Seriously, This Series Needs To Not End
With Blue Beetle's recovery, the Justice League International finally start catching some breaks against Maxwell Lord in an issue that feels very satisfying after all the team has been through in the course of this series. Unfortunately, the story has to stumble its way around DC's current status quo for Wonder Woman.
Books as consistent as this one get increasingly hard to praise. How many times and different ways can I talk about Judd Winick's excellent grasp of all these characters and the team dynamic or how well this book balances its humor and drama? This is simply a consistently well-written book. It has a cast of characters that play off one another better than most other teams currently out there. It has great humor without becoming a comedy book. It does great work with the characters without becoming a "talking heads" series. The team's reactions to Blue Beetle's recovery is a great scene, as is the arrival of Batman.
The downside of this issue is something I mentioned in an earlier review being concerned about. Because this story is taking place at the same time as JMS' alternate reality Wonder Woman story, it has to address that directly. This is the issue where that starts to happen. I know Winick has said in interviews that having to use this version of Wonder Woman turned out to be a positive, but that is really not true. This Wonder Woman had nothing to do with Max Lord's death, so there is nothing really satisfying about her involvement. Instead, we are cheated out of having the real Wonder Woman's response to the conspiracy Max has carried out. It is also just confusing, because it has to tackle the continuity issues of Wonder Woman while other titles have managed to just avoid it. Why is any of this even happening if Wonder Woman was never around to kill Max in the first place? Why do Max and most of the JLI remember Wonder Woman when no one else does? It overcomplicates the story to have this secondary memory loss syndrome going on at the same time as Max's, and it is annoying that this title has to suffer for the sins of the Wonder Woman title.
This is minor, but the big image of Batman's arrival is killed by the art hiccup of having him wearing his black underwear on ths outside with his new costume. One of the great things about the new Batman costume is that it got rid of that silliness. Editors? Hello? It would not have been that hard to fix if anyone was paying attention.
Like I said, it is getting hard to find new ways to say this is a series worth reading. It is probably the best superhero team book DC has right now.
