Written by: Geoff Johns
Art by: Mikel Janín
DC Comics, March 2024
This title is a 12-issue maxi-series, written by DC Comics’ former Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns, with art by Mikel Janín. Here is the promotional blurb, which seems to be quite wrong.
The JSA scour Europe on the hunt for Ruby, the daughter of the Red Lantern! But can they catch up to her before she burns the Earth in search of her father?
But the story has as one of its first pages the Golden Age Green Lantern and the Huntress standing over a character dressed in red, clearly found and sounding very truculent about it.
Mr Johns has been busy with his new imprint Ghost Machine., housed by Image Comics (see https://www.worldcomicbookreview.com/2024/06/23/redcoat-1-review/,. In an interview for Comic Book Resources in late 2002 https://www.cbr.com/justice-society-of-america-geoff-johns-interview/ Mr Johns said of the JSA (and Stargirl):
…this is a labor of love. I love these characters. I love the JSA and Stargirl. I came back to do these two books with the great artists that I’m working with with some characters that I feel are still underexposed and just fun to write about. I’m having a blast on both books, and it’s been really fun to have these books talk to each other and to be able to use The New Golden Age one-shot to feel and be bigger than just a JSA relaunch. It can feel like this little corner of the DC Universe that we made called the New Golden Age. There are some other creators working on stuff that, if we do well, hopefully, their projects will come to fruition and will expand this little Golden Age corner of the DC Universe out even more.
Mr Johns is reported to have an exclusive arrangement with Ghost Machine, and so perhaps this is his final dabble with the Justice Society. In that case, Mr Johns is providing his readers with his last foray in drips. Bleeding Cool noted dryly in February 2024 https://bleedingcool.com/comics/justice-society-of-america-gets-later-and-later-and-later/ “Once upon a time, it was planned to spin off into the new Legion Of Super Heroes. But now it looks like it might take till the 30th century to get there for its final twelfth issue.” We assume Ghost Machine now occupies Mr Johns’ time, leading to very significant publishing delays. (We have been scathing of such delays in the past – see https://www.worldcomicbookreview.com/2015/06/09/gaimans-sandman-overture-and-the-elves-that-come-in-the-night-why-comic-books-release-dates-matter/.)
We expected that as part of his farewell Mr Johns might try something new with the team. The Justice Society of America is 75 years old. A big part of the JSA’s popularity in the 1940s was that it completely supported the Allied war effort against the Axis. Most of the people who read All-Star Comics back in the 1940s (the comic which first featured the team’s adventures) are likely to be dead. But the characters themselves are alive and kicking, with only one of them – the Golden Age Mr Terrific – permanently in the grave. We sadly, and reluctantly, suggest that aside from devotees of Golden Age characters, no one nowadays seems to be interested in the Justice Society anymore. This particular issue ranked 92 of the top selling comics in the United States in March 2024. It is not a good sales number and surely only JSA fans and loyal followers of Mr Johns thought to buy the issue.
Sure enough, in his DC Comics swan song, Mr Johns seems to have procured for himself a creative license. Back in the 1980s, writer Roy Thomas coined what has become key comic book terminology called “retroactive continuity” – a “retcon”, as it is now known. Mr Thomas was trying to stitch together the craziness of the comic book writing from the 1940s into a coherent whole. Mr Johns goes further with his retcons. He backfills with abandon – he introduces characters into the 1940s continuity who were never there, such as Gizmo Lad, the Red Lantern, and the Legionnaire.
The big reveal of the issue is that the Legion of Super-Heroes’ arch-nemesis Mordru has been masquerading as the Legionnaire. (Mordru has an uncanny resemblance to the glamour of Jack Faust, a wizard in Alan Moore’s and JH Williams III’s Promethea.) The Mordru reveal is rolled out extremely quickly, within the space of a couple of pages.
My Johns foreshadows through a vigilante called The Harlequin’s Son (a clunky superhero name) and Gizmo Lad that the team will concentrate on street-level crimes. That is contradicted by Mordu’s sudden appearance. And what has the JSA ever had to do with the LSH? The direction seems lost.
When Mr Thomas wrote All-Star Squadron in the 1980s, he focussed the story very hard on the rights and wrongs of the Axis’ invasions of Europe and Asia during the Second World War. Boomers are famously obsessed with the exploits of their parents, uncles, and aunts in that war, and Mr Thomas was no exception. In All-Star Squadron, Mr Thomas crafted a plot device whereby many of the super-powered heroes of the era – Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, the Spectre, Dr Fate – could not enter Axis-controlled territory without malign magic causing them to become pawns of the enemy. It meant that while the lesser-powered heroes could enter continental Europe and occupied Asia on missions, the characters which could have turned the tide of the war within hours were out of the frame. It was a clever retcon. The heroes could fight the evil of territorial aggression, but with one arm tied behind their collective backs.
There is one uncontroversial wars of territorial aggression currently on foot which the JSA could again participate in – the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Mr Johns (and DC Comics) would run the risk of being dubbed “political”, in having superheroes be involved in what clearly is a war of aggression by Putin’s Russia. It also runs the risk of trivialising the high death toll, the tragedy of events such as the recent bombing of the children’s hospital in Kiev, and broad destruction of an ongoing war. But it would draw attention to the fact that the war om Ukraine is analogous to the Nazi invasions of European countries in 1939. That would be a remarkable deployment of the characters, and if nothing else, give them a purpose not seen for seventy-five years – the purpose for which the team was first created.
