The Death of the Justice League

It’s been done before, better. Much better.

Twenty years ago, Joe Kelly’s “Obsidian Age” arc gave us the death of the Justice League. The six-issue story, building upon many issues that preceded it, showed the Justice League being defeated and killed by another league of super-beings. The story was structured around two intertwined narrative threads that initially alternated issue by issue, odd-even, between the past and the present, with prophecy and the interleaved narrative challenging the reader to guess where things are going, and even where they’ve been. I have written about that story before and won’t try to reproduce here a tally of its merits, or even its faults, which surely exist.

Then today, there was this story, 2022’s Justice League #75, with “Death of the Justice League” emblazoned on the cover. Guess what happens inside? Spoiler alert: It’s the death of the Justice League. The cover needn’t have tipped you off, though, because DC’s promotion of the event has already detailed this, down to the fact that Black Adam would be the one survivor. So as you read, page by page, you know what is coming, exactly. There is no drama on any single panel of the issue. It doesn’t matter if Batman can get to Pariah’s machine to stop it (whatever that machine does). It doesn’t matter if Jon Stewart can summon a ring-powered army. It doesn’t matter if Green Arrow’s arrow does something. He will not be cooking chili as a celebratory dinner. We already know this. There is no drama.

In fact, I was at all points during this issue more certain about how it would end, and what would happen on the next page, than I often was about what was happening on the page I was actually reading. What does Pariah’s machine do? If the Dark Army isn’t fighting as themselves, what does that mean? When someone’s utterance is cut off mid-sentence, what were they trying to say? How can Aquaman and Aquawoman fight Doomsday fist-to-fist? These are details that I wanted to have clarified, but that never were. And they never mattered. Ultimately, Pariah had wave-your-hands-and-it-kills-Superman power. Why? Did he always have that? Did it come from his machine? Did the machine give him that power because Green Arrow failed to stop it? Or did that just not matter? This is the correct answer: None of it mattered. The Dark Army didn’t even actually do anything except fight the heroes to a draw for way too many pages of unimportant busy-ness on the page before someone waving their hands around did the one and only important event in the whole issue, and that was an event that we already knew was going to happen.

It was flimsy story telling that seemed like an imitation of better storytelling with not enough effort to make a pretense of being good storytelling.

Not only is the issue predictable, but so is this: As April 26 goes on, fan and professional reviews will appear online calling this a great issue. It will get ratings of 10/10, 9/10, 8/10, and perhaps 11/10. There will be false claims that this issue had drama and emotion, when it had zero of those. Reviewers will be impressed by the last cast of characters, even though there isn’t a single page worth of those characters exhibiting any personality. This was a visual spectacle, and in that, I will acknowledge the one thing that impressed me as interesting: The deaths of Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman visually echoed the death of Barry Allen in Crisis on Infinite Earths. their faces peeling away to bone, in a series of minipanels. The homage is not deep, but this act of borrowing, borrowing though it be, was imaginative.

 “Pop will eat itself.” Andy Warhol said. Food looks a lot better going into the digestive tract than coming out. Anyone looking to have an engaging experience reading about the death of the Justice League today should put down today’s “new” Justice League #75 and pick up 2001-2002’s Obsidian Age. 

I’m more interested in the source of the automatically-positive reviews than in anything Williamson put on the page. I suspect that it’s this: Positive reviews end up with higher click counts, and psychology’s study of classical conditioning tells us that a rewarded behavior will be repeated. Drama has been replaced by the presence of eyeballs on pages. It is mere gaze. Storytelling is dead. And that is the true death of the Justice League. 

Press Pause

I started this blog almost 13 years ago. It formed out of a few different motivations:

1) To continue the discussion that many of us had been having in DC Message Boards, where seemingly random deletions, bans, and uproars made some quality conversation just disappear. This was initially focused on Grant Morrison’s Batman run; I wish that some of the older discussions posted there could have been preserved.

2) To reconsider the history of DC comics from the beginning. One of the first comic books I ever owned was a 1974 JLA-JSA meet-up, which was a confusing thing for a new reader! Those stories indicated that there was a vast, cosmic backstory of DC that I didn’t know and couldn’t possibly learn much about by reading new comics. It was only around 2008 that I really caught up on some of the oldest stories, which became fascinating for me in a sort of sociological sense, as Golden Age stories generally weren’t written for adults, but they presented me with an explanation for how DC’s characters began and became American mythology that later drew my admiration.

3) To continue both of those “present” and “past” threads of discussion, breaking down new comics of interest to me (quite often, by Grant Morrison) and writing Retro Reviews of older works – sometimes old favorites of mine, sometimes as I was reading them for the first time – of particularly significant value.

About four years ago, those two threads merged in my analysis of Final Crisis, a work that concluded only weeks before I began the blog, but that I didn’t feel ready to break down in subatomic detail until giving it obsessive levels of attention in late 2017. It was an enormously gratifying study for me, and felt like I took a bit of a risk there because I didn’t really have enough understanding to write the third part until after I’d already posted the first two parts.

Along the way, I took some considerable detours in topic, including the TV show Mad Men. I also have written quite a few drafts – even some extremely long and heavily-researched unpublished ones – that are sitting in my folders, so distant in my memory that I’d feel unqualified to finish them now.

It seems crass to be, in this online age, motivated by sheer numbers of clicks and likes, and I don’t want to convey that exact equation, but to be blunt: If I spend a good part of an hour working on a post for each person who eventually reads it, that feels like I’m speaking to an empty room. (E.g, if I spend 50 hours thinking about a post, then 153 people end up reading it.) And that’s how things are trending. I’m sure there are good reasons for this – there are reasons for everything. I could consider a shift in focus, spreading links in different places, but this is all meant to be fun. There are just about no DC titles that haven’t lost my interest at some point or another in the past few years and some top sellers have been aggressively off-putting to my taste. In a few cases, I’ve thrown down my money and held my nose while reading the issues of a pivotal event that I didn’t really like at all. In others, I’ve bought the first issue and regretted that I used my dollars to “vote” for creators creating something like that. Then I check online reviews and those works have 4.8-star ratings that tie The Dark Knight Returns. It’s hard for me to justify reading depressing, cluttered, subpar works in a life where good reading (viewing, etc.) material exists in overwhelming abundance.

Some comics that others have enjoyed have always – for decades now – seemed too inconsequential for me. Last year, I binge-watched Friday Night Lights and felt like it did an excellent job of something that so, so many mentor-and-sidekick comics had always done poorly. The mentor gives the sidekick an inspirational 30-second speech and then they’re ready to fight super criminals? Maybe someone reads that and finds it exciting. I find that it’s trying, with a pointed lack of effort, to do something that Friday Night Lights did with real effort and real conviction.

And increasingly, some of the news about the comics industry has been hard to stomach. A century ago, Proust advised us, “Never meet your heroes.” Well, that really undermines the point of a genre that is specifically about heroes. And there’s probably nothing in the news now that isn’t in a careful reading of several decades ago. Maybe Fredric Wertham hit the nail on the head.

2022 will make 50 years since I first walked out of a “news” store with a new comic book in my hand. It’s been a good run and it’s not over. For all I know, I’ll soon be strongly motivated to blog about some new comic book. But right now, I’m not sure what that comic book will be.