JLA: The Nail

JLA: The Nail 

By Alan Davis & Mark Farmer (DC Comics)
ISBN 1-84023-064-9

Here’s one that’s primarily for the dedicated fans. Produced for DC’s Elseworlds imprint, where major characters and brands are explored and exploited free of the strictures of regular continuity, Alan Davis turned the concept upon itself to create a wonderland for followers of comic minutiae.

His tale, based on the old verse, “For want of a nail the shoe was lost…” (originally penned by George Herbert in 1651 – so don’t tell me comics aren’t educational) asks what would have happened if that rocket from Krypton hadn’t been found by Jonathan and Martha Kent in Smallville.

All those super-menaces would have been defeated by all those other DC champions, but gradually the war would itself have been lost, and the dystopic world we see is nearing its ending when these heroes all come together.

I grew up with this stuff and for people like me it’s all utterly enthralling. There are clever in-jokes, sharp asides for the knowing, and vignettes that hit straight to the part of me that’s still eight years old and wide-eyed. The dialogue is sharp, the plot tension-filled and the action and art is all you could hope for.

And here’s that “but” you’ve been expecting: I tried this out on a couple of interested but non-fanboy, occasional readers. You know the type; they’ve seen Dark Knight, Sandman, Cerebus, Maus, Carl Barks and Alan Moore. Not anti-comics by any means, nor even anti super-heroes. Just not mired in “The Lore”. And they didn’t get it. It was pretty but not engaging, they said.

So I just have to give this a health warning I deeply regret. It’s brilliant and fun and great, but if you not at least passingly familiar with the continuity you might want to leave it until you’ve absorbed a few DC Archive or Showcase editions.

© 1999 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

4 Replies to “JLA: The Nail”

  1. Hey Win

    This one is also in my Amazon order…I hope I will enjoy it as I enjoyed the elseworlds “The new frontier” by Darwyn Cooke

    Read you soon

  2. Hi Bruce,

    If you’re familiar with the DC Universe and its nuances you should love this.

    The Darwyn Cooke books were amazing, weren’t they.

  3. I agree.

    But I do worry that sometimes the sheer volume of history that some writers try to access can be off-putting to new readers, and above all else, the industry needs more consumers or we’ll eventually die out like dime novels of newspaper strips.

    At least because of all the TV, films and cartoons there’s always a decent effort to reach new markets.

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