The Multiversity: The Just #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Grant Morrison
Art By: Ben Oliver
Cover Price: $4.99
Release Date: October 22, 2014

You Think Teenagers Are Bad Now?  Imagine Them With Superpowers

Now we journey to what Grant Morrison likes to call Earth-Me.  The strange world where the world's superheroes that we know have saved the world and apparently have come up with a way to keep it safe and their super offspring are really bored because of it.  So let's look this month's strange Earth and see if we can make out what it wants to tell us........... You know about cursed comics and doomed worlds and the such.  Okay let's go.

Explain It!:

There is just too much to convey to you guys for me to do a proper Explain It!, you know where I spoil everything and piss a lot of people off, but I'll do my best here to pass along what went down in here.  So this is a world where time works differently and like I said above all the heroes have pretty much retired or died and their kids have taken over.  But in a perfect world with nothing to really do but be spoiled and self absorbed, these are the kids that people always use as an example when they talk about what's wrong with the current generation.  Besides for all the "Real World-esque" problems our heroes are facing in this issue, the first real problem they've ever faced comes from a superhero named Megamorpho killing herself.  While Batman tries to team up with Superman to get to the bottom of this mystery they really just bicker with each other because Batman (Damian Wayne) is seeing Alexis Luthor, the daughter of the man who killed Superman's father.  So Superman hates Alexis and I guess Damian likes rubbing his hands over her bald head because of his weird bald fetish and feathers are ruffled because people don't like Alexis because Superman doesn't like Alexis.  It's teenage drama at it's finest and when I say finest, I mean it's annoying as shit and it reminds me why I'm a crotchety old man that hates every generation that came after mine.  

Even though one of their own committed suicide most of her friends and teammates decide to go to art shows put on by Kon-El and then later go to a party, where everyone talks about the suicide, but it does't seem like anyone really cares.  You know since it isn't about them. 

We do get some action in this book though when the current Justice League go out and recreate one of their battles for exercise but the amalgam of Red Tornado and Amazo that they were using for the reenactment fun went a little haywire and almost hurt some of the team.  Now could this be part of the mystery?  No it's just a red herring.  See Batman and Bloodwynd come to the same conclusion separately by deducing that the cursed comic book that Megamorpho was reading prior to her suicide infected her and made her kill herself and since it's now in their world, everyone is at risk.  

In the end we find out the bit about Red Amazo going haywire was really Alexis Luthor proving every bad thing Superman ever said about her because she used Jay Jay Thunder's 5th Dimension genie to take over Red Amazo and now plans on using the genie to take control of Superman's robot army.  Do you know why she's doing all this?  Because she wasn't invited to a party.  Kids are awful.  

That's where our issue ends all you multiverse maniacs.  While it's always fun to take a look at a parallel world, I do have to say that I hated every character that graced the pages of this issue.  On top of that, these books are really too long.  Who can really say what could be cut or what couldn't be for one of these Multiversity stories, but it just doesn't feel like it needs to be as long as it is and the length of the book actually seems to hinder the story telling because Grant Morrison just seems to go off on things that don't really matter in telling a story about other worlds doomed by a cursed comic.  I don't know, I just wish they were shorter.  See you next month as we continue our foray through the Multiverse. 

Bits and Pieces:

While I really dug the art in this book, I couldn't get into the story.  I don't know if it's just how kids talk today or if there was something off with the dialog, but I found it really hard to follow what the characters were talking about at any given time.  The whole issue seemed like an over sized way to poke fun at teenagers by putting them in superhero masks and also to poke fun at the comic book industry and it's fans at the same time.  All the meta was wasted on unlikable characters and the only saving grace was the fantastic art by Ben Oliver.

6/10