And as a concept, Justice League #1 works for new readers. It features three superheroes just about everyone in the world is familiar with—Batman, Green Lantern, and Superman—and they're running around, investigating the traces of an evil plot that will build into something more than any one of them can handle. If you've read a superhero comic, you've read this before. I'm pretty sure kids would still think Jim Lee's artwork is cool. To me, his pages feel dated, like a series of noodly sketches of action figures in a Kama Sutra of cool superhero poses, as opposed to a story about characters who are doing things. But accusing Jim Lee of drawing cool instead of drawing interesting is like accusing Michael Bay of fumbling the human drama in Transformers 3. It's superheroic, commercial artwork that holds up really well to digital flick-to-zoom scrutiny.
In terms of storytelling, though, I have problems with Justice League #1. As in, some of the dialogue doesn't make sense, (When you're telling someone to make a note of something, you don't say "note to self" to them. You say "note to self" to yourself, when you want to make a note to yourself. Note to DC Comics: This is what editors are for.) and it doesn't sound especially cool, either. The introduction of Cyborg as a major player is heavy handed—He's like the best football player in the history of ever! Awesome! But he just wants his dad's approval, and he can't have it. Bummer!
I would've liked to see a few new tricks, here, rather than the superhero comics I've read thousands of times before. Maybe if you've never read superhero comics before, a reasonably well-executed superhero comic will be enough to bring you back for the next issue. If so, the success of DC Comics will be primarily a triumph of marketing; considering that mainstream monthly comics have been mouldering in obscurity for the last twenty years, that would be revolutionary enough. But I'd like to see some new, updated sensibilities and storytelling tricks, the way Warren Ellis created a whole new superheroic language with The Authority and Planetary, or the way Kirby and Ditko and Lee gave us something new with Marvel in 1963, or—hell—even the way Jim Shooter tried to create a cohesive, somewhat more realistic sci-fi superhero universe with Valiant in the 90s.
- This is the second half of the code. Just the second half.
The review edition of Justice League that DC sent me came with a digital copy. After entering a hilariously unwieldy code into a website (and after taking a few tries to figure out whether the Os were letters or zeroes), it was available for download through a Comixology account. The digital comic is (more or less) identical to the print version, with the same backmatter. The price of the digital edition—$3.99—is prohibitive for that kind of content. (For a dollar more, you get 250 levels of Angry Birds on an iPad.) I would have been perfectly happy with a few glitzy non-video digital ads if they could drive the price down to 99¢. Hell, I'd sign up for a subscription for 99¢ an issue. Twelve bucks a year for dumb superhero comic? Why not?
On the whole, Justice League works fine. It's a superhero comic book that is intended to be someone's first comic book. And that's a fine goal. But I'm holding out hope for some of the fringier comics DC's rolling out over the next month—the books written by Grant Morrison, Jeff Lemire, and Paul Cornell, especially. Those books promise to attract new readers while pushing the whole idea of superhero comics forward. I think that's DC's best hope if they want to stay relevant as more than an intellectual property farm.
