JSA volume 6: Savage Times


By Geoff Johns, David Goyer, Leonard Kirk & Keith Champagne (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-84023-984-0
New Extended Review

When they’re producing what their confirmed readership wants, today’s mainstream comics publishers seem to be on comfortably solid ground, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh in my judgements when they seemingly go berserk with multi-part, braided mega-crossovers. The tale collected as Savage Times is top notch, well crafted, standard comic book fare, but I just can’t escape the nagging worry that by only regurgitating the past – no matter how well – ultimately you’re only diminishing the business and the medium.

This volume gathers together issues #39-45 of the monthly JSA title, and as costumed capers go, it is a saga packed with action, excitement, soap opera tension , humour and that heady mix of continuity in-filling we fan-boys adore…

The drama begins with two stand-alone tales ‘Power Crush’ by Goyer, Johns, Patrick Gleason and Christian Alamy, starring the unfeasibly pneumatic and feisty Power Girl as she deals in characteristically direct manner with a metahuman stalker obsessed with her prodigious physical charms, before moving into far more sinister territory with ‘…Do No Harm’ (by Leonard Kirk & Keith Champagne who also illustrated the rest of this book) as Star-Spangled Kid and Captain Marvel must use extreme care to rescue an entire school from a sadistic telepathic suicide bomber, whilst Doctor Mid-Nite struggles to keep the monster’s geriatric master alive on the operating table…

The main event begins in the ‘Unborn Hour’ as a time-travelling villain accidentally shifts some of the Justice Society back to 1944 and a climactic meeting with the first Mister Terrific. In ‘Paradox Play’ the malfunctioning time vehicle sends Captain Marvel to ancient Egypt, and after defeating the chronal marauder, Hawkgirl and Terrific’s modern successor follow the world’s mightiest mortal into a spectacular confrontation with the immortal conqueror Vandal Savage and an elemental metamorph determined to lay waste the Black Lands.

Meanwhile the new Doctor Fate is in another dimension seeking answers to the mystery of his comatose wife…

‘Yesterday’s War’ unites the modern heroes with Egypt’s champions Nabu, Prince Khufu, Chay-Ara (Hawkgirl’s own earlier incarnation) and Black Adam – who is both hero and villain in the JSA’s own time – but as the war goes against the beleaguered defenders Marvel and Adam are dispatched to the Land of the Dead to seek godly aid in ‘The Tears of Ra’, wherein the Black Marvel’s tragic history is poignantly revealed…

With Savage defeated and history restored, the book closes on a treble cliffhanger in ‘Princes of Darkness Prologue: Peacemakers’ as Doctor Fate returns to discover the true nature of the woman he believed to be his long-lost wife, the genocidal terrorist Kobra smugly escapes his long-deserved fate and the Society’s most powerful foe reveals how he has manipulated the team from the start…

It’s always unsatisfying to reach the end of a book but not the story, so even though this is a class superhero act it is hard to not feel a bit resentful, even though the next volume promises everything a fan could wish for.

At least the thing has already been published. Maybe you shouldn’t wait for my impending follow-up graphic novel review but just get this book and JSA: Princes of Darkness right away…
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