I had high hopes for this book. I was ready to learn new things about the characters in a universe I love and to maybe see them in a whole new light. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. The essays in my opinion are interesting and compare real world problems with the comic world, but they are repetitious and the amount of typos in the text is unbelievable. I’m disappointed with this book altogether, it really needs to be proofread and reworked.

YAWN

As a fan of comics for decades now I was there when they were not the cool things for adults to be a part of or college classes to teach lessons from. They were simply comics that I enjoyed. The Justice League of America was always a favorite of mine. Why? Because I couldn’t afford to buy numerous comics as a child. The JLA was a comic that included several characters rather than focus on one. This way I could get Batman AND Superman in one comic as well as other heroes. So when I saw this book I immediately was curious.

What I got was something incredibly boring to attempt to read. Each chapter was written by a different author and all of them read like college dissertations or grad school thesis’ discussing the societal impact of the themes used and discussed in those classic comics. Rarely did any actually discuss the comics themselves and instead they discussed topics that revolved around them or their interpretations of what was really meant by them. In essence they became long winded boring reflections that tried to dissect the comics that many enjoy rather than realizing they were just stories that people, well, enjoyed.

Far too pretentious and boring than anything this book is unworthy of being read. Unless you are a grad student looking for items to bolster your own paper and include in your bibliography.

Not as engaging or creative as I had hope but still some quality essays on the JLA as a lens to view and a mirror reflecting US culture

Copy of my Goodreads review:

A collection of essays detailing the way the comics about Justice League were influenced by the global and domestic politics and the social situations. Works better if you are a fan of all of those topics.

It has always been a curse of anthologies to have parts that work out less well than others. This seems nearly inevitable unless you pick the absolute cream of the crop and even then you can't please every reader's taste. Though usually this sentiment applies to genre-based story collections and not non-fiction essays on the politics and the socium, I suppose.
Books are always a matter of personal preference so it's hard to state outright which essays will appeal most to others, but I found that the first half of the book kept me largely indifferent, while the latter just happened to draw me in with more expansive, well-constructed, and just plain more engaging works. Idle discussion of the way comics depicted race (hint: poorly) and women (actually sometimes less poorly!) was replaced by topics that merged the political discourse with the comic book medium and its narratives and came out all the better for it.
Perhaps it's just that the series that were picked for the book were less than stellar, but at times it felt like some of the authors downright despised the subject matter and couldn't care less about comic books beyond the pages of their essays.
Despite all of my problems, I did enjoy a great number of the works presented in the collection, though I do feel that they are bogged down by some less excellent efforts.

Overall, occassionally great, sometimes frustrating, and mostly competent collection of thoughts and musings on the way real life influenced the colored pages of comics of the years past. Only for those that are interested both in comics and the politics of the periods that are discussed in the book.