Fifty-Two Week Three

It’s the third week of the year we’ve skipped ahead in the DCU, and for the second time in a row, day 7 is missing. I guess nothing at all happens on Sundays or something? Joe Bennett continues to provide more than adequate pencils on a book that appears to be plodding along nicely, slowly building up steam and getting geared up for a couple of climaxes around the first quarter of the covered year, if the solicitations for upcoming months are any indication.

Despite the intriguing Two-Face-esque cover depiction of Lex Luthor, it’s Black Adam who takes up most of the issue, which is a pity, because he is rapidly becoming disturbingly one-note: gone is the troubled mixture of Marvel’s Magneto and Namor, whose well-intentioned arrogance made him the perfect anti-hero throughout Johns’s work on JSA. Instead we are left with a bloodthirsty maniac. It would be one thing if Adam decreed who lives and dies within the borders of his own nation. However, in the course of the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed him committing grizzly murder over and over again: brain-poking, head-popping, limbs torn off, bodies ripped in two...

He may have been well-intentioned once, and I’ll readily admit I was interested in his take-over of the Amazonian embassy as seen in 52 #1, but it’s become impossible for me to relate to Adam anymore. In the final scene of JSA #75, we were left with a man who had lost what amounted to his best friend and whose team-mates had forbidden him to come anywhere near them anymore. It was already a bit hard to swallow that he’d throw his hat in with a criminal organisation like the Society, but this takes it one step further. Going to extremes to do what you believe is right is something one can understand, if disagree with, but under the guidance of Geoff Johns the character has been driven straight through extremism out the other end, emerging as the ultimate black-and-white villain, far less appealing than the sum of his parts. A disappointment, to say the least.

As for the rest, the two things of note are the obvious tampering “our” Luthor did with Alex’s body, last seen in the final pages of Infinite Crisis #7 (where he was disfigured in the same way Two-Face once was—and still had hair, at that), and Booster’s increasing worry about Skeets’s flawed memories of history, prompting him to look for the time-traveler supreme, none other than Rip Hunter. Something’s obviously amiss with time, as the disappearance of the various scientists shown in the previous issue indicates, most of them being involved with time-tampering of some sort. It’s currently the most exciting aspect of the series, because I do love me a good time-twisting story and I feel like Morrison is at the helm of most if not all Booster’s scenes. The character feels like he’s right up his alley, at any rate.

Apart from all that, the cocoon at the end was a nice teaser for future issues: what will happen when the nefarious alien worm with the hilarious-yet-awesome moniker of Mr. Mind grows into his next phase? I do hope the answer won’t turn out to be he’ll become a nefarious alien butterfly...

After three issues, I’m beginning to worry about the relative pacing of the series. Week two ended with Ralph Dibny confronting Wonder Girl about the resurrection cult, but there’s no mention of this plot in week three, which seems more than a bit off. At least with the Question/Renée Montoya plotline, it’s conceivable that good ol’ No-Face is letting her stew for a week. But I presume that Ralph is no less on the case this week, so his absence this time around was jarring. The four pages at the end reserved for the nonsensical History of the DCU featurette could’ve been put to better use in that regard. At least Jurgens draws a nice pin-up/collage page.

I’m still in for the long haul, but I would appreciate it if they could forego the typical conventions of monthly comics and amp up the opportunities that a weekly format provides the creators with (scenes happening simultaneously, for one thing, would be rather welcome, rather than the one-scene-a-day routine). Still GOOD, but with its (serious) flaws.