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The Avengers, Justice League Origins and Colorform Storytelling

Marvel's The Avengers got it right. The movie is basically one gigantic getting-the-band-together story. It's Ocean's 11 just with Nick Fury instead of Danny Ocean. Joss Whedon and his actors showed an audience larger than 200,000 people why superheroes are cool and why teams can even be cooler. Characters coming together to fight a threat bigger than any one of them could handle isn't all that super-heroes and super-hero team ups are all about. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby showed us in the first issues of Avengers back in 1963 that the conflict comes from the characters, something that DC with their Superman and Batman comics hadn't yet learned. The fireworks begin when you put Thor, Hulk and Iron Man into the same room and wait to see what happens  Lee and Kirby redefined how superheroes got along every time that the Hulk fought the Thing. It wasn't a brotherhood; it was a rivalry. That was the secret of Marvel and since the 1980s DC has been to one degree or another trying to replicate it.  The Avengers movie captures and updates that Lee patter and Kirby showmanship in a way that the Marvel Avenger comics are disappointingly missing it right now.



If Bendis and his many artistic cohorts aren't delivering the same joie de superheroes that Whedon showed us on the big screen, the closest thing right now that we may be getting to it is Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's Justice League Volume 1: Origins, which essentially hits the same plot points that Whedon's movie did.  Origins is DC's story of gathering a disfunctional team together. If the original Justice League were the boy scout heroes of the 1950 and 1960s, this early 21st century version of the team is the bad boys of the DCU. Set five years ago as superheroes were just showing up on the scene, Johns and Lee tell a story of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and everyone else meeting for the first time and trusting one another only slightly more than they distrust them. Johns tries to taps into that ole Stan Lee razzmatazz to show us how seven heroes came together to be one team.

So the basic goal of Geoff Johns comic and Joss Whedon's movie are the same; forge a team that can face the threats that no one can face alone. But there's something wildly different in the two stories. The Avengers was a fun movie, full of personality and moments that felt real for the characters. The little moments for Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and the rest of them actually serve the characters and help build up to the big action scenes. Whether it's Stark literally needling Banner, looking for some hint of an uncontrollable monster or Agent Coulson gushing about having a small hand in redesigning Captain America's uniform, Whedon uses those moments to build his characters. It's what he's always done from Buffy to Cabin in the Woods; he uses the scenes between fights and action to reveal bits of his characters. It's what leads to that idiosyncratic Whedon dialogue. He loves to fill his characters with words and chatter that defines them.

I don't think anyone has ever really talked about how Johns uses dialogue to reveal characters and I really doubt anyone ever will.  Johns doesn’t reveal characters in this book as much as he pummels you with them.  In Origins, Green Lantern is a brash hotshot.  Wonder Woman is a warrior babe in the woods.  Aquaman is the pompous ruler and Superman is the alien.  These aren’t characters; they’re types of the character, fitting into the roles that DC has been pushing these characters into for years.  Now Johns get a fresh reboot and a clean slate to really slam home who He and DC thinks they are.  For too long now, probably since at least Infinite Crisis, it’s felt like Johns doesn’t know how to write anything more than cardboard personalities. His characters fit nice and neatly into the squares that the plot needs them to.

The roughest character in the book is the “angry” character; Cyborg.  I believe Johns thinks he’s our everyman into the book, the point of view character through which we should be seeing this “new, wonderful” world.  To go back to the Avengers comparison, he’s our Agent Coulson, the man who should stand around and go “how cool is this” when he sees the world he’s entering.  The only problem is that Johns and Lee don’t give him anything to do other than stand around and be angry because his daddy doesn’t love him enough.  That’s part of the character going back to the Wolfman/Perez days of The New Teen Titans but there’s absolutely nothing to the character other than his daddy issues.  He isn’t a hero, he isn’t even trying.  He’s a privileged boy who doesn’t do anything in the whole book.

