Broken Frontier

It’s the last issue for this title and the question stands: Does the Justice League go out with a bang, a whimper...or something else?

Some fans may or may not remember that this title was restarted some years ago with Grant Morrison writing. In the years since then, JLA has seen a number of creative team changes as well as character line-ups. Now the title is being cancelled again and will be rebooted this summer as the Justice League of America written by Brad Meltzer. So where does JLA #125 leave arguably comicdom’s most famous superteam?

Powered up psychic villain The Key seems to have Green Arrow, Batman, Black Canary and Manitou Dawn right where he wants them. He is unaware that he is getting a helping hand from one of the Seven Deadly Sins – namely Envy. Once he finds out, however, the fight equation changes. Meanwhile, the four former teammates must stop battling each other as well as their own emotional turmoil. Their salvation may come from an unlikely source and with a surprising motive. When the dust settles, though, the wounds remain. Is there hope for the Justice League?

Writer Bob Harras was given an unenviable task in having to close out JLA, having to do so in the midst of a big ‘event,’ and in having to follow the impact-heavy run of Geoff Johns and Allan Heinberg. What Harras has succeeded in doing is providing a serviceable story with some interesting emotional twists and turns but which is, in the end, unsatisfying.

The eventual fate of The Key in this story sits a little uneasily with me and as for the other characters – with DC’s Infinite Crisis event still with three issues to go, followed by the clean-up series 52, there is little closure Harras can give to the title or the characters. All of the players involved here, except, perhaps, Manitou Dawn, still have significant roles to play in the Crisis event. Because of this, there is still a lot of darkness that must be gone through before the new dawn.

Ironically, Tom Derenick’s art is much more in the vein of some of the old masters of the early days of the Justice League – Carmine Infantino or Mike Sekowsky, for example. There is simplicity of line here, almost a cartoon-like quality that was seen more commonly in the 1960’s. Mike Baron adds to this feel with bright, almost primary colors throughout the issue. Unfortunately this look is a little poorly suited to such a dark, emotional tale. The art is just a little too cheery for the script and the result is slightly schizophrenic. Although, I must confess that my inner fan got a little thrill from the last splash page.

With 125 issues in this run alone and a history that goes back to 1960, the Justice League has been through pretty much every conceivable incarnation and line-up – from the early days of the "Big Seven," to Giffen and DeMatteis’s mixture of comedy and drama with an eclectic line-up of heroes, to Joe Kelly’s mix of new and old members. JLA, under all its variation of names, has a long and rich heritage and so it seems kind of strange that it ends not with a bang, or with a whimper but with a shrug and a readiness to move forward to the next incarnation.