Some thoughts about Justice League Incarnate #1

The Multiverse continues in peril.

The Earth's mightiest heroes from another universe have feared other realities for a long time and with good reason since the power of Darkseid is willing to consume everything.

Joshua Williamson's ongoing Multiversal saga continues.

Infinite Frontier had its ups and downs (and had a pretty abrupt ending) but I was looking forward to another series that could follow up most of those ideas and further expand them. This time Williamson is accompanied by Dennis Culver on writing duties and quite frankly, I don't think that really helps to the execution.

There's a lot of Multiverse fanservice right from the beginning obviously seen with the appearance of the Retaliators who are the DCU counterpart of Marvel's Avengers who... don't really have the best portrayal but let's talk about that a bit later. Of course there are also other appearances of characters from DC's history and is always cool to see them play a bigger role in the story.

Speaking about the story, the ongoing plot of Darkseid gaining more power around the Multiverse continues but Williamson always thinks in the long game so there are many sub-plots being planted here, one of the most important being Avery's role here now that Barry is missing (and makes sense considering Williamson created her). Plus, this being a Williamson work, expect a lot of references to continuity (especially digged how Captain Carrot mentions how he preferred Justice Incarnate as name).

My biggest issues here is the overall narration. Especially once that the Retaliators start throwing names to introduce themselves which is one of the clunkiest ways to present characters, you might believe this is done to homage classic comic dialogue but again, is not like the rest of the issue is that much better in that regard (and speaking about the Retaliators themselves, they're practically presented as a bunch of cowards and I'm not sure how I feel about that). This is weird because I haven't seen this kind of heavyhanded presentation from Williamson (at least not in a while) so I'm willing to assume that Culver might be responsible for this and so, I don't have great expectations for the future.

Brandon Peterson, Andrei Bressan and Tom Derenick share the pencils and their different styles sometimes clash with one another but fortunately, they all handle different segments of the story so the transitions don't feel so jarring.

Not bad overall but I could go for better craft next. Hopefully following issues are better.