114 Justice League Vol 3: Timeless

I'm continuing to enjoy Bryan Hitch's Justice League book.  As I've stated before, his Justice League stories are very cinematic looking to me.  The artwork is gorgeous.  The action is HUGE.  If this was a big budget movie, the budget would have been enough to feed a third world nation for a year.  It's big, it's bombastic.  But after reading this, it feels like there's something missing.  I'm not quite sure what, though.  I'm starting to feel this book is 85% looks, 15% depth.  And I'm dazzled by the looks, so whatever depth I'm missing is lost on me.  Does that make any sense?

This book starts off with a done in one tale, which I loved.  The League is trapped together and spend the entire issue talking to each other.  This tale felt like it had the depth I feel I'm missing from the bigger stories.  I loved it.

The rest of the book is the classic separate the team, do their parts, get back together.  I like that format.  It reminds me of the old JLA/JSA team ups where a member from each team would go off and accomplish what it is they needed to do to defeat the bad guy.

What I like about this story is we have a bad guy (or is he) and a good guy (or is she), but they're both kind of rotten.  An old comic book story device, but used effectively here.

Justice League Vol 3: Timeless

Writer: Bryan Hitch

Artist: Fernando Pasarin, Bryan Hitch, Matt Ryan, Daniel Henriques

DC Comics

096 Batman - Detective Comics Vol. 9: Gordon At War

Because I haven't been reading most things in hardback, I've had to wait for the trade paperback version to come out.  This is one series that I've had weird overlap with.  This is the final volume of the New 52 run of Detective Comics, but I've also read two volumes of the Rebirth run as well.  That book is probably the next book to be written about.

I've really enjoyed this run.  It's one of the few consistent New 52 books despite changing creative teams.  This volume is written by Peter Tomasi, who I have always had mixed feelings about.  I think he's a great storyteller, but he's a lousy scripter.  This book is no different.  He's got great ideas, but he gets all caught up in the minutiae of his words that kind of gets under my skin.  For instance, Harvey Bullock is suddenly an expert on things you'd never think of, in this case, space travel.  Now that's not what bothers me, but what bothers me is while reading Harvey's dialogue, I feel like I might as well be reading Wikipedia.  Nitpicky, sure, but it's how I feel.

The stories in this volume are solid and I've thoroughly enjoyed the James Gordon as Batman run.  More than I expected to.  I'm happy Bruce is back and is Batman again, but this was a good run. 

The art by both Fernando Pasarin and Scot Eaton is simply wonderful.  I look forward to their next projects.

Batman - Detective Comics Vol. 9: Gordon At War

Writer: Peter Tomasi

Artist: Fernando Pasarin, Scot Eaton, Matt Ryan, Wayne Faucher

DC Comics