Review: Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Two: The Complete Collection trade paperback (DC Comics)

The more I read Tom Taylor’s Injustice: Gods Among Us with the benefit of hindsight, the more it seems a clear warm-up for DCeased. Tied to the video game’s specious origin story, Taylor struggles to make the major players' actions make sense, but beyond that, he uses the vast tapestry of the DC Universe to deliver impressive moment after impressive moment. In DCeased, with more control over the premise, Taylor can again deliver the “no one is safe, anything can happen” aesthetic without the albatross of a near-unrecognizable Big Three.

I’m reading Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Two: The Complete Collection having already read the individual Year Two Vol. 1, so admittedly I’m judging more stringently half of this volume and calling it a whole. But my estimation from that review of Injustice: Year Two Vol. 1 remains mostly the same, that Taylor’s second year is an improvement on his first. The pacing is better, and in sidelining Wonder Woman, Batman, and (somewhat) Superman, Taylor gets to play with a host of other characters from the DCU, and one begins to see why the Injustice comic was so improbably successful.

Some of what seemed significant when I read the first part of this in 2014 is less so now. Halfway through the New 52, an adult Barbara Gordon as Oracle was a refreshing jolt of nostalgia, though with Infinite Frontier and into Dawn of DC, Taylor playing in the old continuity doesn’t have the same punch. At the same time, given key scenes drawn by Bruno Redondo over Taylor’s scripts, a la their Nightwing collaboration, there’s equally times one can’t spot Injustice’s age at all.

The second half of Year Two is far too repetitious of the first, and some of the pacing problems that were seemingly overcome creep back in. But with time we’ve learned there’s nothing like a Tom Taylor apocalyptic romp, and the end of Year Two certainly makes me eager for Year Three and beyond.

[Review contains spoilers]

What was great about the first half of Year Two was that Taylor sent to the background Superman and Batman’s petty sniping at one another, as well as a Wonder Woman almost unrecognizable from her mainstream portrayals. Instead, to the forefront were both the cosmic tapestry of the Green Lantern Corps and the gritty street-level of the Gotham PD, paralleled in a fantastic sequence of war and resistance that brought Injustice to another level.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

The problem with the second half is that it’s exactly the same thing. There’s barely a break — or, at least, the seven-month break happens between the issues, so if the characters get one, the reader doesn’t — and that’s particularly problematic in this combined volume. It is almost entirely more war — the first half is war, that war ends, and then the second half is more war, extending what the first half seemed to have already resolved.

The “thing,” of course, remains Taylor’s genius ability to mix and match these action figures in new and interesting ways. Batman recovering from a paralyzing injury in the Tower of Fate. Hal Jordan becoming a member of the Sinestro Corps. Lex Luthor, never Superman’s enemy in this reality, actually being a spy for Batman’s forces. The precious, precious friendship of Black Canary and Harley Quinn. Even at Injustice’s most egregious, Taylor’s flair for these pseudo-modern Elseworlds tales shines through.

In terms of egregious, little will (I hope) outdo Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year One, between Superman verily killing his own wife and child and then breaking Batman’s back over his knee (not to mention the almost-comical-if-it-wasn’t-so-sad Damian Wayne accidentally murdering Nightwing). Here we’ve Sinestro ripping Kyle Rayner to bits, Hal about beating Guy Gardner to death with his own arm, and Superman throwing Mogo into the sun, but the path we’re on is the path we’re on, at this point.

But I was struck by the conversations Superman has with both Ganthet and Guy where each say, essentially, “You realize this is all very un-Superman-like behavior, right?” and Superman’s reply isn’t much more convincing than “Shut up! You’re not the boss of me!” This is what Taylor is saddled with, a Superman who must be unrepentingly dictatorial throughout this story with no inch of nuance because that’s where the video game begins and ends, and Taylor struggles mightily (and fails, at least here) to make it work. I’m reminded of the same such back in the Superman Armageddon 2001 annuals, but an annual is a far smaller amount of space to try to draw out a Superman gone mad than this is.

It’s nice that if Superman’s going to kill off both Green Arrow and Black Canary, at least Doctor Fate can save Dinah and her child so that dead is not dead-dead. It’s weird, in-story, that if Fate can save Dinah, he can’t also save Ollie, but rather connects Dinah with the Ollie of another world who lost his Dinah and leaves them to raise her child together. Perhaps the point is we can’t get too tidy of an ending, but also I wonder if this is the last we’ll see of these characters, as Fate suggests, or if this is set-up for later multiversal elements in the Injustice mythos.

Again, following Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Two: The Complete Collection, I’m certainly up for Year Three; I see a certain “hellraiser”’s visage on the cover and that’s most definitely what this series needs. Injustice gets collected in two ten-page chapters per “issue,” but the breaks aren’t well delineated; as mentioned, these cuts were less awkward than in Year One, but there’s a bit with the Lanterns separated by a page but it’s actually a chapter break, and so it seems like no time has passed when it has, and confusion ensues. If Year Three can avoid that kind of thing, all the better.

[Includes original, variant, and unused covers; character sketches; cover sketches; pencilled pages]

Rating 2.25