Writer: Chip Zdarsky / Artists: Miguel Mendonça and Enrica Eren Angiolini / DC Comics
Justice League: Last Ride #3 serves as a calm before the storm as the team takes a break from the conflict while they prepare for an armada of antagonists who want to take Lobo from them and kill him before he stands trial.
Issues like these are important. It’s great to have a bunch of double splash pages that showcase some truly dope art and action, but from a narrative standpoint, when things standstill, it gives room for the characters to breathe, and it ultimately makes you care for them more.
Plus, if it’s done right, it’ll be engaging and make you feel something. And it will ultimately make those double splash pages feel more special when they do come, because they’re like a reward for sticking with it all.
Zdarsky really takes really good care of these characters. He did some heavy lifting in this issue because since the conflict was kind of paused, that meant that he had to give the characters something to do and something to talk about.
So, he put them at a campfire and took their masks down figuratively and literally. This was a time for the League to truly reckon with its past as a group. I won’t spoil exactly what they got into or if everything is fixed, but it is a step in the right direction.
Plus, we get to see Batman try to act like a normal human. That might be his only weakness. When there isn’t something to decipher, my guy is just a really strange dude. It’s pretty funny.
Stuff like that you can really only see when you take a break. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. Zdarsky could have just as easily conveyed all of the things he needed to through exposition, but that would have been a much less satisfying read.
These characters have a lot of depth. Not because we already know them but because Zdarsky is doing the legwork to make sure he doesn’t rely too heavily on the fact that we are already familiar with these characters. He’s writing them as if we don’t know.
I think because he’s an artist as well as a writer, it’s easier for him to naturally know how to show an audience something instead of taking the easy way out and just telling us. And I’m sure because he knows their job as well, conveying his vision to Mendonça and Angiolini must be a breath of fresh air for everyone involved. Because they’re doing a really good job as well.
Justice League: Last Ride #3 gives us Batman eating S’mores, and Superman making a cross galactic phone call. What more could you want?
9 Apokoliptian Summer Homes out of 10
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