DC Comics reviews 6/22/21 – Infinite Frontier #1, Robin #3

Justice League #63

My endless frustration with his dialogue aside, I do appreciate the consistency in how Brian Michael Bendis writes his choppy, disjointed scripts.

He pulls an old standby from his playbook with the recapping the fight after the fact approach. This means Naomi, Black Canary, Aquaman and the rest of the League are decompressing and thinking back to how they got off of Naomi’s home planet.

And Bendis gets to revisit his signature Naomi shtick of reminding everyone she’s a newbie superhero. What continues to go unanswered is why the Justice League would want a rookie hero on the team instead of learning to hone her skills at the Teen Titans Academy. And as usual, Bendis writes everyone in the same homogenized style where everyone sounds like they’re on a 90s sitcom.

Artist David Marquez continues experimenting with small circles of art to work in all the random dialogue. Bendis has been known to overwhelm artists with the scattered dialogue, and Marquez seems especially baffled with the best approach for drawing the action.

Pairing him with a wordy writer like Bendis is a waste of Marquez. By the end of the story, it felt like nothing got accomplished besides the League deciding Naomi should be a member despite having no idea of her power or intentions. And Black Adam and Hippolyta join the team because Bendis thought they’d be good additions.

Justice League remains a chore and Bendis’s version the worst take on the team in years.

Rating: 4 out of 10