With a little bit more Robert Downey Jr. and a little less Ryan Reynolds (rent the Green Lantern movie if you don’t get that,) the new Justice League could have been something special, earning that “must read” pull quoted on the cover.  As it is, Johns’ dialogue all painfully blends together until there’s just words, words and more words on the page without any need to care about who is saying what.  The characters talk as much as they do in Avengers but they never really say anything.  Thanks to Johns' inability to really create anything more than a surface level reading of any of the characters, this is a book that's full of costumes and not people underneath those masks ans capes.

It’s like Johns is relying on Jim Lee’s artwork to develop the character through the images.  With the right writer like Jeph Loeb or Frank Miller (two examples I can’t believe I’m using with the word “right”) Lee has that character to work with.  With Johns, he has superheroes and that’s not a character; that’s a role.  I’ll admit to being a Jim Lee apologist; I like his artwork.  His Art Adams-meets-Neal Adams need to dedication to the image works for bright, colorful superheroes.  It’s not lively and it’s not graceful.  It may end up just being a fifth generation copy of Jack Kirby, filtered through Buscema, Byrne, Adams, Golden, Cockrum, Perez and Starlin, watered down with each year removed from the originator of modern superhero drawings.  That’s what his work often is in books like Divine Right, a lot of his Wildcats stuff and parts of Superman: For Tomorrow.  The problem with his book though is that too much of it feels like Colorform storytelling.

You may not be old enough to remember but Colorforms were these static images that somehow magically (remember I was a kid myself at the time) stuck to a background image.  They could be anything but I always had the superhero Colorforms, creating these epically fantastic images of Iron Man fighting an array of badguys.  Of course, these images weren’t stories; they were just pieces of plastic overlapping other pieces of plastic.  Unfortunately, that’s what so much modern comics are: images overlapping other images with little or no relationship to one another.  See almost any Greg Land comic for prime examples of Colorform storytelling.

O.k, so Jim Lee is better than that but just barely. The same kind of discrepancies happen all the time in movies that try to use computer effects.  The first Spider-Man films are difficult because there is no relationship between Spider-Man and his environment as he’s swinging through NYC.  Like that, Jim Lee’s characters have the tendency to act independently of anyone else, even people they are fighting.  In one key moment, where the Batmanless and Supermanless Justice League has to rally, the characters look like they were drawn on completely different pieces of paper and just composited together on a computer screen. From that moment on, none of Lee’s drawings come together in any kind of meaningful way.  It’s the same as bad green-screen in a movie; you can see the seems in the story and it just feels fake.

The lynchpin of The Avengers wasn’t Nick Fury or Iron Man or Captain America.  Loki, the villain, brought the whole thing together.  This is where Origins is a joint failure by both Johns and Lee.  Their Darkseid isn’t the schemer that Kirby’s creation was.  He’s not a mad god or even a villain.  He’s a mountain.  He’s a huge piece of rock that the heroes throw themselves against, trying to make it move.  There’s nothing to him in this book other than an occasional “I am Darkseid” (shades of Grant Morrison’s JLA run) and some fighting.  As Johns and Lee are trying to show how Aquaman and Flash should be standing next to Superman and Wonder Woman, they put them all up against a villain who does nothing.  That’s the threat that brings the Justice League together.  Not a giant starfish from space.  Not some elemental aliens.  It’s a hunk of rock.  That’s how much personality is in the big bad and in any of the heroes in this book.  They’re all stone and wood with all of the personality that were in my Colorform scenes when I was a kid.

Maybe it’s telling that people will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to watch superhero movies and yet avoid the comic books no matter how simple it is nowadays to find them.  After the success of The Avengers, Marvel blindly refuses to publish a comic that has the same energy as Whedon’s movie and DC tries to but just can’t find the same fun in the characters or danger that the movies have.  Justice League Volume 1: Origin should have been DC’s answer to Whedon’s movie but instead it feels like it’s brought to us by the same people who gave us the Green Lantern movie.  There is no understanding of the joy of superheroes, the madness of them or the sheer exhilaration that can exist in these brightly colored pages.  Justice League Volume 1 misses injecting blockbuster movie storytelling onto a comic book page.