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| Tuesday, October 9, 2007 02:38 PM |
| The Take: Addendum |
 by Fëanor |
JLA: World War III
This is a book I've had on my Amazon wishlist for a while, and thus it ended up amongst my birthday gifts this year. There have been many events in comics over the years called "World War III," but this particular one is a series of issues of JLA written by Grant Morrison that marked the end of his run on that book. It's about an ancient doomsday weapon of the Old Gods called Mageddon that suddenly breaks free from its prison at the edge of the universe and heads towards Earth, sowing war, death, and destruction as it comes. As the thing gets closer and closer to Earth, all of humanity gets more and more riled and full of bloodlust, leading at first to small outbreaks of violence - like a prison riot - and finally to the titular all-out war. Also riled into action is a brand new Injustice League, composed of Lex Luthor... and a bunch of other guys I'd never heard of before. Their attack on the Justice League doesn't exactly make anything any easier.
This is, overall, actually a pretty good book, although I didn't like it very much early on, and the art varies between mediocre and just really bad. I discovered, looking back, that the worst section of the story - a departure from the main plot in which the Spectre essentially whines for 20 pages while his friends try to calm him down, and then we get a really stupid, corny lesson in the essential goodness of man - is actually not written by Morrison, but by some other guy named J.M. DeMatteis. As you can probably already tell, I am not very impressed with his skills as an author. But Morrison does a decent job with his sections. I particularly like the way he writes Batman and Orion. Orion is over-the-top poetic, crazy, and violent in a wonderful, wonderful way, and Batman is just a hardass and a dick, in classic Batman style (the Stephen Hawking sequence? Pure gold). The Flash and his big friend from the edge of space are pretty awesome, and Aquaman, Superman, and Plastic Man have some good bits, too. And the end of the story, in which humanity rises up to save itself and Superman, is genuinely effective and moving. So yeah, there are some corny bits, some really terrible art, and the ending comes so suddenly that it's a bit jarring and even slightly anti-climactic. But overall this is actually a much better book than I thought it would be. Thumbs up! |
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