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Comic Book Review

Justice Vols. 1-3

Writers: Alex Ross (Story), Jim Krueger (Story and Script)

Artists: Alex Ross (Painter), Doug Braithwaite (Penciller)

Look, I’m not made of stone, all right? I dig Alex Ross. I do. Marvels is still one of my favorites of all superhero comics, and I like the oversized one-shots he did with Paul Dini featuring Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and the Justice League as much as any maquette-stroking fanboy. I find Kingdom Come a little underwhelming, but I still would call it a good, solid superhero story.

So what the fuck happened with Justice?

It looks good on paper (the paper on which the project was hypothetically described, not the paper on which it was ultimately printed): Alex Ross painting a 12-issue limited series that is essentially an epic Super Friends episode, pitting the classic Silver Age Justice League against the Legion of Doom. Sounds like fun, right? Unfortunately, Justice, a story crammed with so many classic DC Comics heroes and villains that its three collected volumes can barely contain them, is not so much damn fun. It’s lots of other things — dense, confused and confusing, muddled, chaotic, pointless — but hardly ever fun.

Here’s the plot, as best I can make sense of it. The world’s supervillains have all been having the same dream, a vision of the world being utterly destroyed, with the Justice League powerless to prevent it. Convinced that the apocalyptic dreams are destined to come true, the villains — old Super Friends favorites like Captain Cold, Cheetah, Giganta, the Scarecrow, Gorilla Grodd, the Riddler — led by Lex Luthor and Brainiac, join forces to (wait for it . . .) save the world. Using advanced technology, the Toyman begins replacing the lost limbs of amputees, Poison Ivy uses her supernatural knack for gardening to feed the hungry, and Captain Cold uses his freeze gun to create an oasis in a desert. Those people aided by the work of the villains are also invited to come and live in a series of floating cities, where they can escape the suffering they endured on the Earth.

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You find it everywhere. Sometimes it’s a movie, sometimes it’s a TV show. It can be a comic book, a trashy novel, a painting, or even a song. But sometimes — if you are very fortunate — you’ll find a man who transcends genre and media, who exists in a realm all his own as the embodiment of quality cheese.

No. 3: Patrick Swayze

If you’ve had a harder time getting out of bed the last couple of days, if life has seemed less hopeful, if you’ve found the world to be a less magical place, I know the reason why. Patrick Swayze is dead.

Swayze was the king of this thing we call quality cheese. He didn’t get his crown because of his bloodline, and he wasn’t summarily enthroned by his predecessor (William Shatner). He earned it the hard way, by forging himself a career the likes of which we had never seen (and, barring an unexpected Keanu Reeves resurgence, never will again), an output of cheese so prolific that it causes lovers of the campy, the overwrought, the splendidly awful to touch their foreheads and brace themselves against the back of a chair at the very sight of it. He headlined Dirty Dancing, Road House, Next of Kin, Point Break, Ghost, Black Dog — and that ain’t all. He also starred in North and South — Book One and Book Two (not Book Three though, because by the time they made it he was too fucking huge). There’s no other way to say it: Swayze was the best there’s ever been at being the worst there ever was.

His breakthrough came in 1987 when he played the role of Johnny Castle, a dangerous young Catskills resort dance instructor — from the streets! — in Dirty Dancing. Lonely, sexually neglected housewives all across the country were stirred by the inspiring tale of 17 year-old Baby Houseman, whom Swayze’s Johnny instructs in the forbidden ways of the mambo, and the just-as-forbidden ways . . . of love. Aficionados of cheesy cinema were similarly moved by the acting, which varied wildly from wooden to ham on ham with a side of ham in creamy ham sauce, and by the ludicrous, overwrought storyline. And above it all, standing astride this awful film like a well-coiffed colossus, Patrick Swayze.

Remember that Billy Joel song “Keeping the Faith,” which contains the lyric “found you could dance and still look tough”? That was horseshit, until Dirty Dancing that is, when Swayze managed to play Johnny as a hair-trigger-time-bomb badass, prancing and plié-ing all the way. Johnny Castle became the prototype for the regular Swayze persona — the slender, sensitive young man who obviously gave an extravagant amount of attention to his hair, who was also an unstoppable killing machine. He never got the chance to really cut loose and whip some ass in Dirty Dancing, but that’s okay. There were better, bloodier days yet to come.

Two years after Dirty Dancing put him on the map, Swayze secured his legacy by starring in two of the all-time classics in the annals of quality cheese. Let’s spend a moment on this, because I dare not diminish his accomplishment in that wondrous year of 1989 — justly known among appreciators of the sublimely bad as “The Year of Living Swayze-ously.” To put the year Swayze had in ’89 in perspective, imagine Harrison Ford starring in The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark in the same year, and also imagine them being two of the most horrible, ridiculous films ever made, yet so awesome in their horrible ridiculousness that lots of people would rather watch them over and over than many far better films. That was Swayze in 1989.
 

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