I would like to say that this is a good comic book or that this is a fun comic book, but I would be bending the truth a bit. For some reason, I get the feeling that Brad Meltzer gets writing for comics and he tries to write a compelling fairplay mystery but he just can not get the ball across the goal line. This story is clearly an homage to the once a year JLA/ JSA meeting that took place in the summer back in the long long ago. But this is complete fanboy wankery too. Once upon a time over in the pages of one of the Legion of Super-Heroes titles, DC published a Legion alphabet. The code word that the Legion characters keep speaking is in that geekspeak alphabet. Can you imagine anything more off-putting to new readers?
Artwise, Ed Benes pays an amazing attention to detail and anatomy even if it is comic book anatomy. You have to like a guy who takes time to get ears right. He gets a bit heavy with the thick black outlines in a couple of spots, but that is more of an aesthetic choice and less of an error. The storytelling is solid but there is no action in the book except for a dinosaur race. It would be nice if the lead characters got to do something cool, but that is a strike against the script more than anything else. Drawn by anybody else, I think this book would be a total loss.
Modern comic book storytelling (and press releases) reminds me of that old joke about the five blind men describing an elephant. They all have their hands on different parts and they all describe it differently. (In a cartoon by Callahan, a sixth blind man stood behind the elephant and described it as “squishy, warm, and kind of stinky.”) Modern comic book stories are told in a similar fashion with changing narrators and cryptic dialogue and buckets of melodrama. Nothing makes any sense until you get to the end of the story and get a shot at putting all of the pieces together. That means that 5/6th of your story is relatively unsatisfying.
By way of comparison, most good TV gets the structure right. Using a similar a multi-act structure, each television act has to advance the story and reveal character and break on a cliffhanger. Most comic book writers working on long arcs do not seem to get the similarity except for maybe the three best serial guys in the business: Brian Bendis, Brian Vaughn and Bill Willingham.
Do comics readers realize that they are reading soap operas with punching?
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