DCU Comic Book Reviews

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #34

Welcome to Sundown Town, Conclusion: Dharma Initiative

August 2009

Written by Dwayne McDuffie

Pencils by Ardian Syaf with Eddy Barrows

Inks by Don Ho, Ruy Jose, Dan Green, Jack Purcell, Mark Propst

Cover by Ed Benes

Synopsis

In the Shadowspire, Icon is battling Starbreaker, but with little luck.  Zatanna casts one of her most powerful spells, but all it does is stun Starbreaker.  It is enough to loosen the cave walls, which John Stewart brings down on top of Starbreaker to give the team time to regroup.  Elsewhere, Shadow Thief injures Dr. Light.  Firestorm comes to her rescue, but she doesn’t need it as she is able to defeat the Shadow Thief.  Outside in the Himalayas, the team reunites.  Just then, Starbreaker emerges and attacks the league once more.  Paladin then shoots Starbreaker, killing him with rail gun with Lutetium bullets.  Zatanna then heals Dharma, who explains his actions to Superman and Icon, explaining how two universes were merged into one.

Review by Binkley (e-mail)

It is not a good sign when a story ends with one of the characters explaining everything that just happened.  To me, it is a sign of a poor plotting and storytelling when a writer can’t incorporate necessary bits of information to the reader for the story to make sense.  Yet, I can’t really blame McDuffie for the way this story ends, because he has constantly been having to re-write his stories based on other events occurring in the DC universe.  I highly doubt the final product is the story he originally wanted to tell.  This is especially apparent with the ending when Superman is brought back, which to me says how important the Man of Steel was to the story, yet McDuffie was forced to eliminate him from the story.  I think it is a testament to McDuffie’s skills that this story reads fairly well despite all of the intrusions and re-writes (and different pencillers and inkers; hell, there are 5 of them alone in this issue). 

The ending (when Paladin shoots Starbreaker) comes across as rather abrupt although admittedly Paladin’s entrance was rather odd to begin with, so (again) one wonders how much of Paladin’s role was necessitated by DC’s tampering of what McDuffie could or could not do.  So, Paladin becomes the deus ex machina.

I also have to commend McDuffie for weaving the appearance of the Milestone characters into the DC universe with the events from Final Crisis.  The Milestone characters first started to appear around the time of Final Crisis, so the timing works as well.  It is a good explanation as we are going to get, I suppose.  Personally, I am not all that concerned with the whats and whys the Milestone characters are in the DC universe, but I am sure there are obsessive fanboys who are and I hope this explanation appeases them. 

A railgun is a purely electrical gun that accelerates a conductive projectile along a pair of metal rails.  Lutetium has the smallest atomic radius and is the heaviest and hardest member of the rare-earth group.  Lutetium is one of the rarest and is the most expensive rare-earth element.  I am guessing that lutetium (an earth element) is toxic to Starbreaker (a sun eater)?  Otherwise I am not quite sure of the science (even pseudo-science of the DC universe) behind the reasons why the gun would kill Starbreaker.

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