Justice League 1

“ONE ORDER OF ALL-STAR BATMAN – HOLD THE CONTENT!”

Don’t mistake me, I thought All-Star Batman was vile. It was vulgar, self-consciously ‘controversial’, and only borderline competent, despite some admittedly pretty illustration. It was the comic-book equivalent of monkeys in the zoo flinging poo at the patrons because they’re bored. But at least it aspired to some content – in the last few issues, when it was introducing other heroes and moving towards its JLA-equivalent, something was going on, even if it was something despicable.

As opposed to the hollowed-out All-Star Batman that is Justice League # 1.

It’s ‘Five years ago’. Batman is pursuing an unidentified villain across the rooftops, with the police trying to bring both of them down.  Green Lantern intervenes. GL and Bats get into a willie-measuring contest about whose methods work better. Meanwhile, there is shouting. Explosions! Fire! Cluttered, over-elaborate splash panels all over the frigging place! Shooting! And did I mention the shouting?

After fourteen pages of this desperately padded rubbish, with both Hal and Bruce being such knobs that you want to slap the crap out of the pair of arrogant, plonking arseholes, they decide, since the bad guy appeared to be alien, that they should go and see Superman – whom neither of them has met at this point, but, hey, he’s the only alien they know of. And he promptly slaps the crap out of Green Lantern – go, Clark! Now if only he can twat the World’s Smuggest Detective in the next issue, I’ll be a happy man. But I fear I may hope in vain.

Oh, and in the middle there’s four pages of Vic Stone, not yet Cyborg, which startle by being quietly-paced and featuring coherent storytelling rather than explodey shoutiness.

So, at the end of this extra-thick, more expensive debut issue, we’ve had basically a really bad example  of 1970s’ Brave & Bold, with a last-panel cameo by Superman, three of the putative team nowhere to be seen and a fourth only briefly in civvies, and long-winded pyrotechnics failing to cover for the fact that we’ve laid down £3 or thereabouts for, being generous, maybe 10 pages of story stretched over 24 pages of special effects and tricky layouts.

With art that looks like a bad Jim Lee imitator from the 1990s’.

Here’s a concept, DC; since this is the only comic of the new DCU being released this week, and inevitably the one everyone’s attention is going to be focussed on – would it have killed you to have an appearance by the actual League, even if it led into the flashback origin? Or, better yet, a done-in-one story (Dwayne MacDuffie, where are you now we need you?) with a killer cliffhanger to hook people into the next issue?

But the sad conclusion is that editorial standards have so plummeted that, Gods help us, you probably think that’s what you did give us…