2018.031 Justice League Of America Vol 1: The Tornado's Path

Justice League Of America Vol 1: The Tornado's Path
Written by: Brad Meltzer
Illustrated by: Ed Benes, Sandra Hope
DC Comics

175 Justice League Of America Vol 2: Curse Of The Kingbutcher

Not Steve Orlando's strongest work.

Justice League Of America Vol 2: Curse Of The Kingbutcher

Writer: Steve Orlando

Artist: Felipe Watanabe, Jamal Campbell, Andy MacDonald, Neil Edwards, Scott Hanna, Sandu Florea

DC Comics

147 Wonder Woman And Justice League America Vol 2

DC should really be ashamed of itself.  Justice League should be the company's flagship title.  A book featuring the biggest and the brightest heroes banded together.  By this point in the company's history, Justice League was a group of D-List, at best, characters.  And not just one book of D-Listers, but three full series full of the worst of the worst.  I understand how this happened.  When the JLA was revamped into Justice League International, it had a solid creative team that took a lot of B-Listers and turned them into the premiere DC Superteam.  As time went on, the creative teams got worse and worse and the roster reflected that.  Luckily this is getting to the end of that era.

This book collects a big crossover between all the Justice League books.  It's an awful crossover that culminates with the death of Ice.  Booster Gold also dies, but only kind of dies.  But his Tony Stark Iron Man suit keeps him alive until a new creative team can fix the disaster they made of him.

This book is just not good.  It's everything that was wrong with the 90s all collected into one handy volume.

Wonder Woman And Justice League America Vol 2

Writer: Dan Vado, Mark Waid, Gerard Jones

Artist: Marc Campos, Chuck  Wojtkiewicz, Sal Velluto, Ken Branch, Kevin Conrad, Bob Dvorak, Robert Jones, Rich Rankin, Jeff Albrecht

DC Comics

145 JLA: A Midsummer's Nightmare - The Deluxe Edition

I just realized it's been nearly a month since I've posted anything.  Time has been at a premium lately and I really haven't read much.  This will be the first of six or seven posts.  That's all I've managed to read this month.  It's kind of sad because I have such a big backlog of books.  My October shipment was only four books, which meant I could delve into my backlog.  Or not, as it happens.

Anyway, the first of the six books I'm going to briefly talk about is JLA: A Midsummer's Nightmare.  Originally a three issue mini series back in the 90's, it set the stage for Grant Morrison reviving the JLA.  By this point in time, the JLA was a giant joke (see the next post).  This mini-series served to bring the big guns back together, something that was sorely needed.

I remember loving this series when it first came out.  This time around, however, I just found it to be okay.  Maybe I loved it so much because it was the first time in years that the REAL JLA got together again?  Maybe it was just in that time this book was top notch.  Styles and trends change over the years.  Reading it this time, I thought it was a solid story, definitely rooted in it's era, but that era kind of tainted it just a touch for me.  I thought the art was good, but somewhat generic.  Nothing stand out for a series that served a bigger purpose.

I do love these Deluxe Editions DC is putting out.  The pages are just a little bit bigger, the art is just a little clearer than originally published.  It's a really nice way to reprint these books.

JLA: A Midsummer's Nightmare - The Deluxe Edition

Writer: Mark Waid, Fabian Nicieze

Artist: Jeff Johnson, Darick Robertson, Jon Holdredge, Hanibal Rodriguez

DC Comics

142 Justice League Of America: The Nail - The Complete Deluxe Edition

DC has finally collected both Alan Davis mini-series into one beautiful deluxe edition.  What an amazing book to sit and soak in.

Alan Davis wrote and drew a love letter to DC's Silver Age.  It doesn't quite get the love that something like Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier does, but it should.

Quite simply, Ma & Pa Kent get a nail in their tire the night they were supposed to find baby Kal-El.  They never leave the house and Kal-El gets adopted elsewhere.  He never becomes Superman.  So the story follows the DC Silver Age with that one alteration.  And what it turns into is a scene that is very reminiscent of what's happening today in America.  Except replace minorities with meta humans.  Meta humans are no longer trusted and they're feared.  There's a giant conspiracy against them, but the heroes do get their shit together and take care of matters.  It's a very compelling story.  It grabs your attention and doesn't let it go.

A follow up story was done called Another Nail.  This one I struggled a bit with.  It starts off going further into detail an event that happened in the first book, which leads to the new story.  Or so I guess it does.  The second book felt like it was a lot of plot points, but I was waiting to figure out what the actual plot was.  If that makes sense. 

Both series are some of the best work Alan Davis has ever done.  He's amazing.  I could look at this book for the rest of my life and never get tired of it.

Justice League Of America: The Nail - The Complete Deluxe Edition

Writer: Alan Davis

Artist: Alan Davis, Mark Farmer

DC Comics

138 JLA Year One: The Deluxe Edition

I suppose there was a need for this book.  Crisis On Infinite Earths had made the JLA's origin obsolete.  Things needed to be shuffled around to make it still work.  And this book put it all down on paper for us.  I remember enjoying the book when it first came out all those years ago.  But reading it with a fresh set of eyes, all these years later, I kind of feel like this story is a big waste of time.  In the years since it was published, this story, too, has become obsolete.  Events have made changes in history and this doesn't hold up anymore.  And maybe that's why I feel like it was a waste?  I don't know.

