Justice Society of America #23 Review

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #23
Written by Geoff Johns & Jerry Ordway
Art by Jerry Ordway

I had been anticipating this Black Adam centric storyline since Johns first started hinting at it back in early 2008. Considering how amazing the Tomasi/Mahnke Black Adam mini-series was, I had high hopes coming into this for more of the same.

I know Johns is responsible for most everything that has happend with Black Adam since his early days on JSA, but what I ended up getting in this issue was a pale shadow of the Black Adam and Isis I had come to know over the past few years. Adam and Isis' personalities are two dimensional and their motivations for acting this way feel like I'm reading a Silver Age comic where they're evil for evil's sake.

Another problem I had with the issue was the fact it was trying to be several different things at once with no flow or direction. It wants to be an epilogue for the Gog storyline, but never fully fleshes it out, only giving the briefest of glimpses at the fates of several characters. It wants to set up the new Black Adam storyline, but with the way the characters act, it's hard to really relate to them or feel anything other than bewilderment over what happened to these two amazing characters' personalities.

I rarely talk about the art of books, as I typically take it for granted, but Ordway comes off as trying too hard to look like Eaglesham's work and I found, while it was serviceable, many of the faces, particularly Black Adam's, just looked terrible and distracted me while reading this issue.

Verdict - Check It. I wanted to love this issue, as Black Adam has become one of my favourite characters over the years, but everything he did and said just felt wrong for some reason. The flow of the issue greatly impacted the readability and I just hope the storyline picks up over the next few issues.

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