Books: Justice League: A New Beginning

_________________________________________________________________________________

Justice League: A New Beginning
Written by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis
Art by Kevin Maguire, Al Gordon and Terry Austin
1987




Available now from Islington Libraries
You can reserve this item for free here:
http://www.library.islington.gov.uk/TalisPrism/


Watchmen 2.

I was reading an article (see: here) about Watchmen 2 - sorry - "Before Watchmen" - on the Mindless Ones website when they mentioned this book.

Quote: "Likewise, the Giffen/Dematteis/Maguire Justice League was, in its early issues, a very obvious attempt at incorporating big swathes of Watchmen into mainstream superhero comics (the line-up has a lot of the same basic types as Watchmen, it’s all done on the Ditko nine-panel grid and so on). But it’s very clearly doing something very different from just a straight Watchmen sequel, and it’s one of my very favourite mainstream superhero comics."

I think I reserved it right there and then.

Thing is - I had heard about this book before - and the things people said always made it sound vaguely - I dunno - sit-com-y (that's a word right?). Something about it being the first comic to inject a little humour into it's superhero shenanigans. The whole thing sounded a little - I dunno - cheap. Not that I have anything wrong with people trying something new. But if I wanted to read something funny - then I don't think that I wanna go to stories about guys in capes because - hey come on - this stuff is serious and saving the world isn't the place to make jokes. And so my overall feeling was that this was a book that will have more for long-time superhero comic book fans than the average reader - you need to be fully versed in what it is that's been deconstructed (albeit ever so slightly) before you can really laugh along. And there's bits of it that just felt kinda empty - in that way that most superhero comics tend to. Like - all it is is people fighting each other and dealing with threats that have no bearing on anything in the world (or maybe it just caught me at a bad time?).

But yeah.

........................................................................................................................................................
Links: Tearoom of Despair Article.

Further reading: Animal Man, Doom Patrol.

All comments welcome.