JLA / Avengers

I have to admit, I enjoyed this book more than I expected. I thought this would be a good story, but in the end not more than a team up and fight on a cosmic level. And it was like that, a huge event involving death of entire universes and reality bending.

But there was much more to it. I especially enjoyed the contrast between the Marvel universe and the DCU. Marvel's heroes are often despised, mutants are persecuted. In the DCU if you are a hero you are worshiped. People erect monuments for their heroes.

Also technology is slightly more advanced in the DCU, it having fictional cities. Whereas Marvel's earth is more similar to the real world. This also makes Marvel's earth smaller than DC's, because there are fictional cities.

As with many company crossovers, the two teams meet and fight at first, which usually is just dumb. It is not so different here, as Cap seems to condemn the DC heroes as gods who force their people to worship them. But he doesn't have any evidence of that. Also Superman is way too authoritative and doesn't allow for the Avengers to explain themselves. They just act stupidly. But I did like that Cap and Batman realize that they need to find the truth.

I liked many of the pairings in the second chapter of this book: Wonder Woman / Hercules, Zatanna / Wanda, Green Arrow / Hawkeye etc... It was fun just to see them divide themselves and fight against each other. I liked the bit where Flash can't find the Speed Force in the Marvel U, and that Quicksilver keeps saying he wants to try and tap the Speed Force.

In the third issue reality is keeps changing, and the Avengers almost become the JSA and meet with the JLA every year. It was fun to see all the different iterations of each characters, mostly the DC characters. Towards the end of the issue they learn the truth, and decide to bring back reality as it was, with all its death anddestruction.

The last chapter is just a very long fight against the big bad. And this is exactly what I was afraid of. Mindless action, fighting one menace after the other. Nothing wrong with that, it's just not my favorite story.

The art by Perez is amazingly detailed. He's shown his style in many other books, but this is the biggest event in his modern style. I love his style, although I may prefer his classic art a little bit more. His Thing looks wrong though.

As I said, I enjoyed it more than I thought, especially the first half. But the ending was exactly what I expected.