Shane Bailey at Near Mint Heroes makes an accurate prediction in his comments on JSA 62:
“There’s one scene in this book that I’m sure someone will call Johns out on though. I’ll leave that for them to do.”
Spoilers, ahoy.
The scene in question features the brutal murder of Stargirl’s stepfather, mother, stepbrother, and half-sister. They’re having a pleasant family breakfast when time-traveling villain Degaton sends a squadron of killers who promptly shoot the father in the head, off the family dog, pump a large quantity of bullets and death rays into the mother and stepbrother, and shoot the baby as she wails in terror.
And with that, we have the last Geoff Johns-written issue of JSA I’ll ever read. It’s not a matter of the appropriateness of the material for a super-hero comic, though that’s probably a fair question. It’s not even so much a question of the level of violence, which is the definition of gratuitous. (Shooting a baby? As she sits screaming in her high chair?) It’s the pure, narrative hackery of the moment.
It’s a time travel story, so the reset button is sitting there like a gun in the first act of a play. Johns can either use that reset button, restoring the happy family, or he can pull a switch-up, teaching us all another somber lesson about the cost of being a hero. For me, neither outcome would make the rest of the story worth reading because of the inherent artificiality of it all.
If the event is undone, Johns can pass it off as “uplift,” while still having the thrill of his bloody money shots. If the event stands, it’s just an extremely ugly float in the grim and gritty parade that increasingly defines super-hero comics, particularly those published by DC. It’s vulgar either way, a sequence so over-the-top and disturbing as to derail anything that happens subsequently.
Beyond this staggering bit of bad taste, there are other Johns tics in evidence. There’s the whole daddy-hero theme that’s taken such a pounding in this title (and in Flash). There’s also the standard Johns narration, which always sounds the same, no matter who’s delivering it. (Stargirl apparently has speech patterns remarkably like the Wally West, at least in captions.) And there’s the prospect of another “undo death” routine, already portrayed with Atom-Smasher and Hourman.
I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to pull this particular plug. Fondness for this set of characters is probably behind it. But I just can’t take it any more. It’s bad storytelling, and it’s offensive. Enough.
(And, yes, I realize I’ve shot my credibility all to hell with yesterday’s “I want to hate something” post. I swear it’s a coincidence.)