Review: Earth 2: Society Vol. 1: Planetfall trade paperback (DC Comics)

As I’ve said before, I adore Earth 2’s premise, an ongoing alt-Earth multiverse title, almost an Elseworlds, but with the potential to cross-over with the rest of the DCU built-in from the start. It’s not the original role of the Golden Age heroes, but it’s as close a proximation of the role the Justice Society played in the Silver Age that we’ve seen since that time.

Earth 2: Society: Planetfall, arriving in the DC You era, is a welcome restart for this book. With no offense intended to James Robinson, Nicola Scott, or Tom Taylor, what was fresh when Earth 2 kicked off in the New 52 maybe began to look a little stodgy, and the shifting of the writing teams left unfinished storylines littered across the landscape. With the Earth 2 characters essentially building a new society on a new Earth, writer Daniel Wilson can wipe a lot of that slate clean, not to mention Jorge Jimenez' youthful, dynamic artwork that we’d come to love later on Batman.

This first volume struggles a little in juggling its narrative present and also its flashbacks to the previous year in the lives of Earth 2; neither story feels fully fleshed out, both of them feel hurried. But like many good “one year later” stories, Wilson does well offering twists and turns on the way from when we last saw these heroes to now. Further, insofar as the last 30-some issues of Earth 2 were almost entirely given over to nonstop war, Wilson succeeds in putting some meat on the bones of these characters as people now that they’re not running from battle to battle.

As far as one volume is concerned, Society is doing fine as a follow-up to Earth 2.

[Review contains spoilers]

To wit, in the 15-ish issues since Tom Taylor introduced the Red Tornado Lois Lane, she’s been on the run or in battle the whole time. Jimenez' cover for the third chapter, reflecting Wilson’s story inside, is an “a-ha” moment — of course at some point we should get back to Lois in her trademark collared shirt, microphone in hand, ready to report the news, even if this Lois is a bald, red robot. It is, again, that kind of thing where Wilson distinguishes Society, giving some focus to the people behind the heroes. (In my notes, I wrote, “Society gets real!”)

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Flash Jay Garrick gets a similar turn. This Jay has been interesting — from the beginning, as conceived by Robinson, Jay is sort of a directionless teenager; with the Earth 2 Alan Scott, we can see how he could evolve to the senior statesman of “our” Alan, but Jay’s similarity to “our” Jay has been more murky. Again, now that the fighting’s stopped, that the Earth 2 Jay should become something of a “celeb behaving badly” makes a lot of sense — but indeed in the same issue Wilson also lets his heroism shine. Here too, I thought Jay seemed all the more “real” after Wilson’s spotlight issue.

I don’t think anyone will quite match the breadth of esoteric name drops and character resurrections that Robinson did in early Earth 2, but I’m pleased to see Wilson carrying on the tradition. There’s a nice, creepy take on Johnny Sorrow here, well-drawn by Jimenez, and I was super-excited to see Hourman (though disappointed to find he was not a dimension-hopping robot). To these ends, using Anarky seemed anachronistic — I’d as soon just Golden Age-related characters, please — and Dr. Impossible is just plain weird. Am I correct this is the second appearance of a Mister Miracle look-alike never quite explained in Brad Meltzer’s Justice League?

There’s a couple McGuffins in Planetfall, a Source Vault and a Genesis Machine and such. I generally know these things' origins by way of Earth 2: World’s End, but there’s a lot of pseudo-science nonsense talk and melodrama about things poorly explained, such that I rather clocked the good guys and bad guys and left the rest aside. Indeed, again, Planetfall tells two stories in two time periods, and now that we’re all caught up and the Earth 2 heroes are mostly back together again, my hope is that Wilson can tell a comparatively more straightforward story with comparatively less esoteric set pieces.

I don’t recall if Earth 2 ever teased “Justice” and “Society”; indeed, with a rather military-led war with Apokolips, super-team-dom felt far away. With Earth 2: Society, it’s in the name, and given — as we know now — 22 issues, my hope is that Wilson goes for it, and sooner than later. I understand being coy for a while, but here at the end, I think seeing these heroes — misfits, and not exactly friends — work to form the classic super-team would be interesting indeed.

Again, a good start. I’m not convinced Daniel Wilson has control of Earth 2: Society: Planetfall every second — that a spurned Val-Zod had made a giant stone statue of Power Girl comes off creepier than I think Wilson intends — but this was fine for the beginning and I’m hoping Society gets better as it goes.

[Includes original and variant covers, Jorge Jimenez character designs]

Rating 2.25