DC reviews 2/8/22 – Detective Comics #1052, The Joker #12
Justice League #72
One of the major failings of every team book Brian Michael Bendis has written at DC is his inability to write characters with distinct voices. To further complicate that problem, Bendis also tends to write teams with massive casts or add surplus members.
It’s as if Bendis thinks the more characters in a book the less likely readers are to notice everyone sounds the same.
In Justice League, the already late team has shared the spotlight with the United Planets delegation of heroes, Checkmate and now Justice League Dark.
It was bad enough Bendis got the consistently enjoyable Justice League Dark title folded into Justice League, but now he’s dragging them through another talking in circles, uneventful issue of Justice League. Not that the characters sound anything like themselves.
Aquaman rallies the troops by saying “Suit up, my League,” which doesn’t sound like anything Arthur would ever say.
Bendis again has Batman repeatedly saying he’s sorry to characters. That reads wrong and is the problem with Bendis’ take on just about every DC at this point.
If Bendis’ books — Young Justice, Legion of Super Heroes, Superman and shortly Justice League — didn’t always get canceled, DC really should have just set the Bendis DC on another Earth so it was clear these aren’t the same characters from every other title. Good luck recognizing Constantine, Dr. Fate, Zatanna or Detective Chimp.
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Magic users have a shared vision of a possessed and out of control Black Adam. This sounds like every portrayal of the character since Bendis started writing him.
The two Justice League teams set out to find him before the horrible vision comes to pass. It’s too late as the chaos agent attempting to possess him uses dialogue like “But to do what I need to do next, I need a very, very powerful agent. It just so happens that you boy! Really fit that bill.”
Bendis never writes the villains seriously and they come off like quippy nuisances looking for laughs instead of some big threat.
For this issue the art is split between three artists — Szymon Kudranski, Emanuela Lupacchino and Wade Von Grawbadger.
As usual, the art is the redeeming factor even with the jarring shifts between styles.
There’s only two more issues left in Bendis’ run. Too bad the issue after he departs the Justice League gets killed, leaving yet another entertaining title wiped out by Bendis’ swath of terror through DC.
Rating: 3 out of 10