Justice League #1

My review of Justice League #1, on Thursday of last week, was pretty scathing. Matter of fact, it pretty much deconstructs the entire issue, proving that it suffers from a whole series of serious problems, from confusing artwork and bad dialogue to a plot hole so large that it renders the entire story illogical.

Today, I've followed that up with a look at how super-hero comics suffer from a love of hollow spectacle and how reading them has literally undermined our ability to detect illogical, nonsensical elements. Which I then go on to demonstrate.

There's been a lot of vociferous debate about all of this. And let me be clear: I want the DC relaunch to succeed, but I also want it to consist of high-quality work. I want the people hopefully coming to comics for the first time to see this high-quality work, not shoddy, poorly-edited nonsense that ought to scare them away from comics, if they're the kind of smart reader that we (should) most want to attract.

No, Justice League #1 isn't the worst comic ever. But it is fair game, because it's been publicized as the introduction to DC's revised universe, one friendly to new comics readers. But objectively, it's anything but.

The above review and article are both at Sequart.

In other Justice League #1 news, Bleeding Cool (one of the few comics website I read almost daily) has one of the dumbest reviews of the comic yet, in which the writer says about the issue's decompression, "As a literary technique, I found this most interesting."

New rule: if you can't identify cliched dialogue, massive plot holes, and shitty panel compositions, you don't get to use the phrase "literary technique."

Is this what comics criticism has come to?