Broken Frontier

Brad Meltzer pens his final issue of JLA, a story that aptly embodies the best and the worst of his entire run.

This issue is titled “Monitor Duty,” and via that legendarily mundane JLA chore, the story explores the relationships, character, and current standings of each and every member of the team’s current roster.  Only one, minor plot element is advanced, as by and large this issue acts as Meltzer’s summation, a nearly defensive pointing out of all he’s done over the course of the past year and therefore what he’s leaving behind as his legacy.   The art is Ed Benes, and everyone by now knows what to expect there, though additionally there’s a few pages by guest Eric Wight that lend homage to past 60’s comic art styles, exploring a heretofore untold moment of when the League first formed.  As with the past twelve issues (including #0), Meltzer focuses primarily on character, allowing all plot elements to exist, but remain secondary, nearly beside the point.  And therein lay two big fat rub-a-dub-dubs.

Rub #1: throughout Meltzer’s run, the overarching plots were treated inferior next to character, at least in execution, but the plots were epic in content due to what he had to achieve in order to set-up the upcoming year of crossovers.  For example, his first storyarc brought back Red Tornado, potentially one of the most powerful characters in the DCU.  It also brought the new League together, introduced an ultimate Amazo, and a hyper-intelligent Solomon Grundy.  The second storyarc brought back Wally West and family, and situated key members of the Legion of Super-Heroes for all that’s to come in Countdown and beyond.  Even issue #11, for all its smallness in time and space, established a new set of powers for Vixen.  But these events came, and they went, and they didn’t feel powerful, or dramatic, or at all what they in fact were, because the stories weren’t executed to suit their content, and vice versa didn’t happen either -- the content wasn’t allowed to suit the stories.

Which brings us to rub #2, and the proof of rub #1: the characterization.  If Meltzer’s machinations were so inarguably character-based, character-focused, and character-driven…why do I care so little about his characters?  Meltzer’s proven more a comic nerd than a comic geek, a veritable textbook of factoids and continuity Easter eggs that, erringly, he allowed to inform his every character decision.

Almost like an actor and not at all like a writer, Meltzer deduced that a comic book icon’s bits and pieces, that their powers, costumes, associations, and their myriad established accoutrements somehow equated with their actual personas, and so we got a Superman in need of anger management, because the elements of The Lightning Saga somehow allowed for this.  We got a Hawkgirl that fought and hunted and strategized like an actual hawk and a Legion of Super-Heroes who couldn’t be honest or open and a JLA that couldn’t be trusting or verbal, even when the established character of these characters allowed for neither such behaviors.  In this very issue Red Tornado’s wife, a woman who’s stood by Reddy through the most outrageous supernatural developments, argued that a League emergency wasn’t worth missing saying “hi” to his mother-in-law, a prime example of a Meltzer scene that establishes a drama only by ignoring an established characterization.

There is more, of course, such as the great inconsistencies and plot holes (issue #11: Vixen tugging on a rope through water-tight glue, a rope that, even when slack, apparently didn’t sink to the whims of gravity).  Also the year of ridiculously obscure, broken dialogue that informed the reader of nothing and could’ve been lifted wholesale from any given issue without hindering the efficacy of the narrative a whit. R.C. Harvey, in his essay Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image defined comics as “pictorial narratives or expositions in which words (often lettered into the picture area within speech balloons) usually contribute to the meaning of the pictures and vice versa.”  Sadly, with Meltzer’s JLA, the text never served to illuminate the visuals in any way, but rather utilized either Azzarello-esque wordplay -- clever but sans all actual connotation or denotation -- or else heavily didactic lessons on the continuity-laden elements that served only to justify unjustifiable character bastardizations.

Regardless of all else, comics’ primary purpose is narration.  Whatever the dynamic between the graphic and the text, both must combine or complement the other in order to divulge a story of some sort or another.  In Scott McCloud’s wholly unsurpassed and industry-accepted Understanding Comics, he claims graphic storytelling to have three possible modes: realistic, iconic, and abstract.  Super-hero books, he claims, are the offspring of the realistic, wherein the art portrays precisely what occurs in the pulp adventure.  While I cannot fault Benes for illustrating issue after issue of precisely what does occur, and which, in simple action, is imminently understandable, the scripts of Meltzer have failed again and again to offer “realistic” yarns in the sense that McCloud defined the term.  Nothing is clear until the end, and at the end, only the results are apparent or even acceptable as considered storytelling.

There is no doubt that Meltzer is a big fan, and in love with the properties he’s handled, but nostalgia steers his ship, and the problem with nostalgia is that it’s the flip side of stagnation.  DC is on the cusp of great change, or so they say, and yet to announce the evolutionary progress of an entire company line and then to develop this future by way of nostalgia, romanticism, and long-ago standardized storytelling structures, is at best self-delusional, a languishment rather than an advancement.  That’s at best.  At worst, its bad, bad comics.  And as a wise someone once thought and even named his own website to reflect: “Comics should be good.”