Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely JLA: Earth 2 (2000)
I wouldn't have bothered, but I actually thought this was the one Andrew Hickey wrote about in his fascinating analysis of Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory, which it wasn't.
Never mind. It seems decent anyway, or at least a massive improvement on Morrison's JLA: New World Order which was mainly about Superman growing a mullett. The art is mostly wonderful and redolent of Jean Giraud or Gaetano Liberatore except still with those fucking chins making everyone look like Jimmy Hill, Sammy Davis Jr. or Bruce bloody Forsyth. The story is paced so as to be readable and entertaining - as opposed to wilfully obscure and irritating - although I have no idea what the hell any of it is supposed to be about. Superman and pals travel to a mirror Earth in which everything good is bad and vice versa, and so the looking glass Justice League are dedicated to crime, murder, evil, the music of Jeff Lynne and so on. Superman and pals inevitably attempt to stomp the bad guys, but can't because this is a universe in which the bad guys always win; so they do something bad and win the day after all. So reality, both here and in our own universe, is dictated by narrative, which itself is a function of storytelling and hence human perception. as above, so below... er...
That's all I've got.
I'm sure there's more to it given Morrison's usual preoccupations, but it wasn't obvious to me, and I didn't care enough to feel like working it out. Earth 2 is very enjoyable, but probably makes more sense if you have more invested in caped stuff than I do.
I wouldn't have bothered, but I actually thought this was the one Andrew Hickey wrote about in his fascinating analysis of Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory, which it wasn't.
Never mind. It seems decent anyway, or at least a massive improvement on Morrison's JLA: New World Order which was mainly about Superman growing a mullett. The art is mostly wonderful and redolent of Jean Giraud or Gaetano Liberatore except still with those fucking chins making everyone look like Jimmy Hill, Sammy Davis Jr. or Bruce bloody Forsyth. The story is paced so as to be readable and entertaining - as opposed to wilfully obscure and irritating - although I have no idea what the hell any of it is supposed to be about. Superman and pals travel to a mirror Earth in which everything good is bad and vice versa, and so the looking glass Justice League are dedicated to crime, murder, evil, the music of Jeff Lynne and so on. Superman and pals inevitably attempt to stomp the bad guys, but can't because this is a universe in which the bad guys always win; so they do something bad and win the day after all. So reality, both here and in our own universe, is dictated by narrative, which itself is a function of storytelling and hence human perception. as above, so below... er...
That's all I've got.
I'm sure there's more to it given Morrison's usual preoccupations, but it wasn't obvious to me, and I didn't care enough to feel like working it out. Earth 2 is very enjoyable, but probably makes more sense if you have more invested in caped stuff than I do.
It confuzzled me because the world of the Crime Syndicate was of course Earth-3 in the pre-1986 DC universe. Earth-2 was the world where Superman had been around since the 1940s (and was married to Lois) and Batman was dead.
ReplyDeleteEven your reply confuses me, so I probably didn't have much of a chance with this one.
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