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.