The JUSTICE LEAGUE (2021) Take
If you have been paying attention, you will not be surprised when I tell you that yes, I did love Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE. It’s the movie I wanted, plus forty minutes of extra footage otherwise bound to the cutting room floor. It’s a whole rotisserie chicken of a film, and I tore into it with my bare hands. And look: you and I both know I would have loved it anyway, for any reason, so I will not review JUSTICE LEAGUE. There are people who are way better at this and way more qualified than me to talk about movies, and I am but a humble best comic book reviewer on the goddamn planet.
In truth, the biggest reason I love JUSTICE LEAGUE is because of the film it isn’t. Which is to say, I love it because it gets rid of every single rewrite, cut, and edit mandated by a group of creatives including Jon Berg, Geoff Johns and Joss Whedon, that were meant to make the movie closer in visuals and tone to the modern standard set by the two Avengers movies Whedon directed. The result was a barf-ugly cynical mess, best represented by its most notorious moment, when the Flash takes a high-speed pratfall right into Wonder Woman’s breasts.
But it’s not enough to point the blame at Whedon for trying to correct his myriad failures on Avengers: Age of Ultron with other, worse failures. Those failures have an origin point. As you probably know, those films took their inspiration from Bryan Hitch and Mark Millar’s The Ultimates, replacing that book’s most outwardly satirical elements with the self-aware quippery Whedon was famous for in his television work. That book didn’t come out of nowhere fully formed, however, and if you look a bit further back, you can find all the worst impulses behind that 2017 cut of JUSTICE LEAGUE in uncut form in a book so completely wretched reading it will cause you pain. Folks, it’s time to talk about Mark Millar and Frank Quitely’s The Authority run.
The story goes like this: in 1999, Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch turn Stormwatch into the ultimate (no caps) blockbuster comic, a special blend of big heroes, world-ending threats, a touch of realpolitik and a dash of world-weary cynicism. It’s a hit, it changes the face of comics forever, and twenty years later its fetishization of Angie and Jenny would read a lot creepier.
One year later, Mark Millar and Frank Quitely show up, and ruin everything. Before we go in too deep, let’s start with this: it’s a lesser Quitely work. He’s stuck working in an imitation of Hitch’s widescreen style, and not really doing anything interesting with it. It looks impeccable, but it’s only genius on occasion, when Quitely is usually genius all the time. Now that that’s said: the rest of the book is even more fucking miserable. If you thought Millar was at his most Millar in his creator-owned books, you might have forgotten about this one.
Nominally, it takes the idea of The Authority existing in the public eye, and examines how the world would react to a superhero team imposing its will on world affairs, all done through relentless satire of celebrity culture and global politics. But in Millar’s world, these things are pushed to their unbearable extreme, and get steeped in know-it-all misanthropy and nihilism. It is also violently misogynistic, and at times outright racist. It is obsessed with image, whether in its almost omnipresent depictions of television’s point of view or in its painfully crafted hero moments, contrived postcards of juvenile “cool” where our heroes indulge in their violent pleasures.
It’s pretty obvious that those filtered down to Whedon’s work, from his butchering of anything having to do with either the Amazons, Wonder Woman or Cyborg to how he forces Superman to be the reassuring father figure some people were clamoring for in a phone video straight from the Uncanny Valley. But those failures are far older than Millar, and they’re not unique to Avengers and Avengers: Age Of Ultron. Where I found the most glaring commonality of thought, however, is in the attitude: both Millar and Whedon constantly want to remind you that they are better than this.
The Authority is more direct about it, certainly: it is about a rogue scientist who’s an obvious Jack Kirby riff, and his armies of superheroes legally distinct but very similar to the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Howling Commandos. The fake heroes are dispatched in as graphic a fashion as Quitely can muster, and the fake Kirby gets convinced that the Authority’s way of thinking is better, while Millar’s dialogue finds no shortage of slurs that never should have been fit to see print to describe comic books and their audience. He even throws in a jab at the visual dullness of comic book expository scenes while having its characters stand in a green void.
And sure, the successive translations from indie comic to high-profile Marvel book to film mean that Whedon is marginally better about those things, but the attitude is still there, in the knowing nods, in the ways his characters undermine one another through pointed barbs. Batman, whose path to Damascus is central to the film’s arc, is turned into an impotent punchline as penance for the perceived sins of Batman V. Superman. Flash’s contributions are pushed into the margins to make room for his constant bumbling. It’s reported that behind the scenes, Joss Whedon kept acting like he knew better than everyone else, and the arrogance shows.
