By Joe Kelly, Doug Mankhe & Tom Nguyen (DC Comics)
ISBN13: 978-1-84023-609-5
Joe Kelly’s run on the World’s Greatest Superheroes has some notable highs and lows. This slim volume collecting issues # 61-65 of the monthly comicbook happily falls into the former category. The title comes from the three-part tale that forms the bulk of the book, but before that the wonderment kicks off with the stand-alone tale ‘Two-Minute Warning’, one of the best “day-in-the-life†type stories I’ve ever seen, with sharp dialogue, spectacular art and a novel format that elevates it beyond the many other attempts to show what everyday means for such god-like beings.
‘Golden Perfect’ is a tale which examines the nature of Truth itself. When Wonder Woman leads the team to the hidden kingdom of Jarhanpur to rescue a baby from a life of hereditary slavery she encounters a despot whose philosophy counters her belief in objective or absolute truth. The dispute shatters her magical golden lasso of Hestia…
Soon however this defeat has astounding repercussions for the entire universe. The broken lasso has destroyed objective truth completely. What people believe becomes the only arbiter of Reality. The moon is made of green cheese, the world is flat, Earth is the centre of the universe… As it all unravels a devastated Wonder Woman must find a way to reconcile her beliefs within the new Reality while the team battle desperately to keep the cosmos alive.
A dynamic end-of-everything tale that challenges the mind as well as stirring the blood, the patented Kelly one-liners, especially from Plastic Man, leaven the tension and heighten the enjoyment in this cracking little epic.
Ending the volume is ‘Bouncing Baby Boy’, a wistful and funny team-up of the mismatched Batman and Plastic Man. This small story looks at the sad side of the eternal clown, seen through the “cold and emotionless†eyes of the Dark Knight, and provides a welcome change from the Big Stories that are increasingly all Super-team books consist of.
Golden Perfect is well written and superbly illustrated, but not a typical JLA collection: It’s much, much better than that…
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