Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities The All-JSA (2024) Thread!

So, I thought the first issue of Jeff Lemire's JSA series was promising, far better than anything in the last series!

I liked the "second generation" lineup for the main team, and I really dug the new Chair!

I'm not blown away by it, but it looks like this could be a good series, if it doesn't get too caught up in the massive event of the week and stuff.

Anyone else read it?

I haven't read it yet, but you've just sold me on giving it a fair chance. Thanks, EDE.

It odes do a good job of grabbing you right out of the gate. I'm certainly looking forward to the next issue so that's good.

I get it next week.

I know diamond had a stranglehold, but the books mostly showed up on time.

Sucks.

The biggest complaint I'm seeing people having about it is that it's a bit soap-operaish, which I kind of get, but it just reads to me like classic Marvel dysfunctional family team dynamics, and there's a specific reason given, even beyond the incredibly stressful situation the team is in, why things are discordant. So I'm not really taking that too seriously as a problem.

I agree. The discordant nature of the team felt a bit weird at first but tying it back to their recent experience with Waller and the trauma that induced made sense and nice to see that one of these events actually has ongoing consequences.

Read #3 today and I'm still really enjoying this series!

Love the Demons Three!

Not really up on current Hawk continuity but intrigued by what's being portrayed here.

Iffy on the possible Jade/Sand relationship, which kind of felt like three pages of filler, but whatever.

Beth's discovery in Jakeem's blood was cool!

The Wildcat pep talk scene went on a bit long, but I really wanted to see him actually don the Helmet of Fate!

Definitely interested in the "new" character who popped up at the end!

I'm super behind (as aways) on my monthlies. The most recent issue of the Johns JSA I read was #8. Overall, I've enjoyed that volume, especially because the delays don't hurt my experience when I binge-read about 6 months worth of comics at a time. I like overall what Johns did thru issue 8, except that Degaton seemed beaten rather quickly after a lot of buildup.

I'm definitely getting the new volume and look forward (eventually) to start reading it. I'm curious as to whether Lemire follows what Johns set up, such as the new ret-conned legacy characters and the reformed villains.

You're definitely making me interested! thanks for sharing your thoughts, folks!

Haven't gotten to this series yet. At this point, I can only commit to one monthly series, and it's looking like Absolute Wonder Woman is going to be it. But hopefully, when the first trade of Lemire's JSA comes out, my library will have a copy. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the comments in this thread.

Oh...so I take it you dropped Birds of Prey? I finally got that first trade and hope to read it soon. Any feedback you can share on why you no longer get it would be appreciated over on the BoP thread.

Them some tough choices, but they are entirely personal, so do what makes you happy, Ann. Honestly, I've been buying more OLD stuff than new the last few years. That may be a precursor to old age, but hell, I'm 57, I AM old. So, I get to buy what I like, and so do you.

Thanks, Rick.

Get off my lawn you young whippersnapper. You'll catch up to me in a few years - uh wait - oh darn!
(However I totally agree with your sentiment. Do what makes you happy.)

So...since Absolute Wonder Woman got a mixed reaction from me, I'm going to read the most recent issue of JSA and see what I think.

Stay tuned.

I hope you'll like it. As I've said, I think it's pretty good, but I'm not massively wowed by it. There's a few things that annoy me a bit about it, such as having a bunch of villains show up and not really identifying them. Why can't they just put boxes with their names above them like in the old days? It drives me crazy.

EDE, I had a similar reaction to yours. Agreed that the refusal to identify the villains was annoying (especially since one of them was wearing the Golden Age Sandman's costume.)

I guess the thing that annoyed me most was Kendra's muddled soliloquy about her relationship to Carter -- I like the character herself, but not the way she was shoehorned into the Hawk legacy. At the same time, I know it's not entirely Jeff Lemire's fault.

I did like the use of the Demons Three from JLA, updated for modern times without losing what was fun about them in the past. Kudos to Jeff Lemire.

Kudos as well to artist Diego Ortolegui. His style reminds me of an artist from the 80s and 90s named Ron Wagner, who started out at Marvel (on GI Joe, then Ghost Rider followed by Morbius the Human Vampire) and then went to DC, where, unfortunately, he was assigned the core miniseries of 1997's awful DCU event, Genesis, which I'm sure hurt his career considerably through no real fault of his own.

Back to Ortolegui -- he actually sold me on the Jade/Sand sequence even though I found Lemire's dialogue to be cliché and trite. That takes real artistic talent.

Overall, I liked the issue enough to get the previous two and the upcoming next two, which will finish out the storyarc. We'll see where I go from there.

Yeah, you're apparently supposed to have read the recent Sandman mini-series to know who that bad guy is and just assume that there will be an explanation of why he's around even though he died at the end of that series set in the early 40s.

I kind of liked the Kendra scene, but the Hawks are just such a mess and have been so since Crisis. I don't think anything they can do with them is satisfactory. I'm also a bit weirded out by Shadow Thief being in the Injustice Society. It just feels odd.

As as said above, I also love the Demons Three, and they seem well-used here.

I was worried about how you'd react to the art, as I've seen some really negative reactions to it online, which I don't really get at all.

Let us know what you think of the other issues when you get them!

The art is getting heavily criticized? That's a big surprise to me! Then again, I do have a thing for 90s style art that most people don't seem to share with me.

And I'll certainly comment on the other issues. I'm counting the days until the 1st week of February! It's been a long time since I last had that feeling!

I'm not sure how widespread it is, but right after you posted you were going to read it, I saw two or three comments really harshly attacking it for "bad 90s-style art" and, besides being bewildered by them, I immediately start thinking, "Oh carp! Is Fickles going to hate the art on this?" knowing that the art was a big factor in what turned you off Absolute WW.

The art in Absolute WW is, to my eyes, very modern and flat and scratchy, and the coloring is all murky earth tones -- again, a very modern approach.

Whereas I find both the art and coloring in JSA to be pleasant throwbacks to the styles that were prevalent when I first got into comics in the early 90s.

Also, having looked at Diego Ortolegui's cover for issue 1, I think the inking on the inside pages may be clashing somewhat with his natural style. The cover is almost Ordway-esque, which is quite fitting for a JSA series, but the inks inside are a bit rougher. Maybe that's why the art is meeting with displeasure?