Comics Fondle

I hate it when things go wrong at the end of a story, especially a long story, because then it clouds the response. Like JLA: Year One. I was ready to call it a wonderful superhero comic and then I finished it and Waid capped it with a busy, all-resolving action sequence. Oh, it’d be great for a movie or something, but not for the complicated, human story he and Brian Augustyn told for the first eight or so issues (reading from the trade, not taking the time to count) of the comic. The majority of the comic is filled with a wonder about superheroes, not what they can do, not even from a regular person’s perspective , but from the perspective of their fellows. Waid set out to make the five heroes of Justice League something special, then he went and undid it all by turning the last three issues into something akin to Secret Wars with DC characters on Earth. The issues aren’t so much bad as unimaginative and, for a considerable amount of action, boring. The questions Waid raises in those issues, like how the Flash and Black Canary would take down a soil monster and how Flash and Superman would take down a diamond monster, these aren’t questions anyone needs answered. They’ve already been answered, probably a dozen and a half times before in the last thirty years. The questions needing asking and answering are the ones Waid raised earlier–like how does Aquaman finally fit in with his teammates (one moment, he just does, like a switched has been flipped by the unseen hand of a writer needing Aquaman to act in a leadership capacity). For all the work Waid and Augustyn–and especially Barry Kitson–must have done on those issues, it was lazy work.

Starting the comic, if I can remember past the muck of the conclusion, Waid skips over the initial meeting and deals with the fallout. He also skips out on the teams meeting with Amazo for the first time. While he could have just been skipping the most frequently told and retold stories, he also set the story up as being about the formation of team dynamics. About people working together, about how people relate to their work and how they negotiate their lives doing that work. In essence, he made a Michael Mann movie about superheroes (and not in L.A.). The relationships between the characters take center stage and the reader invests in those, not in the world in crisis. The world’s obviously not going anywhere, but Waid and Augustyn are doing something with these characters and they’re what’s important, they’re what’s so good about JLA: Year One.

The end even cheats the reader out of a reasonable solution conclusion, not solution, which makes the thing even more frustrating. It’s a misfire, applying late 1990s pacing to a Silver Age homage. Essentially, what Waid and Augustyn escape by not retelling the initial meeting of the group, they fall victim to in their third act.

Kitson’s art is decent superhero art. The inker really matters. The first time Michael Bair inks Kitson’s pencils is nasty, but he gets better. Still, it’s nothing compared to what Kitson doing his own inks looks like and it’s a definite hit to the visual effect of the book.

All in all, I’m left wishing I’d gotten more for my two or three hour reading investment, but it’s not an empty experience, just a disappointing one. Nicely, the level they failed to meet was real high, so they leave they did meet is better than most.

B

Technorati Tags: Barry Kitson, Brian Augustyn, Comic Book, DC Comics, JLA, Mark Waid, Review

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