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I
feel a Rush song coming on...
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Jason
Schachat's
Occasional Breakdown
12/13/05 page 2
page
1 here
We’ll
also have to wait and see what the full ramifications of
JSA #80 will be, but it’s
looking like a few of the members won’t be coming
back any time soon. Sure, the fight in the fifth dimension
wreaks havoc with our heroes, but the solutions are easily
reached: if your enemy is a friendly genie who’s been
enslaved by a madman, just get the genie to assert his free
will.
Cuz, you know, that’s how it always
works in genie stories... honest...
During the battle between Thunderbolt and
Jakeem, Saradin sidles around and binds the evil genie,
extracting Qwisp from Jakeem and then keeping him for his
own amusement.
Meanwhile, Mordru and Dr. Fate (well, the
inhuman part of Dr. Fate residing in his helmet) tussle
throughout multiple realities, constantly reaching a stalemate.
Infinite crises are witnessed, old miniseries are plugged,
and a good time is had by all who don’t get their
faces punched in.
But then we get the big happening of the
issue: Hector and Lyta Hall forever leave our reality and
journey into the realm of Dream. For anyone familiar with
Sandman, this is a fitting if rather sudden exit for the
couple. However, just about everyone else will be disappointed
in every way. Hector’s time as Dr. Fate was surprisingly
interesting, and the re-invention of characters involved
in that story was quite an accomplishment. But Lyta didn’t
get to do much of anything. She popped back into the DCU
for the first time since her chilling journey in “The
Kindly Ones”, hung out with Fate a bit, and now she’s
gone.
Honestly,
what the heck was the point of bringing her back then? One
of the things that made JSA great was the nearly
countless number of threads Goyer and Robinson wove into
it. At times, the story could prove challenging to keep
up with, but it always sucked you in and probably promoted
more DC Archive sales than any series before or since.
But, when Geoff Johns took over, the story
thinned out, the stories got smaller, and characters were
just cast aside. That’s not to say he hasn’t
pulled off some nice storytelling, but it’s been a
long time since we saw anything on par with the constant
and imaginative retconning of those early years.
When JSA started putting “Infinite
Crisis Crossover” on their covers, I’d hoped
we get to hear the stories that weren’t told in the
Countdown books. We get a whole miniseries about C-list
magic heroes taking on the Spectre, but Dr. Fate and Thunderbolt
don’t get more than a few pages against him?
...well,
okay, I can see how hard it would be to write, but it still
would’ve been worth seeing. This last arc on JSA
has been amusing, but it’s an all-too-strong reminder
that characters resurrect and die all too easily in comics,
and the battles that get them there usually aren’t
as epic as we’re supposed to believe. How will all
this impact the JSA in the future? I don’t know, but
I’m also a lot less sure that I care.
page
3: Y The Last Man #40, Gotham Central #38...
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