Here then, is the HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS take on JUSTICE LEAGUE (2021): JUSTICE LEAGUE is a total repudiation of both Joss Whedon, and the Mark Millar he rode in on. It is overwhelmingly sincere, and it wears the impossibility of its comic book roots with pride. It rejects everything about the fashionable cynicism of the modern comic book movie, down to the aspect ratio, changed from the movie multiplex widescreen to the blocky, towering, Academy ratio. It is one of a handful of movies actually worthy to be called “Comic Book Movie”, and there is no greater honor for a movie, for there is no greater artform than comics. We have spoken.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: IT SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW THERE IS NOTHING I WILL NOT DO FOR YOUR APPROVAL
I think people will be underestimating how much of a total mindblower Batman/Superman #16 is, and that’s in spite of the fact it’s a very showy, and very mind-blowy kind of comic. The part you will see, of course, is that Gene Luen Yang has written an old-school double feature taking its cues from the old Batman and Superman film serials of the 1940s, with strange multiversal twists spicing things up and making you wonder what’s what. You will see those adventures play out in two parallel film reels, and that they kinda play off of one another.
And already, you’ll be pretty impressed by what Ivan Reis has pulled off here. Both reels are pitch-perfect in their old-timey aesthetic, and they have been impeccably paced such that you can read the double feature either back-to-back or both at once, and see the ways in which the narratives converge. I’m here to tell you that the feat is perhaps even more impressive than it looks, because of what the central gimmick of the issue does to Reis’ toolset. Both adventures being confined to a film reel means he only has a single strip to lay out the action, and panels can only be delineated with strict 90 degrees vertical gutters. In other words, he has to nail panel composition every time or else the issue doesn’t work, and he does.
There was already something incredibly exciting about Yang playing with the new rules of DC’s multiverse. But if Ivan Reis is gonna keep delivering masterclass issues like this one? Oh you best believe this is gonna be the most exciting book on the shelves month in and month out.
In an effort to de-toxify the discourse around the latest Teen Titans relaunch, I will disclose, for the sake of clarity and transparency, that I am 28 years old. I am not the target demo, and I will not pretend that I am. Be careful of anyone posting opinions on the Teen Titans online without making that kind of disclosure: if they can’t be honest with themselves, can they really be honest with you?
So, yeah. I did enjoy Teen Titans Academy #1, and I do expect to have to fight some very invested adults about it. It’s as impressive a juggling act as you can find in comics, tracking as it does over two dozens’ worth of characters over a handful of intersecting plotlines, with the events of the Future State story looming over the proceedings like a big grim sword of Damocles. It’s a lot to do, and yet, it’s also a book that has enough space in there for three lush Rafa Sandoval two-page spreads and one final page splash.
How does Tim Sheridan do it? For one, every other page is absolutely packed. But the key trick here is that there’s a center to it all. If you go past the “first day of school” stuff, the “Teen Titans on an away mission” stuff, the “mystery of Red X stuff” and the couple of individual stories in there, you’ll find an idea, repeated over and over again, that Nightwing is in over his head with this Academy business. The Zoomers are zooming past, his past is catching up to him, and all he can do is put a brave face on it all. And then, there’s the impending disaster. All in all, it’s fun, it’s generous, and it gets the mind racing with mysteries. It is the most comic book you will get for $3.99 this week, and with the price of paper going through the roof that’s a steal.
Longtime readers of this rambling cry for help will remember that I wasn’t too hot on Dan Mora and Mariko Tamaki’s Future State: Dark Detective. I didn’t think the near-future cyberpunk dystopia had enough twists to carry what remained a very by the numbers original flavor Batman story. But that future was then, and this is now, and I think Detective Comics #1034 the take on Batman I was waiting for from this creative team.
The reason why is because it goes to places Batman stories ever rarely get to: it’s a book about class, and how it shapes the geography of a city. There’s high-tech Joker cultists in the lot, but at the core of it, this is a story about Bruce Wayne, dispossessed of his vast fortune in James Tynion IV’s Batman, getting forced to slum it like your average millionaire, adjusting to life in downtown Gotham. Of course, there’s machinations underway. On the one side, the totalitarian ambitions of Mayor Nakano, as seen in the aforementioned Future State comics. On the other, someone who’s trying to upset Gotham’s geography through crime.
It all sounds very heady when laid out like that, but don’t worry, it’s still a very splashy superhero action comic, as gorgeous as anything Jordie Bellaire and Dan Mora have ever worked on. You will see more people kick through windows than you’ll know what to do with. There’s a scene where a shirtless wet Bruce Wayne is swinging a sledgehammer. It’s hot. It looks good. The backup Robin story by Williamson and Melnikov packs a killer reveal too. You’ll love it.
And that’s that! Remember kids: reading Mark Millar comics for research should only be done under the supervision of professionals. Following the experience, I have gone through a therapeutic reading of Wildcats Version 3.0, and I expect to have fully recovered by next week. Until then, why don’t you go and like, subscribe, and comment? I’ll be there when you come back, telling you once more to HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS.