JLA/Avengers: 'Nuff Said

This is not a review of Kurt Busiek and George Perez's JLA/Avengers crossover. There's little point to writing one of those anymore, particularly after John Jakala's inspired video-game review, which captures every one of the much-hyped miniseries' virtues and flaws with far more wit and charm than I could muster.

Think of this instead as a post-mortem, where I look at one particular aspect of the comic and try to figure out why it didn't work for me, what it did to the rest of the story, and what it says about Busiek's interests as a writer. This, then, is a stylistic critique, an extended focus on Kurt Busiek's dialogue.

Don't even get me started on his plot.

1. Fanboys

I didn't notice the dialogue at first; not any more than normal, anyway, which is to say not much at all beyond noting Busiek's predilection for sentence fragments and the em dash. Initially I was far more leery of his and Perez's baffling, punishing insistence on featuring every single hero ever to be a member of either the JLA or the Avengers.

This might not have been a bad idea back in 1983 or so, but since both franchises spent the eighties and nineties saddled under the weight of an influx of third- and fourth-stringers it sets the miniseries to an impossible and utterly thankless task. Was it really worth derailing the narrative panel after panel to include such luminaries as Sersi, Bloodwynd, and Silverclaw? Yes, I know the dictum that "Every character is somebody's favorite"; some characters are many more readers' least favorites, and I doubt that rare fan of Rage or Big Bertha will truly be satisfied to see them crop up in one inconsequential panel.

I have a growing suspicion, though, that the characters aren't really there for us. They're there for Kurt Busiek to demonstrate his respect for continuity and history, to show that he's willing to include characters even from those eras that he probably despises. (It was precisely this fealty to the work of inferior writers that ruined many an Avengers issue under his watch, as he'd craft whole dissertations attempting to reconcile some piece of West Coast Avengers or Wonder Man lore that was best left forgotten.)

This fanboy devotion is also legible in the single worst attribute of the miniseries, its dialogue. Busiek scripts few conversations as such in this miniseries, and what might seem to be moments of "character development" inevitably devolve into quick continuity lessons designed to assure us that Busiek shares our knowledge of these characters and their histories. The series treats us to such novel insights as Batman's dislike for guns, the Vision and Scarlet Witch's mourning for their retroactively-erased children, or Hal Jordan and Barry Allen's friendship - none of which need play any part in the story, all of which seem included only to confront the heroes with a contrived moral dilemma about changing history that we all know they're going to transcend anyway.

If that were all it did, the scripting would be merely artificial and cloying. Sadly, we're only just getting started.

2. Brown-nosers

No matter how grave the danger, no matter how dire the threat, no matter how many obscure 70s villains are trying to jump down their throats, it's nice to know that Kurt Busiek's heroes can always take time out from a busy brouhaha to compliment one another. By the fourth issue of JLA/Avengers Busiek's fanboy lovefest has infected the superheroes themselves, as they miss no opportunity to remind each other - and us - how goshdarn wonderful they are. Consider this line from the final issue:

WONDER WOMAN: You're very focused, Wanda.

or this:

ATOM: I'll say this--the man knows what he wants. He always this impressive, Vision?

or this:

SUPERMAN: Where can I get one of these shields--it's fantastic!

or this:

GREEN LANTERN: Wow. Just... wow. This design, Iron Man--the sheer power of it--and how fast you came up with it--I'm jealous as hell.

IRON MAN: You're jealous? Tell me where I can get one of those rings, friend.

Aww, isn't that nice - they like each other's toys!

This is how Busiek claims his laurels as the champion among fanboys, avowing his loyalty in the ultimate comics vanity project: he makes the superheroes into fanboys themselves. I can only imagine they're so in thrall to one another because Busiek can't conceive any other possible attitude towards them.

3. Wusses

The pandemic asskissing is only part of a much greater problem, the constant use of dialogue as narration.

In the first issue, Superman takes a blast from the painfully generic Marvel villain Terminus - a discharge of power that, in a sign of badassery that wore out its welcome back in 1986, shreds his cape - prompting Aquaman to whine, "Superman? Gates of Atlantis, that thing's power...!" Just in case we needed the reminder that something that can hurt Superman is awfully powerful. To be fair, Aquaman comes across as only moderately more asinine than the other Justice Leaguers, who gape in impotent but blessedly mute horror.

Busiek, apparently unwilling to let George Perez to pull his weight in the storytelling department, uses the heroes to narrate the story, to tell us what's happening and, worse, what we should be feeling about it. It's the dialogue equivalent of the sitcom reaction shot, and it stems from that same fear that we won't know Monica just made a funny if we don't see Joey laughing. Busiek doesn't trust Perez to tell a story; apparently he doesn't trust us to follow it, either.

(By the way, the Terminus battle ends when Batman, the World's Greatest Detective, who has watched Terminus shoot his staff, hurt Superman with his staff, pretty much do nothing that doesn't involve the use of his staff, deduces, "Its power is in the staff." The Justice League hasn't displayed this much collective stupidity since Marvin and Wendy were members.)

To provide a complete blow-by-blow of every cringe-inducing line of dialogue would result in a narrative as long as JLA/AVENGERS, albeit much snarkier. Suffice it to say that Busiek never has a character act when they could talk instead; never shows us, say, Batman fighting the Punisher (an admittedly superfluous exercise anyway) when he could spend a page showing us Plastic Man lecturing him about it afterwards. Action, exposition, everything is absorbed into Busiek's incessant dialogue. Even the battle scenes become cluttered with superfluous, often fragmentary self-narrations that make Aquaman's "Gates of Atlantis" sound like David fucking Mamet.

