially good stories; just based on my own experiences, we can expect to see these two pretending they aren’t together to maintain office decorum, then sneaking off to have sex in a closet somewhere, then maybe she thinks she’s pregnant so Superman gets wasted and calls her the worst mistake he ever made, and Batman figures out what’s going on because he finds a receipt for a pregnancy test and a pack of Marlboros, then they break up and have to wander around the office ignoring each other, and she winds up plowing that wuss in the orange shirt and the green pants just to piss me off… Okay, maybe I’m projecting here, but you get my point; there is a lot of good story potential here, and if it doesn’t work? Well, there’s always another reboot, isn’t there?

Jim Lee’s art is the same as it ever was: highly detailed, iconic, and amongst the best in the business, particularly if you like 90s-style art. If I have quibbles, it’s in Lee’s faces – they’re certainly expressive enough, but Lee has this habit of drawing extraneous lines all over them. These go beyond fine-lined detail scratches and shadowing – which I also think he overdoes, just like every big artist who came up in the 90s – they’re just lines. There are several closeups where the characters’ faces are covered in jagged, disjointed lines which don’t serve any purpose I can think of. Is that blood? Scratches? Snot? Drool? They add detail, but detail of nothing in particular, they’re just there. It’s a small price to pay for the gorgeous pin-up panels we get in this issue (potentially a different issue entirely, but let’s face it: when it comes to Jim Lee, those poses are part of what you’re paying for), but I found it simply distracting.

I’m about 1,300 words into this thing, and it occurs to me that I haven’t said yet whether I actually liked this issue or not. That’s a difficult question; on one hand, it concludes a storyline that I didn’t find engaging, and which seemed small in scale for the World’s Greatest Superheroes. so that didn’t grab me. On the other hand, we get some setup for potentially interesting and exciting stories… stories we’ll get at some point in the future. So I guess the verdict is that, as an individual comic book, beyond a few legitimately compelling character moments, Justice League #12 is kind of a bust. But as a gateway to what looks to be some good stories going into 2013? It’s an interesting jumping-off point… which is a better position than Justice League International was in back in the 80s.

Ironically, it’s a promising start, positioned at the end of a mostly disappointing year.