Broken Frontier

Characters come together, a battle is brought to the villains, and the villains at last stand revealed – it’s dramatic as hell, if a little off in execution.

Action; check. Shocks; triple check. Cheeky word play; quadruple check. Anything else? No, not really, and therein lies the storyarc’s primary problem. While the initial three issues of Meltzer’s League were slow, methodical, tension-mounting, and character-focused, this latest foray is nothing but whiz-bang plot twists for the reader’s buck. With the inclusion of Starro as part of the grand mystery plot as revealed in issue #3, the members of the soon to be new Justice League at last come together. A third of these heroes – Hal Jordan, Black Canary, and Arsenal – assault the labs of Professor Ivo in the hopes of rescuing their comrade, The Red Tornado. Meanwhile, the DCU’s Trinity team-up with Hawkgirl and Black Lightning to discover the secret of the Starros (and it’s a pretty good one) before preparing to track down Ivo for themselves. Plus: a now-human Red Tornado hunts for his stolen android body while Vixen flies to where everyone else is already headed. So it’s one giant convergence, plus a slew of last-page revelations, and they’re all surprising, intriguing, and definitely exciting.

So what’s the "problem" I speak of? Generally, it’s a too-sudden change of pace; where the earliest chapters did a fine job on building up Red Tornado’s character while concomitantly building the suspense of the mystery villains’ plot, "Being Human" seems far too buried in action and shock-effect for said effects to feel unforced. Meltzer manages a handful of "moments" with the characters, generally waxing kitsch on the relations between them and the iconic responses each of the iconic heroes would have and then do have to the given situations, but these moments are kitschy, and veer towards the side of soap-opera introspection rather than honest character or complex psychology. Even the human-Tornado sections are overwrought with heavy-handed dramatics, regardless that Meltzer has already proven equipped with a writer’s compass of sufficient quality to navigate such a central, tricky character metamorphosis. Basically, readers should love the events and the reveals in JLoA #4, but the ridiculous level of unrestrained histrionics is like watching a bad BBC version of Hamlet with the protagonist literally pulling at his hair.

Additionally, while the big revelations of this issue are certainly interesting, they do seem a bit out of left field. With all the slow burn build-up and set-up, only the most avid of DCU fans are going to read the final few pages without scratching their heads, and even for those avid-such folks (I’m one of them), there simply wasn’t any foundation laid for these twists. I’m certain it’ll all be revealed in the following issues, but it is disappointing when a story merely switches tracks and starts dropping revelations that only make sense after some up-coming, convoluted explication is offered; in the end, Meltzer could have actually structured this epic to have bit more flow and a bit more cause-and-effect plot, wherein – rather than shadowy scenes which would one issue (this one) become un-shadowed – have a series of actual unhidden clues left behind a la 52.

The art by Benes and Hope and Sinclair is as beatific as in previous issues, and as is usual with such a trio, they get to strut their stuff upon myriad action and splash pages within. The subtle, round-table chit-chat between Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman is done away with (not always Benes’ strength, that) and finally is the art team allowed to unleash some serious havoc, drama (forced though it be), and spandex poses worthy of Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld’s heyday. I also have to give the team massive kudos for keeping the book looking noir-ish and sinister while maintaining an equal level of four-color, spandex heroics as a commingled, prevalent aesthetic. Definitely one of the best looking super-team books out today.

While "The Tornado’s Path" has been far from a disappointment, I can’t help but wonder if – taking away Meltzer’s star-power draw – this opening arc wouldn’t be a bit more of the let down that I sometimes suspect that it is. The pacing seems unconsidered, the dialogue and drama a bit trite and forced respectively, and the team itself seems arbitrary to the extreme, with a plot that doesn’t even allow for them to naturally be drawn together, except for the fact that they just plain are. Even worse, the coming together of the team due to the current conflict makes the three-issue long "voting" a moot concept and not really much else beyond (it wasn’t a terribly well-done exercise in character study outside of it hopefully leading to a voted-for team). Still, the story is enticing on a number of levels, and certainly its faults are not so egregious as to turn any already-fans away. So a thrilling issue, should one let it thrill them and one doesn’t peek to close between the lines, though I’m hoping that this creative team will do much better than this in future arcs.