Justice League United #2

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Mike McKone (art), Dexter Vines & Cam Smith (inks), Marcelo Maiolo (colors)

The Story: Some folks take the saying, “Children are the hope of the future,” a bit too far.

The Review: So I just took my second mock bar yesterday. The good news: got a passing score, barely. The bad news: it was purely freak chance as I guessed on at least a dozen questions. Analysis: still got some work to do. In the meantime, the work of comic book reviewing goes on. As far as this series goes, it’s starting to feel like the thing Lemire least likes about writing Justice League United is the Justice League United.

Let’s fact facts. By far the best part of the issue—the one that feels most natural and Lemire spends the most time on—is Sardath of Rann explaining the whole space war that brought about this whole storyline. Incorporating half of the most prominent alien races in the DCU, the premise has a sci-fi purity that meshes perfectly with Lemire’s sensibilities. If the issue had been nothing but this, in a series titled The Spectacular Adam Strange (or something more original), we’d have a much stronger book.

Having the League around only makes Lemire’s job harder anyway, forcing him to waste pages on rather flat dialogue. The sudden arrival of Supergirl—who claims she just happened to hear them on her way across the galaxy—doesn’t exactly turn the proceedings into a party. At best, we get her somewhat disturbed reaction to Courtney’s verbal diarrhea, after which she tags along with the group for no other apparent reason than she has nothing better to do, which is kind of the dynamic of the team as a whole.

While the group scenes are generally dull, the individual ones are more hit-and-miss, leaning on miss. It’s a problem of execution. Lemire’s writing is by nature a bit introverted, more at home with characters who think and brood than showboat. The steady presence of J’onn comes much easier to Lemire than Hawkman’s rugged bouts with Lobo or Courtney’s chirrupy attitude towards everything.

Even more concerning is the mishandling of characters Lemire knows, or should know, very well. With Buddy, Lemire can’t decide whether to turn him into the League’s jokester (“Oh, you don’t do other planets?! Sorry, Green Arrow, I didn’t get that memo!”) or play up his family man quality to unlikable extremes. “[W]atch your language, Stargirl!” he gasps in the grip of a mutating monster. The offending language in this case is “pissed it off”. Courtney’s reaction, at least, is natural enough: “…Really?“

As for Ollie, if the goal is to make him look as insecure as possible, it’s working. His ad hominem insults on Buddy’s powers (“Why don’t you just become a kangaroo and jump home, Animal Man?”) reek of jealousy, especially when he follows up with yet another useless arrow attack. Lemire seems to be laying groundwork for Ollie to serve as team tactician, with him shouting sideline advice to Courtney while he tries not to get stepped on, but he won’t get very far if all he does is continue to state the obvious: “Stargirl, you’ve got to get Animal away from that thing! It’s crushing him!”

Where Lemire really shines, interestingly enough, is in Sardath’s long, exposition-heavy recounting of the war between Thanagar and Czarnia, Rann’s position as a neutral refuge between them, and his own wildly far-fetched idea to bring peace to the region: creating the ultimate genetic hybrid, one who would be a child of all alien races. The well-intentioned plan is thrown off course, obviously, by an antagonist who’s either a mad scientist latching onto an opportunity for more twisted experiments or an ancient, extraterrestrial evil (“There are those who say he is the devil himself.”).* A great plot, but you wonder how much of it will stand out if it has to compete with the flash and bang of this secondary League. Already, Adam Strange, Alanna, and even Lemire’s original creation, Miiyahbin, get lost in the mix.

Lemire being the quiet, grounded writer that he is, he could use plenty of assistance from his artistic collaborators to punch things up, but he doesn’t get too much of it from McKone and Maiolo. Maybe McKone’s discouraged by all the talking heads, but he doesn’t help matters by drawing everyone so small, more often looking at them from the back than head-on. He has his moments—the double-splash of the Thanagar-Czarnia war is a beaut—but even then, he’s dampened by Maiolo’s pale, ghostly hues.

Conclusion: There are good ideas here, but they’re suffocated by the mainstream demands of a Justice League book, even a lesser one.

Grade: B-

- Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Apparently, the devil is a concept that translates across worlds.

- I don’t quite understand the logic that drove McKone to draw Miiya’s friend Heather like a middle-aged librarian in a teenager’s body, but at least she’s not a blonde/brunette piece of jailbait like so many teen girls in comics.