Scans_Daily

The second half of Bill Willingham's run involves a short arc about the JSA taking on Mordru, followed by one of those Days of Future Past type things where Nazis have taken over the future, so the surviving heroes have to use time travel to undo the lousy future. Nothing wrong with that, theoretically, but

1. The arc just kinda seems to wallow in the awfulness of this Nazi future. Concentration camps and whatnot. Which is par for the course for this kind of story, but I feel it should be leavened somewhat. This is entertainment, after all. I think Bill's trying to do that with a subplot about Mr. Terrific genuinely befriending his interrogator, but it's just not enough to me.

2. This stops being a 'JSA' story and becomes more of a 'DC universe' story, with cameos from just about every superhero ever. It feels elementary to me that this dystopian future arc would be a good chance to show the younger JSAers in something like their prime, answer the question of how they would react to this situation, but instead we get a lot of Ollie and Bruce and Clark and so forth. Which, ironically, makes this story feel a lot more generic.

Anyway, here are some scans.

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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! )

One of the motivation-sapping things about posting scans for me is that, there are just so many issues that recapping each of them would just be a time-sink, especially when a given issue might not be too memorable or the whole thing might be part of a story arc that's really only worth discussing in the aggregate. So I thought I'd try discussing comics in swaths. From David Goyer and James Robinson, here's the JSA.

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