4 out of 5

There are no tricks to what Grant Morrison does: he has a clear m.o., he generally states it up front, and then he presents just that, in generally a rather loud fashion, whether through actual in-panel antics or oversized visuals and concepts.  The roundabout, Morrison-y, all-is-connected way in which he goes about unifying his themes has come to define the writer, and allow us to use terms like ‘Morrison-y’ to describe something, and it’s easy to get distracted (and confused) by all the weirdness, but if you latch on to whatever that initial m.o. is, you can normally feel your way through what’s going on.

This is in contrast to, say, Alan Moore, who occasionally takes the straight-forward path, but also loves burying his intentions under lore and words and layers, and definitely loves a twist.  Grant isn’t above a twist, per se, but more often than not, what you’re seeing is what you’re getting.

And so: JLA.  New World Order.  When, I think, a lot of us became aware of Grant, and when he very notably took that up-front tactic: to make the JLA relevant again.  This first arc is all about the public’s disillusionment with what the once-great team had become, brought even more to the fore when ‘The Hyperclan’ show up on The White House’s lawn and proclaim that they’re there to save the day, doing a lot of sexy things like, for example, reseeding the Sahara.  The public loves the clan and are dismissive of the JLA has-beens, the roster of which has just been handed over to the ‘classic’ Supes / Bats / Wonder Woman / Flash / GL / Martian Manhunter / Aquaman lineup, but it’s all a bit too good to be true, and true to his ‘make the JLA great again’ approach, instead of going an expected route of a showdown, Grant keeps our heroes on cautious lookout while Hyperclan continues their media-friendly run.

…Titles of classic sci-fi flicks – Them!, The Day The Earth Stood Still – headline each issue; along with Howard Porter’s insanely over-stuffed visuals, and Hyperclan’s to-the-nines designs, and every panel featuring some new event or detail in the whole mystery of the ordeal, subtlety and patience were never part of the book’s formula.  And it’s fantastic.  This is the polar opposite of decompressed storytelling: Grant splats it all out on page 1 and just keeps barrelling forward, hitting enough big beats that we can easily keep up.  There is eventually a showdown, of course, and when it hits, it is goldang awesome, with one of the best Batman moments of all time, but – perhaps more importantly – giving every hero involved multiple instances of badassery.

And while going headfirst from the jump was ultimately the right move (I remember breathlessly reading this – admittedly in trade, after the fact – when I got back in to comics), it’s not the most new-reader friendly.  You sort of need the warm-up of Mark Waid’s Year One or the preceding A Midsummer’s Nightmare to set the stage, otherwise the between-panels handoff from the Metamorpho team to this one doesn’t really land, and the final confrontation can feel a bit cluttered in the sense of ‘who has what powers and why are they more powerful than the others’?’  Grant would quickly perfect this balance of millions of foreground events happening while a more linear background plot continues in the very next issue, and if you’d already wet your feet on previous Justice League or team books – which, admiteddly, was likely – New World Order hit like the atom bomb it was intended to be, and absolutely made the JLA into the book-to-read once more.