Justice Society of America #3 // Review
Dr. Fate has just found out that he’s going to get killed in the future by time-traveling Nazis. Sort of. (But only in a future that lies in Huntress’s past.) So there’s still a chance of the Huntress traveling with Dr. Fate into the future to retroactively change her past so that Dr. Fate can continue to live in the present. Or something like that. Parallel worlds and weird Earths ricochet around page and panel in Justice Society of America #3. Writer Geoff Johns continues to play around in the open field of a Golden Age that’s been sliding around in strange directions in the DC Universe for decades. His story is brought to life by artists Mikel Janín and Jerry Ordway with the aid of colorists Jordie Bellaire and John Kalisz.
Angle Man has conjured a big mess of Bizarro Supermen. So y’know...it’s weird. It’s up to the Justice Society to deal with it, but they could really use the help of an actual Superman. What they’re going to get instead is a hero from the future who calls herself the Huntress. They may come from a time WAY before she was born, but she’s got a hell of a lot more experience than them. So...y’know...it’s going to get weirder.
Johns revisits weird elements of the past that have popped up over the years. What was introduced by Gardner F. Fox in the 1940s got a fresh perspective from Roy Thomas in the 1980s and has been periodically given an occasional additional glance since. Johns juggles a lot of bizarre time-traveling weirdness in the third issue of the series. Whereas the first couple of issues might have felt a bit muddled in arcane lore from the periphery of the DC Universe, Johns’s script for the third issue has more than enough weight to keep itself going without a whole lot of knowledge of the past.
Janín and Ordway play to a rather deft balance between action and drama. There are a great many characters in the JSA who bear a distinctly diverse range of different personalities. All too often, artists tend to lose track of the individual personalities that make a superhero team so interesting. Janín and Ordway manage to give each personality its own distinct presence in a story that also manages to maintain the menace of the villains without focusing on them at all. Bellaire and Kalisz lend depth and radiance to action and introspection alike in an issue that works on several levels at once.
There have been quite a few different attempts to give the Huntress the kind of spotlight she’s deserved. She’s by no means the title character of this particular series, but Johns and company seem to have found a vehicle for her that gives her the right balance between heroism and vulnerability to make her FEEL like a title character in her own book. Given the right momentum, this particular incarnation of the Justice Society is making a strong case for a deeper focus on the Huntress.
