Justice League United - Future's End #1 - The Infinitus Saga begins!




Released September 10, 2014
DC Comics, Color
23 Pages

Homeworld Part 1 of 2

Jeff Lemire - Writer
Jed Dougherty- Artist
Gabe Eltaeb - Colorist
Dezi Senty - Letterer
Editor - Rickey Purdin
Group Editor - Eddie Berganza

Synopsis

Five years from now, on the James Bay Ice road in Northern Canada, a trucker drives through the snowy road and encounters several bored out Polar Bears controlled by The Poltergeists, who raids resources in Canada.  This is broken up by the hero Equinox who easily neutralizes Poltergeist.  She suddenly gets a psychic message from Martian Manhunter who is in trouble on Mars.  She flies away to meet Animal Man in California, who has also had the vision of J'onn. Animal Man refuses to help, but refers Equinox to the Justice League.  

Equinox arrives at The Fortress of Justice in New Mexico to meet with Cyborg, Vostok, Flash, Stormguard and Dawnstar - The Justice League United.  They determine that J'onn may be held captive by the prisoners on the Gulag on Mars and decides that the situation warrants their attention and heads to Mars. 

Approaching the Gulag, Equinox is contacted again by J'onn and the team is attacked by Killer Frost, Mongul, Blockbuster, and Mechaneer in order to get the League's cruiser and get off Mars.  Equinox overpowers Killer Frost and she, Dawnstar and Stormguard push into the Gulag while the rest handle the other criminals.

Inside, they discover that the whole thing was a ruse. J'onn is held captive by Grodd, who is serving the real person in charge - Captain Atom.

To Be Continued!

Commentary

I wanted to read the Infinitus Saga for some time, as it is one of the few Legion-related storylines that I haven't gone through. Given that this was the last big one before the Bendis run, I wanted to tackle it.  This is an interesting jump over a couple of titles - Justice League United and the standard Justice League, and it comes at the tail end of the Levitz Legion run (v6).  The v6 Legion ended in 2013, so this is a year after that, and a year before the very middling Convergence Legion tie in two-parter, so I kind of consider this to be the last long-form Legion story.  

Just to get the art discussed first, I'm going to say that I found the Dougherty/Eltaeb art collaboration to be very inconsistent.  The more static frames are very nice, but the later, more dynamic panels, suffer by the characters looking different from one panel to the next.  This is more on the Gulag battle on Mars versus the earlier action scenes in Canada, which seem to work better, perhaps because there are fewer characters involved. Hopefully the art improves as the storyline advances. 

Story-wise, this definitely serves as a decent starting point, as I'm unfamiliar with a lot of the JLU characters, with the exception of Flash, Cyborg and Martian Manhunter.  And of course Dawnstar.  She's here as a holdover from the second Legion Lost series - where they weren't REALLY lost, they were just on 21st century Earth.  Of the new characters to me, the only one that really stands out is Equinox, since she's given the most screen time. But more problematically, the powers of the new characters aren't well defined, and I wanted to see more Animal Man. But it's a pretty decent bait-and-switch to get to the true villain, and I *am* curious as to why Captain Atom is the bad guy here.  The page layout, at least digitally, was effective as I saw Grodd and completely thought I saw who was the mastermind, but Captain Atom was a fun surprise, and I'm looking forward to the next issue!

Grade: B-.  Good setup for a storyline, but inconsistent art.

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