There were a lot of things that bothered me about this book.  I love an Easter egg, but it felt like this book when above and beyond the call of duty to shove as many of them in here as possible.  It's distracting.  Some of the characterizations also annoyed me.  Black Canary especially.  She was insufferable to me.

I heard a lot of behind the scenes stuff about the production of this book back when it was being published.  There was a lot of talk about Mark Waid being furious with Brian Augustyn's scripting and that he had to rescript an awful lot of this book.  It may be true.  I've never been a big Augustyn fan.  I don't feel he's a very good writer.  It may be his presence here that brings the book down for me.  Because it's not Waid.  He's still got a million ideas and they're all good.

It was nice to revisit this book, but I don't know if it was necessary.

JLA Year One: The Deluxe Edition

Writer: Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn

Artist: Barry Kitson, Michael Bair, Mark Propst, John Stokes

DC Comics

133 Justice League Of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol 1

I'm dying.  Or at least it feels like I am.  I woke up Sunday feeling under the weather.  Monday was bad enough that I told work I wasn't coming in Tuesday.  It's now Friday and I still haven't gone back to work.  I think I'm on the verge of kicking this finally.  But as I've sat home sick, I've been reading.  Because there hasn't been anything else I've felt up to doing.  The first thing I grabbed was this beauty.  850 pages (give or take) of Bronze Age JLA goodness.

This volume picks up roughly where the Archive books ended, so I'm happy for the continuity of the reprints.  Black Canary has just left Earth 2 and joined the JLA.  It's been fun watching her in these comics most of all.  She developed a superpower but is having no luck controlling it.  In a couple issues she practices her canary cry, but with no luck.  Later on, her canary cry gives her psychic powers (which were quickly forgotten about).  Most of the use of her actual canary cry takes place in the Green Lantern book.  In this run of JLA, with the exception of her botched attempts at it, she uses it only once in a blink-and-you-miss it scene.

Otherwise, this was a joy to read.  The book has two running themes, I've noticed.  The front half of the book has a ton of stories about the ecology, the environment, civil rights, that sort of stuff.  The second half, however, is all about pure super-heroic action.  I guess I never realized how much I loved Len Wein's contribution to the series until I reread these stories.

I have nothing bad to say about this book.  Nothing.  It's a pure joy, plain and simple.  So much Dick Dillin beauty, too.

Justice League Of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol 1

Writer: Denny O'Neil, Mike Friedrich, Len Wein, Robert Kanigher, Gardner Fox

Artist: Dick Dillin, Neal Adams, Murphy Anderson, Ross Andru, Nick Cardy, Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Giella, Dick Giordano, Bernard Sachs

DC Comics

126 Justice League Of America Vol 1: The Extremists

DC has high hopes for Steve Orlando.  They gave him two high profile books (this and Supergirl) to write with the Rebirth initiative.  So far, he's falling slightly short for me.  And I don't know why.  I love love love love love his Midnighter work.  It's been one of my favorite books from DC in a long time.  But dealing with mainstream DC stuff, it's just not clicking with me yet.

This books has two stories.  The first is the modern day reintroduction of the Extremists.  Lord Havok and his bunch.  While the story itself wasn't bad, reading it all in one fell swoop didn't do it much justice (pardon the pun).  The timeline of the entire story is unbelievable to me.  Things happened entirely too fast for them to seem (even in comic books) plausible.  

I am enjoying the interpersonal exchanges between the characters and look forward to a lot more of that going forward.  It's an interesting line up for a team and I'm anxious to see it succeed.

The second story was my least favorite of the two.  It felt like the team was dealing with a Maxie Zeus knock off.  Yawn.

Justice League Of America Vol 1: The Extremists

Writer: Steve Orlando

Artist: Ivan Reis, Felipe Watanabe, Diogenes Neves, Andy MacDonald, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert, Julio Ferreira, Scott Hanna, Ruy Jose, Marc Deering

DC Comics

102 Justice League Of America: Road To Rebirth

I mentioned a few posts back that the Justice League vs. Suicide Squad book was a direct lead in to a new Justice League of America series.  Well, this is another book that leads directly into that new book.  While the JL/SS book was an actual series that laid the ground work for JLA, this book is a collection of Rebirth one-shots giving the backstory on some of the players in the new book.  We get the new, "improved" origins on the Atom, Vixen, Killer Frost and the Ray.  Some of these stories feel more like they got a New 52 treatment rather than a Rebirth treatment.  But it's hard to tell given that each origin takes place over the course of 20 pages.  I'm anxious to see how this team actual gels together.  I can tell you I'm not exactly pleased Lobo is a part of the book, but I have faith that Steve Orlando knows what he's doing.

Justice League Of America: Road To Rebirth

Writer: Steve Orlando, Jody Houser

Artist: Andy MacDonald, Jamal Campbell, Stephen Byrne, Mirka Andolfo, Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Oclair Albert

DC Comics