Justice League #38: I Believe the Children are Our Future

With only one issue to go before the end of Snyder’s run on Justice League, this story mostly plays out the way it inevitably had to. We continue to see the tides of the war shift towards Justice, particularly with the return of the ace in the sleeve– Martian Manhunter. Shayne sacrifices himself to free J’onn J’onzz from the mind of Luthor in a particularly touching sequence, freeing a psychic with a far greater power who could, theoretically, do a better job reaching the people of Earth to convince them to side with Justice over Doom.

This notion of a disconnect between the populace of Earth and the heroes of Earth seems to bring up an interesting metacommentary on the nature of the relationship between the world of producing superhero comics and the concept of the comics superhero itself. While I do believe that, as a society, our relationship with the superhero– our own American mythology– waxes and wanes with time, I’m not certain the present world is disconnected from the concept. Certainly not in the same way the relationship waned in the post-WWII or pre-9/11 moments. Because this epic trajectory began so long ago, I can’t help but postulate that when the story began, there was an assumption of a world that didn’t quite come to pass, possibly coinciding with the 2016 presidential election. Despite the ups and downs of the past three years, however, the US population remains strongly bonded to its superheroes as far as I can tell, making the story fall perhaps a bit flatter than it would have otherwise. Instead, we have a strong Justice League story but likely not a generational classic that we might have had if the world were more in need of this story.

In the end, this issue has a number of good moments strung together loosely in the chaos of war by strong but highly stylized artwork all around. The audience for this book will fluctuate from reader to reader and mileage will vary but the years of hard work are paying off satisfactorily.