Review: Justice League Vol. 1: The Totality trade paperback (DC Comics)

I'm still struggling to define "Snyder-esque." Surely if you encounter a "man of the people" Batman, aspirational hero to the lowest of Gotham, we can with certainty call that Scott Snyder-esque. And it's easy to differentiate that fallible Batman, often blind to conspiracies in his own midst, from Grant Morrison's "bat-god" Batman, always a step ahead of his enemies and always with a contingency plan.

But when it comes to DC Universe-wide epics, the differences are harder to pin down. Dark Nights: Metal, though fueled with a rock 'n' roll undercurrent, borrowed so many of Morrison's concepts (and even saw Morrison writing a tie-in) such that tonally the book was not so different from Final Crisis. In Snyder's Justice League Vol. 1: The Totality, we see shades of Morrison's JLA from start to finish; Morrison's "we are all superheroes" moral is not so far from this book's testament that we are all base creatures who inspire one another to greatness.

Rife with wild ideas and superheroic cameos, Scott Snyder's Justice League is assuredly what we need right now, the dynamic and relevant Justice League that should perhaps have launched the Rebirth era. It does not feel fully Snyder's yet in its mix of others' ideas, thin characters, and an over-reliance on veiled hints of future threats, but I think Snyder is headed in the right direction and I'm eager to follow him on this journey.

[Review contains spoilers]

In the first issue, Martian Manhunter J'onn J'onzz draws the new League into a mindscape meeting room to warn of a cosmic threat hurtling toward Earth; when he leaves his reverie, the League has mysteriously gone off without him. In the next issue, the story picks up with the threat, the Totality, having already crashed to Earth between the pages. These narrative jumps, even a kind of purposeful narrative mixup to emphasize the small instead of the big, remind me right off of the same in Final Crisis. Snyder eschews the predictable here; that's not a market for which Morrison has a monopoly, but the tricks feel familiar instead of new.

Totality is largely Martian Manhunter's story, and Flash Barry Allen and Green Lantern John Stewart's. I applaud heartily that Snyder establishes new aspects of the latter characters' mythoi — the Still Force and the Ultraviolet Spectrum respectively; I have long thought Justice League should be a cornerstone book from which individual character's titles take their cues, and if these and J'onn's revelations carry over into those titles and Steve Orlando's new Martian Manhunter miniseries respectively, so much the better. At the same time, stemming perhaps from this book's heavy Justice League Unlimited influences, Snyder is writing Barry Allen significantly like Michael Rosenbaum's Wally West, such to make it hard to fully perceive even Joshua Williamson's Barry in these pages.

Though I'm not 100% up to date on the Green Lantern titles, Snyder also has a John Stewart here out on patrol and taking his orders from the Guardians, a generic status quo depiction of John that ignores that, at least until recently, John was the Corps leader. As well, much of John's arc here turns on his guilt over destroying the planet Xanshi in 1988's Cosmic Odyssey and reconciling with J'onn about it — something that, in 30 years, writers have had the John character long since deal with (including under the Geoff Johns Green Lantern team) and I'm even pretty sure I've seen John and J'onn talk about it. Let's hear it for the return of pre-Flashpoint continuity, but so far it feels like Snyder goes at these characters with an old or outdated playbook; in the case of Hawkgirl, we're meant to care about this character but we have little to no understanding of who she is or where she came from in modern times.

On the other hand, I did think Snyder got exactly right this book's other star, Lex Luthor; though Lex has recently been a hero, Snyder demonstrates convincingly the forces that turn him bad again (even if seemingly involving some mind control or manipulation). Though the whole book is well done, James Tynion's interlude guest-shot is among the strongest in the sequence when the dominoes begin to fall and we learn why specifically Luthor chose each member of his Legion of Doom.

Support Collected Editions -- Purchase Justice League Vol. 1: The Totality

I like the Hall of Justice/"open to the people" aesthetic presented at the beginning of Scott Snyder's Justice League Vol. 1: The Totality, which seems a right and proper offshoot of Steve Orlando's Justice League of America and reflective of our inclusive times. Running straight from one mission to another, Snyder has glossed over the hows and whys of this, the new League charter and the photo op on the Capitol steps, etc., also as per Orlando's book. In short, in cutting to the good stuff, we don't quite know the philosophy of this League yet, what they see as their mission, what threats too big or too small, or what this League intends to do when a multiverse-ending threat isn't hurtling toward Earth. I'm not sure we necessarily need "day in the life" stories when most of these characters already appear in their own books; at the same time, I do hope Snyder takes a breather at some point so we can get a better handle on who some of these characters are and why they do what they do.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Summary

Reviewer

Collected Editions

Review Date

2018-12-05

Reviewed Item

Justice League Vol. 1: The Totality

Author Rating

4 (scale of 1 to 5)