Rick Remender, Mat Broome and Sean Parsons, The End
League: Ballad of Big Nothing (Dark Horse, 2008)

There are few more tired, less interesting tropes in comic books than "let's take thinly disguised versions of the Justice League and make them jerks!" If that had been The End League's only sin, then it would simply have been unmemorable, the latest in a long line of thinly disguised Supermen, Batmen and Wonder Women knocking about in circumstances that probably never made the pages of Justice League for a reason.

The problem is, The End League doesn't know when to quit. Rather than accept that it's pastiche and attempt to work form there, it keeps piling the knockoffs and impossibilities on top of each other until the entire thing devolves into an unholy mess.

The graphic novel collects the first four issues of the Dark Horse series, and the problems start early. The first seven pages of the book are devoted to an expository flashback, as Superman-lite "Astonishman" broods in his "Citadel of Seclusion" about how he, personally, devastated the planet twelve years ago. It manages the impressive feat of being overlong while still forgetting key details, leaving the reader at the intersection of "already bored" and "confused." It doesn't help that the crisis that Astonishman precipitated -- the so-called "Green Event" -- is an entirely goofy one.

Apparently he was tricked into nuking a spaceship sitting on the ocean floor that then exploded, releasing super-powered mutagens and knocking Earth off its orbit. He then shoved the planet back on track by, well, shoving it and wondering why his buddy Thor didn't dive down into the mantle to help out. While this is clearly intended to be catastrophic and epic and impressive as all get-out, it instead has the feeling of hasty improvisation, a pile of "wouldn't it be cool" declarations thrown back and forth without regard for whether they make any narrative (or scientific) sense.

And, like I said, that's just the opening. From there, it just gets messier, a hodge-podge of jumbled elements that go together like spaghetti and chocolate. Summarizing the plot in any coherent fashion is nigh-impossible, largely because the plot itself isn't coherent in the slightest, a spattered mess of bad guys randomly popping up out of nowhere, an entirely unbelievable setting, and cringeworthy dialogue and character names. Or, to put it another way, it's twelve years since the world went to hell, there's no food, and everyone with superpowers is still wearing spandex.

I could go on. The pacing is dreadful. The internal logic is nonexistent. A giant, evil demon pops up out of nowhere, but nobody seems too concerned about it. The word "FrankenThor" is used, and used seriously, by one of the characters. There's an insane bad guy who likes dressing up in clown makeup and taunting the Batman-lite figure, not that we've ever seen that before. It just gets worse and worse and worse.

Honestly, I wanted to like The End League. The back cover text promised a thematic merging of Watchmen and Lord of the Rings, which had me excited. The credentials of the writer, Rick Remender, were solid. And yet the book is a hot, incoherent mess that tries so hard to be serious that it utterly fails to be fun, or interesting, or anything except crushingly dense and unpleasant.

That's sad, really. The notion of a bleak future where the bad guys have won and the last few superheroes are on the run could have been interesting, even with characters that look awfully familiar. But The End League doesn't pull it off, doesn't even really come close. A slower pace, a more logical setting, a bit less inner monologue and a bit more flow -- all of those would have gone a long way toward making the book more readable and allowing the concept's potential to blossom. Instead, it's just overwritten and overwhelmed, and not at all worth pursuing.

[Richard Dansky]