Justice League Unlimited #9 // Review
Time is a little bit confused. Heroes mix with villains and everyone is trying to figure out how to fix the fabric of space and time. But it’s all messed-up. People rush around trying to avoid themselves. A fusion between Batman, Superman and Green Lantern is even at kind of a loss to figure things out in Justice League Unlimited #9. Writer Mark Waid does his best to weave a plot through an uncomfortably large ensemble of characters that are brought to the page by artist Dan Mora and colorist Tamra Bonvillain. Waid’s script is more than a bit of a mess, but the art team does a good job of making some sense of it.
There’s an uncomfortably large group of heroes who are getting restless. If this were any of THEIR titles, they would have had this whole mess cleared-up an issue or two ago, but that would have likely involved a more coherent script. And then there’s this whole mess with Airwave, who’s lost. Mr. Terrific and Blue Beetle are working on it. They’re going to have to focus if they’re going to be able to get him back into the corporeal realm from wherever it is that he’s trapped.
To be fair, Waid IS trying to tell a story that’s intended to FEEL like a big mess. The challenge in this sort of story lies in making it feel compellingly messy. Things are totally out of whack and there’s only a limited amount of time before it all gets irrevocably messed-up. Waid is only managing a fraction of the intensity that he needs to really drive home the central conflict beyond the disjointed nature of a bunch of heroes...waiting around for things to become clear while having weird disagreements with villains who feel the need to work with them.
The action isn’t given a whole lot of room to move around, but Mora does a good job of making it FEEL every bit as big as it needs to feel in order to amplify the drama. It’s all very sharp stuff as it moves across the page. Bonvillain does some beautiful work of rendering mood and intensity on the page without overwhelming Mora’s art. It’s a delicate balance that results in a remarkably crisp delivery of a bewildered script.
It’s kind of fun, but it would be a hell of a lot more fun if there was more of a central pulse to the conflict. As it is, the consequences of the heroes not being able to do what they need to do only feels kind of weird and vague and everyone in the room is really, really capable of doing something about it but they don’t because...the don’t. And so maybe Waid is trying for a bit more than he’s capable of. The thing is: the central conflict IS interesting. Waid only needs to frame it a little bit differently so that the reader can feel the center of the conflict.
