I've read maybe a third of this week's new comics, and there've been some decent efforts so far (Invincible Iron Man wasn't bad, Destroyer was dumb fun). But the only one that surprised me was Justice League: Cry for Justice. I really wasn't expecting a lot from that, but the artwork was the first pleasant surprise – a striking mix of drawing and painting, with some Jim Lee in there, some Gene Ha... certainly purty enough to linger over the occasional page. So well done that Mauro Cascioli.
On the writing side, despite a significant break from comics, James Robinson still seems to be doing that thing where he emphasizes all the wrong words. That aside, the story was OK, but the second pleasant surprise was the text material at the back, wherein Robinson writes about his reasoning for the characters he's picked, offers hints of what's coming up in the miniseries that actually made me really quite excited in a schoolgirlish sort of way (The Shade! The Shade!), and teases his forthcoming run on the main Justice League title, which, it transpires, Cry for Justice is a lead-in to. And the scant details of that made me a teensy bit excited. (In fact if I were a schoolgirl, I would have done a little wee in my knickers.)
He also talks about a childhood trip to a secondhand book shop in South Africa, gazing upon a treasure trove of old comics and being told by his mum he could have just one (he chose an old issue of The Atom). Robinson's documented his love of the past and of collecting previously (notably in the pages of Starman), but this kind of reminiscence always hits home with me, chiming with my own childhood (and, it has to be said, adulthood) trips to junk shops, flea markets, wherever, in search of comics.
So Cry for Justice #1 turned out to be a bit of a treat. If nothing else, I'll be getting the next six issues for the back-up material alone.
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