Tower of Babel has an excellent premise, but the general comic book campiness ruins what should have been a dark and desperate arc.
I'm not really much of a comic book fan due to the overall
low quality of storytelling but I’d be lying if I said I wasn't a fan of many
of the comic book heroes themselves. So sometimes I do give them a read with
some of the better ones, like Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns and The Long
Halloween being among my favourite books in general. This week I read Tower of
Babel, a 4-issue arc from the Justice League of America series. For those not
too familiar with the DC Universe, the JLA is DC’s equivalent to the Avengers:
a team of superheroes including, but not limited to, Batman, Superman, Wonder
Woman and the Flash.
What got me interested in Tower of Babel was the premise;
and few DC fans can deny that the premise is anything short of awesome. Tower
of Babel is about Ra’s al Ghul hacking into Batman’s computer and finding that
Batman has plans to kill, disable or maim each individual Justice League
member should they ever go rogue or become a threat. Ra's then uses these plans on the Justice League themselves. I won’t spoil it for you by saying
which plan is set out for which member, but they’re well thought out and each
is quite brutal in its own way. Seeing the League brought to its knees by
Batman’s ingenuity turns out to be quite the treat if you’re a fan of the
Bat.
But while the premise is really exciting, the execution is a
bit shoddy at times. There’s the usual comic book campiness that just ruins it
for me. Guns are fired without bullets hitting anyone, costumed men and women
punch people in the face while cracking ‘witty’ lines and nothing happens that
isn't reversible. It’s not even a spoiler that the good guys win in the end
without even suffering any major losses. I suppose a comic book
written for kids is still a comic book written for kids.
I still love the idea even though the book is childish. It’s
a tribute to Batman’s paranoia and inability to trust anyone that he’d have
measures in place to murder or maim his team-mates ‘just in case’ anything bad
ever happened. The scene where the Justice League finally confronts him turned
out to be my favourite. If they ever make a Justice League movie, I’d really
love for this to be the plot. A better writer would have made it a lot more
hard-hitting and dark (as something like this should be). There is, of course,
the animated film loosely based on this story called Justice League: Doom. But
don’t watch that, it’s awful.
Tower of Babel has an excellent premise, but the general comic book campiness ruins what should have been a dark and desperate arc.
See you next week
Tower of Babel has an excellent premise, but the general comic book campiness ruins what should have been a dark and desperate arc.
See you next week
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