Drawing Straws
Written By: Christopher Priest
Art By: Pete Woods, Chris Sotomayor, Willie Schu
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: March 7, 2018
Release Date: March 7, 2018
*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
It's time to see what's up with The Fan and the people's perception of the Justice League after last issue, where it looked like the Justice League were only saving the rich people of a town caught in a near chemical catastrophe. That perception also forced Cyborg to go against his better judgment and teleport down, leaving who he thought was the Justice League's lawyer in the Watchtower, but who was really The Fan in disguise. Let's jump into this issue and see if the Justice League and the JLA are able to tackle this problem after working together. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
This is the worst week in comics for me because where I think that Batman is always underwritten, every Justice League issue since Christopher Priest has taken over feels overwritten in his need to explain how the Justice League is going to save the day. It feels like I'm paging through a textbook, cramming for a test in a class that I didn't know I was taking. It just becomes too much and sadly, the last third of this book is full of scientific mumbo jumbo like that as the Justice League and the JLA are trying to figure out how they're going to survive in a Watchtower that has again lost its orbit and is crashing down to Earth.
Before all that though, we have our heroes leaving the scene of the chemical catastrophe after The Fan teleports them all up to the Watchtower, which he has sabotaged and we spend way too much time with our heroes trying to come up with a solution that will leave half the heroes in the Watchtower dead. I'm all for heroes feeling real, but the idea that we spend a lot of time in this book where our heroes are fighting about who lives and who dies felt really odd and I was getting really frustrated until Cyborg finally chimed in with the whole "Nobody dies" bit.
In the end, our heroes work together with Cyborg leading the command and it looks like they found a way to survive the heat of entering Earth's atmosphere, but we leave this issue with the Watchtower still plummeting towards the planet so after all of the jargon going on, I'm not sure what they really accomplished. I bet they all survive though.
That's it for this issue of Justice League and this series is really becoming a chore to read because while I care about the idea of The Fan and what he's up to....... and the new idea that there are actually many Fans, the issues just get bogged down with Priest's overwriting of the scenarios and I find myself counting the pages until it's over because I was simply looking to read a fun comic and not get lectured about science that I'll never understand. The majority of the art in this issue is really good and I actually really dig the new look that Cyborg is given here and I'm curious about if The Fan has any other ideas about how our heroes should look going forward, but that's half the problem for me because I care more about fashion ideas for our heroes than the actual story at hand.
Bits and Pieces:
While I think that the JLA characters are written better than they've ever been written in this issue, the story itself is bogged down with scientific jargon instead of actually being fun and because of that, I found myself getting quite bored by the end. I enjoyed the art in this issue, but the story like usual is too overwritten.
5.8/10
It was interesting to see that the JLA recognized their status as the B team and were willing to die to preserve the more iconic JL. I like seeing them work together to save everyone. Also, while I didn't understand every bit of the jargon they used, there were definitely mistakes or misconceptions there. Maybe I was just confused.
ReplyDelete1) Not sure why Aquaman would do better in zero gravity than others. Is it because he knows how to swim? You can't swim through air like you could through water.
2) Not sure how the Atom could play "whack-a-mole" with signals in a fiberoptic cable. They should be moving at whatever speed of light travels in the cable's medium. It should be too fast for Atom to block the light signals. Plus, by the time he saw the light, it would mean the signal had already reached him though maybe he could stop it from continuing to be sent?
3) Someone said the Watchtower would gain "mass" as it falls from orbit. This is just not true. It would gain "weight", since it would be closer to an object with a lot of gravitational pull, but its mass will remain the same (or maybe decrease if bits are falling off of it). The mass is just how much stuff there is in the object. The weight is how it's affected by gravity,
4) It is useful to lower the amount of heat by having Frost absorb the it, but I'm not really sure why adding ice in front of the ship will help. I guess we'll have to see if there's more of a plan next issue.
i agree with all of those...Priest is going out of his way to make things real science that don't have to be and messing stuff up along the way
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