Review: Justice (DC Graphic Novel)

 DC put a bunch of graphic novels on sale, and I noted that I'd never read Justice before, and the artist was Alex Ross, which made it a buy for me.

The opening of the novel is fantastic. The villains of the world got together and announced that while the superheroes have focused on fighting super-villains and preserving status quo, they'd never done anything to improve things that matter to ordinary people, like cure diseases or build housing for the homeless. And they proceed to do that, creating a miracle cure and offering the poorest the opportunity to move into newly built cities.

Of course, this being a graphic novel, the superheroes soon discover that it's a scam (how could it be otherwise?). The plot is convoluted, and we get a few interesting fights (far fewer than you would expect), but in the end our heroes prevail and we discover who the master villain is, as the various super-villains in the DC universe could never expect to cooperate with each other.

Unfortunately, the novel never grants our heroes the epiphany that they could make the world a much better place than just by preserving the status quo. In fact, at the end of the story we return to status quo, which makes it quite unsatisfying.