Justice Society of America #1

by Geoff Johns, Dale Eaglesham, and Art Thibert, according to the cover, for DC Comics

Dear everyone who was involved in the first issue of the new Justice League of America,

This is how you do it.

This is how you create an exciting first issue and pull the entire team together in only one issue. Sure, the JSoA team had five more pages to do it in, but I'm sure you could have asked for them as well, but they wouldn't have helped with my problems with the book.

Good luck next time, fellas.

Anyway, as I declared in my opening statement, I'm a pretty big fan of the Justice Society. I even like the "old men in tights" era of the team. I was, to put it mildly, upset when I found out that JSA was being canceled. I didn't see any reason to do it because the book hadn't lost its way like JLA had. It could have, and I think should have, continued on with a name change. It could have, and should have, been able to hit 100. The only reason, that I can think of, that it was cancelled was because DC didn't want a Justice Society book to have a higher number than the Justice League.

But that's not really what I'm supposed to be talking about, is it?

What I really liked is how, even though the collecting teammates was, at times, kind of boring (albeit important characterization), it was surrounded by the new Mr. America's mystery. So there were the introductions and then there was this mystery that, literally, came crashing down on the Justice Society at the end of the book.

Maxine Hunkle seems to have been the one character that everyone was most surprised by in this book. I was surprised, too. I had no idea what to expect, but everything I expected led me to cringe. She was called the team’s cheerleader and that just took me to a bad place. Like just about everyone else out there, though, I was thrilled with her character. The moment she said it was time to defy gravity, I was sure that there's no way I can dislike her. (Unless a really unskilled writer comes along and turns her into an evil slut. But Geoff Johns has enough clout to keep that from happening for a long while, right?) Her babbling may fill up panels with lots of words, but it makes so much sense for who she is. I can't wait to see what she'll become.

It seems that the new Starman will be Thom Kallor from the Legion of Superheroes. But which one? Seeing Dawnstar's fringe suggests that he'll be from the Silver Age or Earth 2 or where ever, not the current Star Boy. (Oh, that was a spoiler, by the way.) And if he takes off his mask revealing a white guy, they we can all be sure which one he is. Will he go by the name Danny Blaine, though? That's what I want to know. I like how his mind is fractured, too. Time travel in comics always seems to be too easy and, I'm assuming here, I like the idea that traveling through time may have hurt his mental capabilities. Eventually, it'll be fixed, but for now I can enjoy it and I look forward to his first meeting with The Shade, unless they've already met and we all missed it.

The only thing about the issue that I have the slightest problem with is the art. Eaglesham is competent, but his characters don't have much weight to them. And I'm not talking about waist and hip size. (Although there is a picture of Power Girl where I thought it's lucky she has a super strong spine or else her breast would be down to her hips because her spine would compress until it practically doesn't exist any more.) What I'm talking about is a sense of gravity. Like the characters are standing solidly on something. In this book, gravity seems to have a low effect on all the characters and if the wind blows too strong even the ones who can't fly will be blown away.

Of course, part of my problem is comparing Eaglesham and Thibert's work with work of Stephen Sadowski and Michael Bair's first issue in the last book incarnation of the JSA. Sadowski and Bair are probably my favorite penciling/inking team to touch the JSA, ever.

One more art thing before I wrap all this up: To the colorist, whose name escapes me since I didn't bring the comic with me to work, your use of the big color dots in this book was far superior to their use in the first issue of Justice League of America, but I want to remind you for the next time you use it that from the dawn of comic book until the sometime in the '80s, the shading on characters was pretty much non-existent or done with lines from the penciler and inker. So, when you do the initial color pass be sure to block those panels in solid colors and leave the shading out of it. It just looks wrong.

Overall, this book was so spectacular that the grade shoots up the scale into letters that have yet to exist in those higher planes of existence magical character are always talking about. The next issue can not come out soon enough for me.