Justice League vol. 5: Justice/Doom War

Scott Snyder’s run (and it’s also James Tynion IV’s too) reaches its climax with this volume.  I’ve found his “Justice League” to be a little uneven overall.  While the writer did his best to try and “Go Big” with every arc, they never quite connected in the way that I’d hoped they would.  Either they fell victim to Snyder’s tendency to simply “Nope” the heroes’ plan, or the storytelling fell prey to predictability.  Still, each storyline had energy going for it, and generally incredible art from start to finish.  Even though “Justice/Doom War” feels like it’s going to fall prey to some of this run’s pitfalls, Snyder & Tynion actually manage to “Go Bigger” with a lot of the storytelling here, thanks to the help of artists Jorge Jimenez, Francis Manapul, Howard Porter, Bruno Redondo and Daniel Sampere.

At least, that’s how it is until the end.  Which is when Snyder pulls out the biggest “NOPE” of his writing career at DC and plays it on the story itself.

It starts off well enough, with a Jarro-focused issue that sees the little living starfish in a jar try to find a way to head off the upcoming conflict on his own.  The most surprising thing about his plan is that it actually works… until you (and Batman) remember what Jarro’s thing is and it’s up to the Caped Crusader to have a heart-to-heart with the mutant starfish that looks up to him as a dad.  Predictable, yes.  But also weirdly affecting too.  Mainly because it got me to write a sentence that has “mutant starfish that looks up to him as a dad” in it.

After that prelude, the “War” kicks off proper with Will “Starman” Payton catching everyone up on what’s at stake:  With Luthor having unlocked six of the seven primal energies of creation, his master Perpetua has almost regained all of her power.  When she has it all back, she’ll be able to remake the entire multiverse in her image.  The only thing that can stop her is the power of the Totality, an energy source of incredible power that was used to bind Perpetua eons ago.  Luthor has the biggest fragment of it, but Starman was able to find two other shards of it in the past and future, respectively.  If the Justice League can get its hand on them, they can work with the Monitors to seal Perpetua away for good.

This would be a great plan if Luthor wasn’t already one step ahead of the League.  He’s already sent members of his Legion of Doom to these eras to try and find the Totality fragments first.  That just makes the Leagues job harder, not impossible.  You see, they’ve got friends in every era.  From the Justice Society of America to Kamandi the Last Boy on Earth and they’re all against the idea of Doom winning.  Even when things are at their bleakest, heroes — especially those of the “super” variety — know that they have to keep fighting back with everything they have.  Especially when it involves the final measure Batman implemented in the Hall of Justice.

“Justice/Doom War” has all of the energy that drove the previous volumes and then some.  It’s a story that starts off with the fate of the multiverse at stake, then throws in some time travel, the return of some long-missed DC heroes, and just keeps getting bigger as it goes along.  Even though Luthor and his Legion have the League outmaneuvered at the start of the story, the villains’ triumphs don’t completely feel like they’re dictated by the plot.  You get to see the heroes fight and claw back the lead, thanks in part to some well-planned surprises along the way.  The story feels like more of a struggle between both sides than previous volumes have, and I really appreciated that.

This arc also goes bigger in scale than previous ones have as well.  It starts off being told across three different eras, and then manages to feel even more dramatic once everyone’s back in the present and ready to face off against Perpetua.  While the writers deserve a lot of credit for setting all this up, it’s the artists who really deliver.  Jimenez, Manapul, Porter, Redondo, and Sampere are all asked to draw some incredibly crazy stuff over the course of these eleven issues and they do an exceptional job of it.  They sell the scale that the writers are asking for and the story would not have worked as well as it had without their efforts.  That said, everything would’ve looked even more amazing if Jimenez had been able to draw the whole thing himself as he’s been the most in tune with what Snyder and Tynion have been asking of him since the start of this run.

While the story is generally well-executed superhero fare, I do want to bring up a moment in the seventh part that hits at what Snyder really wants it to be about.  As the heroes are at their lowest ebb, Superman and Batman team up to deliver a speech addressing why they’ve lost to Luthor so far.  The Man of Steel talks about how they took it for granted that people knew his archnemesis was an egomaniacal bad guy that he’s always been.  That the heroes didn’t trust the people and tried to win for them instead of win them over.

This story may be taking place in the brightly colored fictional DC Universe, but it’s clear that Snyder is writing about our here and now.  While injecting that kind of sentiment may seem out of place in a story like this, I think it works.  It’s not made out to be thuddingly on the nose as it’s very possible to read this and not make the connection to Luthor’s real-life counterpart.  It does add some interesting context to his characterization over the run, and that’s appreciated.  Batman’s sentiment that the heroes have to go out and inspire humanity to fight back and shake off the shackles of Doom is also well done and serves to fuel the rest of the story from here on out.

I’d say this story was properly inspiring with a setup like that.  Too bad that Snyder goes and slaps a big ‘ol “NOPE” on it for the finale.

Calling the ending of the “Justice/Doom War” a finale is being too generous.  It’s actually a giant “TO BE CONTINUED…” setup for the “Death Metal” event that just. doesn’t. work.  Throughout the length of this storyline, it feels like it’s building toward a point where the League wins and finally shows Perpetua and Luthor the true power of justice, teamwork, friendship, etc.  Never does it feel like it’s working towards something else, which is why this ending feels like such a cop-out.  All the elements of a successful League victory are here, but Snyder chucks them all away in favor of awkwardly setting up “Death Metal.”

Now, it could be that the writer had no choice in the matter.  Maybe this ending was editorially-dictated in order to make “Death Metal” even more of a white-hot event than it was going to be.  I didn’t need any extra coaxing to pick up the eventual collected edition of that event, and deep-sixing the climax of this storyline in service of that doesn’t feel worth it after reading it here.  The end result is that a pretty great “Justice League” storyline is crippled when it didn’t need to be.  For all of this storyline’s merits, you really wind up feeling like Doom won out in the end.