Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Sound & Fury, 25 Jun 2009
For all the hard work that Brad Meltzer, Geoff Johns, and half a dozen pencillers and inkers have put into the title story of this collection, "The Lightning Saga" reads like an evening of Dungeons & Dragons enacted by characters who think they're in a Jacobean revenge tragedy. The reader is urged repeatedly to consider the pain of betrayal as one explanation for the characters' actions, yet by the end there doesn't seem to be anyone responsible for having done the alleged betraying. This is a story without a villain, despite walk-on roles for four of DC's bad guys; what we're left with, not to give too much away, is a story about a handful of 31st century heroes who've been sent back in time on a rather goofy suicide mission. Conveniently amnesiac on arrival, they succeed mostly in making nuisances of themselves.
If "The Lightning Saga" is all sound and fury, things improve drastically in the standalone story, "Walls." Red Arrow and Vixen, both seriously injured, have to rescue themselves from a collapsing building. The panels, on pitch black pages, get narrower and more claustrophobically oppressive as the heroes find themselves running out of time, space, oxygen, and hope. It's a virtuoso piece of visual storytelling by Meltzer and artist Gene Ha, easily the one must-read story in this collection.
The last two stories are more typical of Meltzer's comics writing in that they're both elegant fantasias on decades of Justice League history. "Monitor Duty" views the League as an extended family, a collection of soul mates, confidants, lovers, near-siblings, quasi-in laws, and real and virtual sons and daughters; it's all about the prickly love that makes a family a family. "Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow," drawn by 23 artists, is a behind-the-scenes look at the friendship of DC's Holy Trinity: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Drawing on a dizzying archive of old comics and recent graphic novels, we watch the bond between these three extraordinary, difficult individuals fraying over the years towards a (possible) future in which they'll barely be on speaking terms; for now, they're the indivisible core of the Justice League, friends whose philosophical differences are implicit in their efforts to see the League in the context of a bigger picture. What's that old saw about good intentions?
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