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Geoff Johns' final story arc involves Black Adam (but of course), then there's something of a fill-in arc by Jerry Ordway. The Black Adam stuff... eh, it's fine. It's following up on 52, and of course one of the problems with 52 is that if you're just going a read-through of, say, Renee Montoya, then it's a bit of a time-sink to have her involved in a 52 issue anthology sorta series. Adam's also been in Countdown, Final Crisis, multiple minis... at this point, I have to ask, is he really that popular or was DC just trying again and again to have symmetry with the Rock movie that was in development hell forever?

Okay, point is (thanks Wikipedia), Adam has loved and lost and is desperate to resurrect Isis. He's also killed millions of people at this point, which makes the odd kid gloves treatment he receives for having a code of honor or whatevs seem ridiculous. Yeah, Captain Nazi is a prick and all, but even he hasn't killed a percentage point of the global population.

Anyway, Adam is dealt with and the status quo of the Rock of Eternity changes yet again. Then Ordway's story, which is about a Japanese supervillain who wants to get revenge on the JSA for the bombing of Hiroshima, complete with g-g-g-g-ghosts! Yeah. It all feels a bit overwritten and wordy, clunky in a way that, say, I don't recall Ordway's work on Shazam being. Like the editors didn't bother too much getting it up to snuff because it was a nostalgia play. I don't know, it didn't work for me, it didn't not work for me, it was kinda just there.

Lastly, here's Johns' final issue, which eschews any superhero plotting to just be about the Society celebrating Courtney's birthday.

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So the actual plot of Thy Kingdom Come--yeah, we're still on that story--involves Magog, the antihero in Kingdom Come who killed the Joker and kicked off the superhero Dark Age. He's running around, killing demigod-styled supervillains as false gods (weirdly he doesn't get to Maxie Zeus, who is the only god wannabe I can think of, but maybe he was already dead at the time). Kingdom Come Superman wants to stop him so he can't bring about the comparatively bad future of KC.

This gets a little complicated, but Magog turns out to be not THE Magog, but fighting him leads the JSA to Gog, a god of the Third World (those guys who preceded Apokolips and New Genesis). Gog wakes up, is kaiju-sized, and starts wandering around Africa, performing miracles and gathering a literal following.

(Amazing Man, who you'd think would be the most opinionated about all things African, has surprisingly little to say about all this.)



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This is The Lightning Saga, a crossover with Brad Meltzer's Justice League that also involves the Legion of Superheroes. (Not the then-current reboot by Mark Waid, but rather the 'classic' version)

I found it... a bunch of sound and fury, signifying very little. There's a lot going on. Three separate superteams, time travel, amnesia, resurrection, sparring, random encounters, random encounters that are really illusions, and callbacks callbacks CALLBACKS!

But at the end of the day, it struck me as borderline incoherent, leaving me having a hard time being able to say what happened, what the characters were trying to accomplish, what was getting in their way, why they were trying to accomplish it in the way they went about it...

( Spoilers for almost twenty year old comics now. )

As you'll recall, the JSA split up to deal with both Extant and Kobra. While the Kobra mission went well, they came home to find Metron--who for the New God nobody likes, sure gets a lot of guest spots--telling them that the universe was about to be reset by an insane, power-hungry... ok, you know where this joke is going, fuck Dan Didio and let's move on.

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As seen last time, Wildcat is armed with nothing but a towel when the Injustice Society breaks into JSA headquarters. But, as Douglas Adams always told us, you're pretty sorted as long as you've got a towel.

( You fools, you're mooks and he's a palooka! A mook's natural predator! )