Comic Review: Justice League #3

Justice League #3

DC Comics

Writer: Scott Snyder

Artists: Jorge Jimenez and Alejandro Sanchez

The year is 1963. A boy finds a strange comic on the ground. The paper is glossy and slick. The art is packed with more detail than the boy ever thought could fit on a page. The colors are blended more smoothly than he’s ever seen. The characters are familiar in some cases and unfamiliar in others. But here’s my guess: this boy from the silver age would understand the story inside perfectly well. He would read the bombastic language, see the mind-boggling scale of the threats, and feel completely at home.

“Superman and Martian Manhunter in: BATTLE OF THE SOURCE!”

“Batman and Hawkgirl in: SUPERMAN AND MARTIAN MANHUNTER!”

“Cyborg and John Stewart in: THE INVISIBLE SPECTRUM!”

“Flash, Wonder Woman and Aquaman in: WHITE MARTIANS FROM THE DAWN OF TIME!”

The year is 2018. A boy picks up a strange comic from the rack. The art makes sense to him  – the smooth color gradations and tight details are all standards for his time. But the story? There’s so much happening, he doesn’t know where it’s going to go next! The threats are all scientific, but the science involved is so fantastical that the word “science” barely fits! The heroes are all split up, the villains are sinister and bent on destruction, and the scale of the threats are so large that they strain the limits of comprehension. And yet he, too, feels completely at home.

A smile spreads across his face.

Justice League #3 is a continuation of what is promising to be Scott Snyder’s magnum opus. It’s what I’ve been waiting for from Justice League for a long time now, and the feeling of reading a Justice League comic that I actually love was sorely missed until now. If you like Justice League, this comic is for you. If you like gigantic science-style threats, this comic is for you. If you liked Morrison’s run, this comic is for you. There are too many tastes and preferences out there for me to call something a must-buy for everyone, but this is about as close as I come to that. If you like superhero comics, you’ll like this one.

The art comes to us from Jorge Jimenez on lines and Alejandro Sanchez on colors, and it is excellent stuff from start to finish. The linework is fluid and solid, and I don’t see any lines getting lost in colors or fading out at odd points. Jimenez has an excellent grasp on texture – there are a lot of artists who can use hatching, but many of those artists just hatch on everything, robbing the technique of its potency. Jimenez, on the other hand, is completely cognizant of which panels require the depth that hatching provides and which panels require clarity of texture. Several pages stand out to me as being notably clear or notably textured, and when you look at the comic as a whole you’ll find that each choice lands perfectly with the atmosphere and thematic tone of the scene. It’s brilliant. The colors and the color textures were, on the whole, pretty good! I’m not always a fan of digital coloring, and a few elements strike me as slightly under-colored or under-textured, but the colors are also very striking at a few points. For example, Batman is inside of Superman’s body and Hawkgirl is inside J’onn’s. When we see them, the background of the “world” outside the bloodships is red for Superman and green for J’onn. It’s a simple thing, and an obvious choice, but it still reminds us that coloring is a powerful tool for subtly communicating information to the reader without them even noticing. My favorite part about the art, though, is the page composition. Now, don’t misunderstand me – there’s not that much intricate panelwork here. It’s not too fancy. But it is extremely proficient, and here’s what I mean by that: every page has a completely different panel layout, and all of the pages are very easy to read. Jimenez does an excellent job of guiding the reader’s eye from panel to panel and speech bubble to speech bubble. Remember, folks: the purpose of any form of art is to communicate. Jimenez’ choices in this issue really prove to me that he understands his task and is capable of rising to the challenge. There’s also a few panels where Jimenez works in silhouette, and I love them. The art’s great!

The story, though, is even better. Oh, silver age, I’ve missed you. I’ve mentioned it before, but Scott Snyder’s strength as a writer is when he writes on a large scale. He loves to write big things happening in his given arena, and while it’s not the best approach for Batman it is a perfect approach to Justice League. He’s talking about five or six different corners of the DCU and cramming all of them into one big, crazy story – and what’s crazier is that it all fits together perfectly. You’ve got ancient Martian evils, ancient Lantern evils, an evil sentient sun, something called the Still Force, something that looks like the Source Wall, and then you’ve got the Legion of Doom dead center! It doesn’t seem like it should work, but it does! It’s so much to process, yet it’s not hard to understand the plot at all due to Snyder’s masterful sense of pacing. He jumps from mini-story to mini-story, treating them all as individual but concurrent chapters of his work. Snyder manages to push the story forward on every page, giving us new exposition and information in nearly every panel and still managing to keep it from being talky! The sense of movement and progression in the story is nearly palpable as it sweeps you along! It’s a seriously exciting experience. As far as the individual threats, what is there to say? I’m excited about every single one of them. I don’t know where everything is going. I don’t even have a guess as to what kind of dangers are going to evolve from this point on, but it’s pretty clear that everything’s about to go even more wild in the next issue or two. There’s not a lot to spoil here because the plot is essentially “oh god oh no things are getting so much worse”, but that’s exactly the plot I want out of my Justice League comic: excitement, simple and pure. This isn’t some edgy, modern story about grey moral choices and the fallibility of authority. It isn’t even a modern story about individual characters and their struggles. This is a Silver Age comic book. What defined the Silver Age? Many people would say “cheesy technology”, or “a complete lack of understanding of character.” And sure, those are a big part of it. But you have to understand, the Silver Age was about mystery. Because science was the greatest mystery of all back then! The general public was absolutely wild for anything that provided a scientific explanation for impossible things. And that is what Snyder has tapped into. He has created, for our pleasure, an utter smorgasbord of impossible things. And this comic is him slowly giving us hints about their purpose, their function, their history. It is a mystery story at its core, and our heroes are fighting against not only villains but the unknown. Every clue they receive is the equivalent of a punch on The Unknown’s shadowy jaw, every breakthrough they make is the equivalent of a kick to its shadowy nuts. It’s thrilling to read, and you get completely swept up in the chase. The writing is just as action-packed as the art, and how many comics have you read lately that you could say that of?