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DC
Writer: Bryan Hitch
Penciller: Neil Edwards
Inker: Daniel Henriques
Colorist: Tony Avina
Lettering: Richard Starkings
WARNING: Major spoilers – article meant only for those who have completed reading this issue!
I had the great benefit of my review assignments for this week being three books by members of the Top Writer’s club in comics these days. Mark Waid, Marguerite Bennett, and this issue, by Brian Hitch, which was the first issue I read out of my stack. This was a well-written and well-drawn book. Unfortunately, it is a carbon copy of a ton of Justice League issues written over the years. I get it; it’s a setup issue to transition the team from the last arc to the next. But I finished the issue feeling like I had not gotten much out of it. More on that in a bit.
The story picks up with Cyborg lamenting the one death that occurred in the wake of the League’s battle with the Kindred. In one aspect, I was a bit dismissive of the notion that the League, who
My problem with this issue, like i said, is that it does not do anything new. I like Hitch, and as I mentioned, the story is written well. There is a bit of detectable sorrow in the writing of the thoughts and words between the Cyborg and Batman scenes that communicate the League’s efforts in struggling with the wake of the Kindred defense. I just feel like if you are going to invoke this thread, it needs to feel a bit more heart-breaking. Some of that blame is in the storytelling from an art perspective, where we do not see the emotional strain or a smoldering intensity in Batman’s face. Not like we have seen it drawn in the pages of Batman and Detective Comics in the recent issues as Bruce has been dealing with the (as far as he knows) death of Tim Drake. It just didn’t get me in this issue like it has in those other two series. There are some nice heroics in the Cyborg scenes, with a last minute Boom Tube save where Cyborg shunts the Watchtower back into space before it almost crashes into the Earth’s surface. But outside of that and the Green Lantern ring hop at the end, I just did not feel like there was much being done here to go out of the way of what we would have already been expecting. There is no deep character insight offered here, and no major reveals. It’s a solid issue, just not one that falls too far from the stock Justice League tree.
Despite my criticism, this is a great jumping on point for those who have not been reading JL and want to get in now. It is not a talking heads issue; despite