Comic Reviews by Walt

Return of the Hero part 2 of 3: Losers!

Writer: Christopher Priest
Penciller: Greg Larocque
Inker: Rich Rankin
Letterer: Bob Pinaha
Colorist: Dave Grafe
Assistant Editor: Ruben Diaz
Editor: Brian Augustyn
Published by: DC Comics
Cover Date: September 1994
Cover Price: $1.50

It’s kinda odd jumping "back" into an issue of this particular series–I vaguely recall THAT I had the first issue, and reading a 2-issue bit several issues later that tied into Batman‘s KnightQuest stuff…and now another several issues later, this. Given the singular 3-issue "crossover" WITHIN the larger Zero Hour bit, I don’t know how much this issue’s story would REALLY reflect on the ongoing series…but it doesn’t impress me either way.

The story itself–of this guy showing up after years away, having been forgotten while the world’s moved on–came years before Marvel‘s The Sentry, yet because I read that years ago, this feels vaguely like a sort of echo of it; just that I’m consciously aware of it being the reverse-order.

Perhaps part of it is my mood as I type this, but while I’d love to like this–particularly as a Priest book–it just feels a bit scattered and confusing. I mean, I know most of the characters–or at least know OF them–and even Triumph himself is not entirely unfamiliar conceptually to me. I can definitely–at this point, in 2016–identify with Triumph at the surprise of the group he finds here being THE Justice League. Despite the decade or so (at least) that the Justice League was more (for lack of better phrasing) made up of "second string" characters–it was a relatively brief period overall in the history of DC Comics, with most of the last two decades particularly having been refocused and then held to more of a "first string" of big characters.

Even with some familiarity with characters’ existence I’m not that invested in this period, and it holds plenty of blind spots for me detail-wise. As just a nearly-random issue in the midst of a larger run of a single title in a family of titles, this issue alone is clearly not meant for someone like me, especially being read in a near-vacuum more than two decades after it was published.

I’ll chalk this up as yet another tie-in issue that "ties in" to Zero Hour loosely (in the sense of the time anomalies allow for key story elements to happen without separate context/explanation) without being essential to Zero Hour itself. I wouldn’t choose this as an isolated issue to suggest anyone seek out, but if you’re reading the various Justice League stuff from this period, the entirety of Zero Hour, or just this title, it’d likely make for a better read in-context than as part of an event series.

Moving on…

Filed under: 2016 posts, The '90s Revisited, Zero Hour | Tagged: 1990s, Bob Pinaha, Brian Augustyn, Christopher Priest, Comic Reviews, comics, Dave Grafe, DC, DC Comics, Greg Larocque, Justice League, Justice League Task Force, Losers, Return of the Hero, Rich Rankin, Ruben Diaz, Zero Hour |