By: Grant Morrison Publisher: DC Comics Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: DC Comics Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 160 Publication Date: May 18, 1998 Reading Level: Young Adult Release Date: May 18, 1998
The JLA have landed So after a shakey start, Morrison hits us with his big magnum opus. I suppose he could have just started off with this instead of Vol. 1 which looks even worse in comparrison, but then what would be the fun in starting the series guns blazing, right? Well, actually that would have been a great idea, but oh well.
So here we're given a 6 part story arc that introduces the newly reformed Injustice League. The story gets a little convoluted from that point on, since Morrison likes to throw everything at us from hard light replicas of the JLA, to time travel, to trying to bring everything back to the start and have it make sense. It's a lot to take in all at once and I spent a good majority of the time trying to figure out what was going on.
He slpits up the team quite a bit here which is nice, giving each member something to do, but the story is stretched to the point of ridiculousness, sometimes you just have to ignore what you can't possibly fathom and read on, hoping that all will be explained in the following pages. There's no lack of ideas here, I'll give him that. Now if he could just piece it all together in a logical order.
A worthy attempt and an action packed story, but still not the best JL ever, and I'm hoping the series will improve as it continues.
Graphic SF Reader This is a Grant Morrison JLA collection. A bunch of Supervillain get together to do some bad things to the Justice League of America.
In the process, Lex Luthor and The Joker have a disagreement on methodology.
There is an alternate type of reality where Darkseid rules and only of handful of people still resist, including the Atom and Green Arrow.
An excellent time travel story These were originally published as JLA #10-#15.
The story throws a few large curves in the beginning. The unexpected part of the Justice League is that all of the characters have their own story lines, so major events like Wonder Woman dying and Superman turning into pure energy contained in a blue and white suit happen outside of the JLA stories. But having Aztec join the JLA in his own story, not in a JLA story is asking a bit much of the reader (at least he has the grace to leave the JLA in a JLA story!). This should have been handled in the flow, kind of like the old Green Arrow's son taking over his place when the JLA fought the Key.
The other major twist is that the plot starts out as a battle with the newly formed Lex Luthor brainchild The Injustice Gang. This would have been quite ho-hum IMHO. I am quite happy that it took a mind-bending turn into back and forth time travel and multiple-dimensions, in a story worthy of our heroes. The ending of the story is a little forced, but the storyline gives the members many situations to show who they are beneath their powers, which is what makes the League a great book.
Our favorite panels: my son's is page 129, an excellent sketch of J'onn, Superman and Batman with Plasticman in the background. Mine is page 50, Bruce Wayne and Robin in the batcave, with Bruce, mask off, half way being Bruce and halfway being Batman.
Whoa... Someone, somewhere along the line recommended JLA: Rock of Ages to me. Having bought it, it took me almost a year before I could sit down and give the story a proper read-through. Not because I didn't have the time, but because the story is incredibly difficult to get into.
This is really for the hardcore DC/JLA reader. I'm not sure what exactly was happening in the comics during this story's run, but here Wonder Woman is presumed dead, Green Arrow has been replaced by his son Connor, C-list hero Aztek is part of the league, and Superman is in his blue energy phase. That's a lot of changes to take in, and for someone not familiar with the JLA during this period, its quite disorienting.
It doesn't help that Morrison weaves two different plot threads together, one with Lex Luthor and a newly formed Injustice Gang and another with the heroes being tossed through time and space to confront a world overrun by Darkseid. You expect the story to focus on the Injustice Gang, then a third of the way through it shifts gears completely and turns epic on a cosmic scale. Granted it all makes sense at the end, and Morrison's writing/ploting can get very clever (such as his defeat of Darkseid), but the sci-fi/techno/mumbo jumbo babble can get very tiresome if you don't have patience for that sort of thing. The art, not that I'm a very good critic, is commendable. Characters stay properly proportioned and don't look overly bulky.
Really, Rock of Ages is what the JLA books are all about: massive, cosmic-level threats that take multiple heroes working together to overcome. If you can make it through the story (which is best done slowly one panel at a time) you'll find its an entertaining, if ambitious one. I can't recommend this as a blind purchase, but its definitely one to check out.
When Morrison is good, he's very good...
But when he tries to do this complex space opera stuff, it goes awry. The same thing that happened with JLA happened with New X-Men. By the time he got to his final story-line, it was a jumble of confused action sequences. Compare that to Morrison's Cassandra Nova stories from earlier in the series.
Likewise, Morrison's first JLA story arc (New World Order) is some of the best mainstream comic book story telling I've ever seen. But by the time he got to World War III, everything was confused and jumbled again.
Rock of Ages is like that as well, although it has one saving grace, the unsettling future world run by Darkeseid. he struck gold with that part of the book, but then lost it after the showdown with Darkseid.
Still, I think Morrison is one of the best writers in comics. Check out his We3 series, probably one of the creepiest things he's ever done.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
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