Guess What? Naomi's Important
Our Xanadoth story continues as this series winds down, but while it's still around hopefully we can make something of our big bad who Bendis debuted in his Superman run but didn't really have time to flesh out over there. Yeah, this run of the Justice League has been one of the biggest messes that I can remember from this series, especially since it only wants to push Bendis characters while having Naomi tell us that she's new every issue, but I was hoping that for some reason this final story arc would be something to remember since it involved a villain that felt like it could be something actually legitimate that Bendis brought to the DC Universe and while the previous issue wasn't great, it was definitely one of the best issues we've gotten out of this, where the Lord of the Lords of Chaos possessed Black Adam. Let's see if our heroes can overcome this threat and find out what Xanadoth is up to.
Xanadoth continues her mission in this issue, the only problem is, beyond just general baddery, we really don't know what that is. Ultimately we will get the Lord of the Lords of Chaos kidnapping one of our heroes, beyond Black Adam but to get there we have to go through excessive backwards magic that means nothing in the long run except that our magical heroes don't seem to be effective at all against this threat and speaking of heroes when the rest of our Justice League show up, there's little they do beyond trying to talk about who Xanadoth is while giving us a backstory that seems to contradict what we saw in the Superman series where Xanadoth was introduced.
This is a weird and disappointing issue that doesn't do a lot overall beyond have heroes sit around and talk, while Naomi continues to tell us how new she is, while Bendis makes sure to tell us the old trope that Superman is vulnerable to magic...... which doesn't matter since neither he nor Jon is in this issue and it doesn't look like they'll be in this arc going forward. The thing it really wants to show us by the end though is like always...... Naomi is important and for some reason, the entity of Nabu has no idea who she is. Just a lot of weird choices for this story overall...... not to mention our new Swamp Thing just being here with no explanation.
All in all, as much as I was looking forward to this final Bendis arc of the Justice League being something that would somehow redeem his run overall since the first part of this arc felt like it had promise, this issue feels like it threw all that promise away to go back to normal Bendis tropes, where the characters don't feel or sound like themselves, things just happen for no reason, Naomi is again center stage, while knowing nothing about anything and the progression seemed like it moved hardly anywhere beyond two kidnappings by two different people. The art thankfully was great again this issue but the story just dragged everything down for me and I guess I was a sucker for thinking that something from this series could be anything decent or memorable. Let's continue the suckery though and hope that the final issue of this arc and this series before the Death of the Justice League can bring something to this story overall.
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Bits and Pieces:
While I thought that the previous issue of this arc was probably the best issue that this Bendis run has seen, this issue made me lose all hope for this arc in general as it goes back to normal Bendis tropes that just drag everything down. The art thankfully is still great but everything else is pretty much just nonsense.
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