Copied over from forum split:
Dear Internet,
Is Grant Morrison's JLA actually any good, or have you all been lying to me for years?
Love,
T
Try To Take This Seriously.
It's a 1997 story. A very well done 1997 story, but still a 1997 story. If you're gonna say that the majority of the works of Alan Moore are excused their laughable retardation because of the time when they were written, you should be extending Morrison the same courtesy.
It does get a lot more interesting than the first arc, though.
Question: Was this a monomythical JLA story before or after Morrison did it?
Huh. That actually seems like the kind of plot I would have expected from the Justice League cartoon. Like if they ran out of DC continuity to mine ideas from.
Responding to TA: "Very well done" my ass. The art's hideous and the story's paint-by-numbers. Calling it simply a product of its time is a copout, and the Moore comparison is flawed because Moore did plenty of great shit in the 1980's. Hell, Morrison did too; you don't see me bitching about the mullets in Animal Man.
Animal Man was deep; this really couldn't be any shallower unless the single-issue plot was stretched out across six issues instead of just four.
Dismissing it with "it was 1997" is bullshit. Sure, it was better than the Evil Hal stuff they'd just gotten past or the Onslaught nonsense Marvel was up to, but Marvel was also doing Thunderbolts. Ellis was writing Stormwatch, Kingdom Come and Sandman had just ended, and Planetary and the Priest version of Black Panther were a year off.
In short, yeah, it was better than a lot of what was being published at the time. That still doesn't make it good, even for a 1997 book from one of the Big Two.
Responding to Brent: That's actually a good question, and one I intentionally raised, albeit in an offhand manner. Were all these plot elements cliches before Morrison got ahold of them?
I acknowledge that I wasn't a DC reader at the time, but my impression is that they were. Batman always wins even when he's up against foes who could physically overpower him. Aquaman -- well, he had that ridiculous metal quarter-shirt thing and harpoon hand before Morrison got there, so the "WE ARE TRYING TO MAKE AQUAMAN A BADASS" nonsense was already well underway.
And the "why doesn't Superman just fix everything?" question has been around as long as Superman's had his current crazy power level. And the "new guy shows up, makes hero look bad, but is actually evil" is MOST DEFINITELY a cliche -- and yeah, there WAS a book out at the time that put a fresh spin on it; this wasn't it.