Justice League vol. 7: Galaxy of Terrors

The current “Justice League” title stopped being central to the DCU at the end of Scott Snyder’s run.  Surprisingly, DC didn’t cancel and restart the series with a new #1 once new ongoing writer Bendis took over.  Instead, they had a number of creators try their hands at telling stories involving the League.  One of them was Simon Spurrier, and that’s why I felt the need to pick up this volume.  It may not be the writer’s best work, but it’s still a lot better than the other story collected alongside it in this volume.

Spurrier and artist Aaron Lopresti give us “The Rule,” which finds the League heading out into space to answer a distress call from a near-derelict spaceship.  After fending off the alien that was attempting to feed on it, the heroes find that the ship is full of kids who were sent out into space by their parents.  Their species is called the Trotha and they consist of two perpetually warring factions:  The biologic The Way of the Cell, and the mechanical The Way of the Spark.  Both have been ruled by the despotic Empress Siddix for a very long time.  A time which comes to an end once the League shows up.

While removing a despot from power is usually a good thing, our heroes — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, and Green Lantern — quickly find that was the easy part of their adventure.  Now they’ve got to deal with finding a way to broker peace between two warring factions, fighting off an assault from a nearby alien civilization, and rebuilding a planetary government.  All things that are mostly outside the team’s skillset.

This is a point that Spurrier makes over and over during the course of the three-issue story.  Mostly through Wonder Woman’s mouth as she’s firmly against trying to lead these people even though Superman believes they have an obligation to.  It’s honestly a little painful to see the rest of the team screw up the business of leadership so badly as they try to solve the problems at hand with no real long-term plan.  That there are forces working against them certainly doesn’t help things either.

The story does become a little easier to take when you realize what real-life situation Spurrier is trying to allegorize here.  I mean, think about it:  A nation ruled by a despot.  Who kept two warring factions in line.  When an outside force came in and overthrew the despot.  With no idea what to do next.  Which led to the nation descending into chaos and at the mercy of outside forces.  In case you’re wondering:  no, I don’t think the Justice League would’ve fared any better had they actually tried to run the Second Iraq War and manage its fallout themselves.

I do think that the story is a fairly solid allegory for this for the majority of the story’s run.  This is in spite of the fact that he kind of has to make most of the League look like well-meaning idiots for most of the story’s run.  Things do work out well in the end, and I honestly would’ve liked to have seen more of that since the ultimate solution the heroes (well, Wonder Woman, really) come up with feels more like the start of a story than the end.

In fact, I think I like the idea of “What if the Justice League invaded Iraq” more than I do the actual story itself.  I appreciate the fact that it’s different, as I don’t see too many real-world allegories in the superhero comics that I read.  Yet it doesn’t have much interesting to say beyond the fact that superheroes aren’t meant to be rulers.  Which is a point that a lot of other comics have made repeatedly over the years.

“The Rule” isn’t really enlivened by its art either.  Lopresti does a capable job drawing all of the sci-fi weirdness that Spurrier asks of him, and I recognize that required a lot of effort.  It’s just that there wasn’t anything that really stood out in the story on a visual level.  Lopresti gives the story a solid look, invests a lot of detail in it, and delivers the storytelling well.  This is work that delivers on all of the basics, but offers nothing to take the comic to the next level.

The same can be said of Robson Rocha’s work in “The Garden of Mercy,” except that he’s working with weaker material.  Which is surprising since it’s coming from Jeff Loveness, a veteran “Rick & Morty” writer who won an Emmy last year for “The Vat of Acid Episode.”  That episode managed to be demented, funny, and dark in equal measure and that spark was missing from this two-issue story.

It picks up with the League heading back to Earth when they’re unexpectedly pulled out of hyperspace and drawn to a mysterious planet.  They quickly find out that this is not a safe planet as the foliage has absorbed some sentient beings into itself.  Further investigation finds that this foliage is familiar to some of the League:  It’s the Black Mercy.  An interstellar parasite that absorbs its victims life force while granting them a dream of their heart’s desire, and this is its homeworld.

Such a setup might seem like Loveness is trying to give us the ultimate story involving this parasite.  Except that it’s just one that focuses mostly on Batman as he falls prey to the Black Mercy and winds up having a conversation with his mother.   You see, she’s sad that her little boy has wound up like this and she just wants to offer him an end where everything turns out for the best.

I’ll give this to Loveness:  Pitching the parasite as a way to give a happy ending to characters who are destined (doomed?) to fight endlessly until the end of time or publication is certainly a gutsy one.  It’s also a dramatic non-starter as the Black Mercy only ever exists to be defeated, while also giving us new insight into the characters it possesses in the process.  Its creator, Alan Moore, understood this the best when he had it latch onto Superman only for the dreams it offered to clash with the character’s survivor’s guilt.  There’s nothing on that level here and Supes’ last-page words to Batman reek of unearned sentimentality in a way that would’ve likely had Rick Sanchez atomizing the comic.

All of this is to say that “The Garden of Mercy” isn’t actively terrible, just disappointing, and a poor companion to “The Rule.”  That story may not have been entirely successful either, but it was trying something different in a way that I wasn’t expecting.  It may not have been the, “Have Spurrier write ‘Justice League’ full-time!” argument that I was hoping for, but it’s still a decent reason for his fans to give this volume a look.