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!
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