Review: Justice Society of America Vol. 1: The New Golden Age hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Ambitious is an understatement describing Geoff Johns' Justice Society of America Vol. 1: The New Golden Age. Johns is all over DC history here, from All-Star Squadron to Infinity Inc., “Batman: Year One” to the Legion of Super-Heroes, plus Doomsday Clock and Flashpoint Beyond. It’s a lot, confusing at first, though it mostly settles down by the end.

For as much as the covers of the individual issues show the Justice Society in battle, they are less consistently in the foreground than one might expect, in favor of hero-from-the-near-future Huntress Helena Wayne. There’s a sequence in which the Justice Society is wholly absent and the action focuses on Deadman, Detective Chimp, and Madame Xanadu. That is, the topic du jour might be the Justice Society, but let us not kid; the amount of Batman here alone suggests Justice Society as a vehicle for Johns to write a whole DC Universe book (which, come to think of it, is a wonder no one has tried before).

As I mentioned in my review of Stargirl: The Lost Children, the difficulty here is that Johns leaves after the next volume, and whether he can tie up this book’s umpteen plot threads — letting alone those of Doomsday Clock/Flashpoint Beyond, letting alone defining enough of the Justice Society members to set a template for the next writer, Jeff Lemire — remains to be seen, with outlook cloudy. It is a mighty fine setup, but reads as prologue, and there’s scant few pages left for the story itself.

[Review contains spoilers]

It is to Johns' credit just how stuffed New Golden Age is with little moments and throwaway lines, any of which could be fodder for their own six-issue story. We’ve plenty of Huntress Helena Wayne and her future villains-filled Justice Society, but still there’s the mystery of her birth and whether Catwoman had to kill “the Arkhams” to protect her; also the Bride of Grundy, the Legionnaire, Mister Miracle Thaddeus Brown and the Justice Society Dark, the lost “Storm of Sin” crossover, Eclipso and the resurrection of Wildcat and Dr. Mid-Nite, and the ongoing multi-faceted saga of “The Watchman.” That’s in addition to “The Thirteen,” the time-lost sidekicks, any of whom could support miniseries of their own.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

At the least, that’s surely meant to be world-building, the illusion of “more” even if more isn’t intended, to make this all feel full-realized. There, Johns is successful, but I couldn’t help think, maybe too successful. Time travel and magic snow globes aside, the story of Helena Wayne, amalgam of the sometimes-warring sides of her mother and father, is something we’ve seen before — we’ve even seen a dimension-lost Helena come to our world and seek out her late father in the New 52 Worlds' Finest. It’s like riding in a speeding car and seeing something interesting pass by the window — I was far more taken by Infinity Inc.’s Dr. Mid-Nite and Wildcat, characters we haven’t seen in ages, and their apparent struggle with Eclipso, but that’s a moment that comes and goes in the span of a page and then we’re back to Huntress.

The real “new” in this story is the arrival of the Thirteen, which doesn’t happen until the end, and there’s perhaps equally a sense of New Golden Age biding its time to link up with Stargirl: The Lost Children. There are some (perhaps mundane) process steps I feel like I’m missing, like did Alan Scott ever look at Jay Garrick and ask, “Were we missing for a while?” At what point did the JSA decide to re-form, and was the JSA brownstone just sitting there all that time? What’s the JSA’s charter or reason for being? Where is, for instance, Dr. Mid-Nite Pieter Cross? To an extent it’s nice to rejoin our story already in progress where it was over a decade ago; at the same time there’s some foundation that Johns could have used these pages to establish.

The Dawn of DC era reminds me increasingly of DC You in its “12 months and done,” as opposed to the longer and seemingly more expansive Infinite Frontier era. From my dual perspectives of both currently reading Dawn of DC and also parsing its finale among the DC solicitations, I see a few short stints on titles that haven’t been around long — Johns on Justice Society and also Tom Taylor on Titans and Mark Waid on Shazam!. Tini Howard’s only doing 16 issues of Harley Quinn, but I think both readers and writers know who Harley is and what her title’s generally about; despite fine writers coming on to all of the above titles, it seems a much more tenuous position for these books to be hitting their second years when the first years were essentially self-contained miniseries.

All of that hand-wringing aside, I thought Johns wrote the Justice Society nicely again, and it’s hard to imagine a better core art team for a Justice Society title than Mikel Janin and Jerry Ordway (much admiration to whomever’s imitating David Mazzucchelli on the “Year One” scenes, too). There’s a bit where Huntress wakes up in the 1940s and Johns gets the JSA so tonally perfect — Jay Garrick sitting calmly at a table, his first question for a visitor from the future, “You doing all right?,” everybody’s favorite uncle even in his youth. Janin — or colorists Jordie Bellaire and John Kalisz — have halftones overlaid so we’re both in the past and it looks like an old comic, a wonderful attention to detail for that scene.

JSA was once DC’s premier team book, and a title at the forefront as DC’s collections releases became more mainstream. It would’ve likely been a mistake for Geoff Johns' new title to feel too much like JSA and indeed it does not, but whether the “team light” approach of Justice Society of America Vol. 1: The New Golden Age is quite right, I’m not sure either. Had this book been called “Huntress and the Justice Society of America,” that might have set our expectations better, as it’s as much her book as the rest of the team’s. As above, really the question of how to consider Johns' return to this group will come down to the next and final volume.

[Includes the Who’s Who pages from the New Golden Age special, and original and variant covers (some of which must be JSA index covers that were sitting in a drawer)]

Rating 2.25