The real problems begin if you assume this dialogue is in any way naturalistic, in any way representative of the characters. Attribute these lines to their writer's characterization rather than his leaden ear and you have no choice but to conclude that the greatest heroes of two worlds are, to a man, complete wusses.

They talk out their plans and narrate the panels for us, remind us of their irrelevant backstories, clamber over one another to tell us how smitten they are, deliver Busiek's scintillating theories on the moral and ontological differences between the two comic-book worlds - i.e., the Marvel one doesn't have the Speed Force (lucky sons of bitches) - in short, they do anything but act. And even when they are acting, even when they're mired in the supervillain slugfest that makes John Jakala's video-game analogy so apt, they still drench the panels in a meaningless blather that saps the life out of them.

4. Sex fiends

Oh, but that's not all the battlefield chatter does! Ken Lowery at Ringwood has already noted that some of the final issue's dialogue needs barely be taken out of context before it begins to sound like a homoerotic sex-romp:

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Take 'em from BEHIND! Keep PUSHING! KEEP PUSHING!

Busiek doesn't write the words in that context, of course, and so this game is cheap and juvenile and at least a little fun. (My own contribution: Superman: "NNH! Oh my lord, the POWER! Never FELT so -- never would have GUESSED --" So, when is an uru hammer not just an uru hammer?)

Oddly enough, though, this game isn't wholly out of line with the rest of the story, which periodically pulses with a strange sexual undercurrent. (Forget the dialogue - if you really want to find weird sexual signals in this crossover, look no further than the image of all the Marvel and DC marine characters writhing in a tangled mass reminiscent of nothing so much as the superhero orgy from Grant Morrison's Flex Mentallo.)

The plot centers on the uneasy union of two universes, with repeated images of Krona merging them together. He's captured Eternity and Kismet (the Marvel and DC embodiments of their respective universes) and, in one panel in the final issue, is forcing them into one another in a scene that reads frighteningly as some kind of cosmic rape camp.

Nor is their union wholly negative, though. The universal avatars embrace passionately in issue three, part longingly in issue four. The whole premise of the crossover is, after all, to satisfy the readers' long-frustrated desire for this union of the two teams and their worlds. Its bittersweet lesson - the in-story reason for why they can't remain merged together, the out-of-story consolation for us as the characters are shipped off back to their respective corporate owners - is that they are fundamentally incompatible.

It's a romance. No wonder the characters are always cooing oddly sexual compliments to one another! It's a romance, albeit a romance that happens almost entirely at the cosmic level, never really filtering down to the characters until it finally reaches partial expression in the weirdly sexualized camaraderie of issue four.

In fact, to Monday-morning quarterback the story for a moment, I wonder if this theme might have been perfectly dramatized by creating a potential romantic relationship between two of the heroes, one from each universe (something Busiek does briefly with Hawkeye and the Black Canary in issue three, only to dismiss it within a page), then having it falter and fail by the series' end. That would at least have added an emotional resonance to the universes' fundamental incompatibility, something quite absent from all of Busiek's sterile theorizing about the Speed Force and varying moral thresholds and whatnot.

This isn't really a fault of the dialogue, so much as an embarrassing coincidence made possible by the story's unrealized potential.

5. -- !

I won't pretend that all the dialogue expresses some potent but unrealized theme, or that it wallows in pointless digressions into fanboy trivia, or even that it turns all the heroes into brown-nosing idiots. Those are just the good lines - the ones that come in more or less complete sentences. Sadly, too much of the dialogue reads more like this:

GREEN LANTERN: NO! He's -- you DIDN'T!

ATOM: Hal?

GREEN LANTERN: YOU--

ATOM: Huh?

GREEN LANTERN: --NO!

That's it. Four double-sized issues of that.

It seems odd that a writer so verbose would also be habitually incapable of allowing any of his characters to finish a thought. Or maybe those two habits mesh perfectly, maybe Busiek reduces his lines to their shortest and most meaningless components because he's afraid that otherwise he won't get them all in.

Why do such lines of non-dialogue even exist? They typically serve only to signal a certain, obvious emotion or reaction - usually shock, or anger, or awe, or fear - again, none of which make the heroes look particularly competent. They feel like substitutes for genuine tension or emotion, especially unnecessary because that tension should be perfectly obvious without them.

Frustratingly, this miniseries is filled, if not overfilled, with perfectly good ideas for a universe-shattering superhero plot. This is a crossover in which four beings of cosmic power vie for the secrets of the universe (which is, perhaps, two too many), in which the Vision selflessly gives his life to save Superman's, in which Darkseid attains an artifact of ultimate power, in which Krona KILLS GALACTUS AND BUILDS A HOME IN HIS BONES. Yet somehow these moments of high four-color drama are shunted aside for endless speechifying, for not-very-touching scenes of Barry Allen and Hal Jordan foreshadowing their deaths for the umpteenth time, for not-very-clever ideas of how chaos magic works in the DC and Marvel universes.

To put it another way, this series could have had everything going for it. JLA/Avengers was never going to be a work of transformative artistic power, and perhaps it never could have lived up to its twenty years of hype. But it had the greatest characters of two companies, and a gifted artist, and the plot, while serviceable at best, could have been an ample vehicle for reduplicating all the classic tropes of the epic superhero adventure. It could have been a fantastically satisfying genre piece.

If only its writer could have just shut the hell up.

Posted by Marc at May 3, 2004 9:39 PM | TrackBack