A quick but temporary solution.
Creative Staff:
Story: Steve Orlando
Art: Ivan Reis, Scott Hanna, Joe Prado
Colors: Marcelo Maiolo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
What They Say:
“THE EXTREMIST AGENDA” finale! The new JLA’s first adventure comes to a (multiple-)earth-shattering conclusion as Batman and his team takes the fight directly to Lord Havok.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
When it comes to opening arcs of team series I tend to find that while there are bright spots, more often than not it’s kind of a slog. A lot of the focus is just on bringing things together for the team and basic setup, which is important. Steve Orlando crafted an interesting tale overall with Havok and the rest and I liked his approach in unifying things the last time around. For this last installment in this arc, which is just prelude for other things, ivan Reise is back on the artwork with Hanna and Prado inking, which means we get a very detailed looking book covering a whole lot of different situations. It’s really well put together but at the same time I find myself missing some of the simplicity of days of old.
The book did some good stuff in putting the League in a position to do a lot of the heavy and hard work in dealing with the Extremists while ensuring that the resistance side against what Havok is doing is taking the lead. They didn’t want the superheroes, who they have a lot of distrust about after years of broadcast and internet revelations of destruction, to be the ones to do everything here. Distrust is high but they also realized that they need them in order to deal with Havok and his merry band. It’s a solid setup, though this four-issue arc just feels so incredibly rushed in terms of the time period it takes in that it’s like a day or two battle from start to finish. Unfortunately, the human resistance side largely takes a back seat here up until the finale, but that’s not much of a surprise.
What the book mostly does through this phase is finish off the fights that we saw in the previous installment. There are good bits along the way, such as the bonding between Atom and Frost in taking down their opponent, and just some craziness out of Lobo during his. Batman is thankfully kept to a minimum overall, but most of the time is taken up with what Ray is doing with Dreamweaver, which works to set things for the future combined with a brief flashback piece at the end to paint a bigger picture of what’s going on. It’s not convoluted per se but it just feels awkward. Tying that in with the League getting their first win in this form and Batman really starting to believe the group has potential now as he sees the coming together is standard material for a new team book of diverse characters like this.
In Summary:
Justice League of America is a book that can definitely do some fun things and I’m hopeful for its potential but this first arc didn’t do much for me. It was well-written overall in terms of characters and the flow of action, but the timeline felt weird and dealing with something extra dimensional like this right off the bat feels like a misstep when we needed something smaller and more personal to connect to these team members with. I’m likely to stick around for the next arc, especially as this one only ran four issues in what feels like a radical change from the usual six-issue arcs for trades. There’s a lot to like here but it still has to come together in a strong way to really cement its position and its cast.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: April 12th, 2017
MSRP: $2.99