Cover 3

Justice Society of America, Vol. 3

Justice Society of America, Vol. 3

2008 • 192 pages

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Average rating3

15

I really need to just stop reading Geoff Johns' work, I think (if I had known this was him before I grabbed it in the library, I probably wouldn't have picked it up, to be honest).

The story's a bit of a mess. The JSA is a huge group - twenty-odd superheroes, some of whom have been heroing for over 70 years (in-story, not just in terms of publication history). There's so many of them here, in fact, that you don't really end up caring about any individual character, because there isn't enough time spent on them. These two dozen heroes spend the bulk of the book fighting this guy named Gog, who's going around killing supervillains who claim to be divine, because they're an affront to his god, also named Gog, who wakes from a centuries-long slumber and starts actually doing things to make the world a better place. The JSA distrusts him, though, for reasons that are never quite made clear.

There's also travel to two different alternate Earths, which is treated in enough of a matter-of-fact way that it almost seems boring, and doesn't really add anything to the plot (which ends on a cliffhanger that will only hold your interest if you've also read Kingdom Come, published 15 years earlier, but even then it doesn't really because they've established that that story didn't take place in the future, but rather an alternate Earth, so the “ooooh foreshadowing” falls flat).