It’s back when groups of people could actually get together safely at parties. You find yourself talking to a friend and they are telling you a story that you just “had” to hear. It sounded kind of interesting at first. You maybe chuckled or said “oh interesting” genuinely once or twice, but it’s been like 20 minutes at this point and every time you think the story is about to wrap up or even just get to the part where you figure out what’s its really about, the person just keeps going and going — never really reaching a climax in the telling, they just sort of sidestep the story in a different direction instead of progressing it. You barely know any of the people in the story and there seems to be a whole lot of background information that would be really useful to understand what the heck this person is even telling you about. You just want to go. There are other people at this party that you could enjoy spending time with. You’d like to hear their stories. You don’t want to be a jerk, you like the friend telling you the story. They’ve even told you really good stories before but this is just not their finest hour.
DC is the party. Justice League is the story. Joshua Williamson is the friend.
I’m the guy looking for the door.
Things are in full blow “time-wasting” mode in Justice League #56. There are a ton of things I could tell you about that don’t work in this issue and others I could even say make the previous issues in Doom Metal worse. I could tell you about obvious and eye-rolly things that don’t land and others that were set up well and then poorly executed. There are random invisible horses and villains propped up to be world-enders who succumb to a team of sidekicks and C-list characters.
I don’t want to go into the details on any of these things. But they’re in there.
I just want to tell you, that at least for a little while, I think you might want to go talk to someone else at this party. I’ll stay here listening to our friend Josh and let you know if you should come back at some point. – Garret Grev
Wish me luck.