Starman didn't get a speaking role in it, he just hung around while the main chracters duked it out. But it was messed up enough to propose that someone with a fragile enough psyche could have become unhinged by it.

It sure was beautiful, though.

Spot's World

I love you guys so, so, so very much.

Thanks

At this point, anything with a title containing 3 letters including “J” and “A” is pretty much a gigantic neon warning sign for me to stay as far away as possible.

Good call. JAG was pretty worthless.

I absolutely love Thomas’ Marvel work, so I don’t know what it is either.

The problem isn’t the outdated moral code of the superheroes in itself, but rather keeping that moral code while turning the villains more psychotic, murderous, unrepentant and lecherous at the same time. As you say, it just creates an endless stream of death.

…no, women and children being buzz-sawed in half is definitely NOT out there. Don’t know where we could have got that idea from!

The whole thing is a farce. I’ve seen people try to justify the buzzsaw fun and games with “oh, well, they’re evil Nazis. They need to be DOING evil Nazi things, or else the JSA have no reason to go dispense some justice”.

….by “dispensing justice”, I’m assuming they mean hit them a few times and put them in jail for a bit, only to have them….ESCAPE and DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN.

Its probably beyond the writers imaginations to ever have one of the heroes consider by swatting at these people with rolled up newspapers, they’re not saving lives at all, but rather slowly condemning an infinite stream of future victims to death.

Oh wow, look! Its Hawkman! Badass Hawkman on the scene, in the midst of women and children being buzzsawed!

and WHAT does he do?

Give some LAME speech about how he’d “cut off the evil nazi chicks legs if it was up to his commander”, but seeing as he’s on earth….he’ll throw a crappy ninja star at her leg instead, incapacitating her for about, oh, thirty seconds.

how utterly, utterly stupid.

oh no wait, I forgot, the entire premise of hawkman is stupid. big scary thug with a mace, yet he never actually seems to kill anyone with it. To me, if a big scary superhero hits you with a mace, you. are. dead.

So of course, he nails someone in this issue with his mace - and they amazingly get back up and bop him one, as far as I can remember. what a nonsense.

heroes in DC are crippled with a ludicrous, outdated sense of “morality” in the face of increasingly nasty bad guys who rape, kill, rape and kill and rape some more. that’s entirely down to the badly thought out logic behind the writing, because they’ve beefed up the bad guys without actually stopping to think that the notion of super powered defenders of the public, who insist on the lamest clinging to ideas of “fair play”, “not killing anyone” and “being a good guy, like mom’s apple pie”, while everyone around them is being pounded into stone pillars face first, is just the most stupid conceit in a comic, ever.

Hawkmans mace has sadly come to represent the inherent stupidity in the DC Universe - a symbol of the lameness of every single person who is supposedly a “hero”. They’re supposed to be protecting the people out there, but they’re just condemning everyone to a drip-feed death.

Hawkmans mace = rolled up newspaper.

Sounds like what’s pulling this comic down in the eyes of some folks is the fact that there’s been some pretty brutal acts of violence going on in every issue so far. But it’s tied in to the story that’s going on (in a bit an interesting parallel to the last time this team got a re-launch, back when the book enjoyed a great deal more praise…) and really isn’t all that gratuitous. So the violence level may not be to taste, but it’s not wildly out there, is it?

I’m little surprised that the pacing is getting hammered on; they’re only on issue #3! Yet they’ve already re-assembled the team, revealed the Big Bad, established a basic premise for the group, established several new characters, and roles for people in the group. How is that bad, exactly? So far the pacing seems pretty good.

The dialogue? Yeah, there are a bunch of clunkers going on here. It’s hardly Johns’ best work. Some of it works, though (mostly with the older members of the team that he’s written for quite some time) so it’s not uniformly bad. (That’s Civil War)

There may be a lot of continuity porn in it, but is the book inaccessible to a new reader? If it’s not, where’s the harm?

The art is of very high quality, and well suited to the storytelling that’s being attempted.

I don’t see awful. It’s not as good (yet) as JSA was before Infinite Crisis, but it’s still an enjoyable read to me and isn’t anywhere near the endangered list for me right now.

Geoff Johns? He’s no Roy Thomas.

Are they?

I complain all the time about crappy books - however, if I don’t like it, I don’t read it.
I’m not sure where this ‘you hate yet you buy’ rumour got started, but it’s really getting old - if only because it’s so dismissive of arguments/comments generally put forward to improve comics (eg. No Loeb or crossovers).

Johns’ prior run was decent at best, but he’s been sucking hind tit as of late. I’ll take the Strazewski/Parobeck run of the JSA over both of Johns’ books any day of the week.

My reaction to Johns’ work is usually heavily influenced by the artist with whom he works. I liked The Flash a good bit when Kolins was on the art chores, and I’m one of the few who was into Dose’s work during “Ignition.” But, when Porter took over and things got all bright and sunshiny again, I had had enough. Teen Titans played a similar tune. I completely dug the issues by McKone and wasn’t all that interested in those by anyone else. When McKone officially left after “Titans Tomorrow,” I dropped the book. JSA was, in that regard, a bit of an anomaly. The transition from Sadowski to Kirk wasn’t too jarring; neither was the shift from Kirk to Kramer.

So, I’m kind of surprised by how little interest I have in Justice Society of America because I’m a big Dale Eaglesham fan. His work on Villains United was a stand-out in the glut of Infinite Crisis tie-ins, and I have no doubt he’s doing his best to make this book look good. However, I just can’t muster the energy to give a damn. After so many mega-events, I’ve had my fill of wanton carnage of the bleak variety for a while (I’m always down for wanton carnage of the light-hearted variety, of course), so Nazi arm-windmills of death don’t sound too tempting. And, the series is steeped not only in continuity, but in continuity I could not possibly care less about. Introducing a new Mister America is fine (I like Golden Age heroes, and I like seeing them revamped, a la Crimson Avenger). Introducing a new Starman who’s actually the same Starman from Kingdom Come? No thanks. Kingdom Come was an entertaining read in its day, but I’ve grown tired of seeing its elements seep into the DCU. Superman replacing the yellow on his chest symbol with black I could handle, since there was a point behind it. But, then, Plastic Man’s kid had to show up out of the blue, as a teenager and a member of the Teen Titans in 52. I can understand the appeal there; Offpsring’s one-shot was the best of The Kingdom event, thanks largely to Quitely’s work. The character’s existence in the modern day DCU, as well as his inclusion in the Titans, is wholly superfluous, though. Which brings us back to Starman. And the female Cyclone. And probably countless other nods to Kingdom Come in Justice Society of America (and elsewhere). Alex Ross’ role as the “creative advisor” on the book places it firmly in the realm of nepotistic continuity, and I’m going to have to pass on that.

Put Johns and Eaglesham on any virtually any other title, and I’ll bite.

If you are enjoying it, great. But if you DON’T enjoy it, do what I did, and spend your money on something else!