I have been looking forward with some anticipation to the new Justice League of America series and I finally had a chance to sit down and read it… and I was very disappointed.

The new JLA series actually started with a zero issue, a fairly pointless introduction to issue #1 which summed up the history of the JLA in a rather disjointed manner that would be hard for any new reader of the Justice League or anyone new to the DC universe to follow.

Justice League of America #1 starts out with Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman deciding who to add to the JLA team, which they do by sitting around a table, throwing out names and voting on that person. Unfortunately this sequence cuts back and forth between several other mini stories which revolved around minor characters in the DC universe, but ultimately tie in to the main story. This discussion between the main characters could have been combined with #0, completely nixed, or summed up in a couple of pages rather than having been drug out for so long.

Brad Meltzer focuses in on the Red Tornado who was “killed” in the pages of Infinite Crisis. I can’t really fault him here, but this just isn’t what I was expecting. When i hear Justice League I automatically think Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Although they were in it, I would rather see them kicking the crap out of bad guys as opposed to sitting around looking at photos and arguing over whether or not so-and-so should make the cut. Back in my day that was called boring.

Red Tornado is a pretty cool character, but why is a book about a team of heroes centering around one guy?

However, all that being said, I’m not going to completely write the series off yet. Although it wasn’t what I was expecting, Meltzer is a decent writer and introductory issues are usually pretty lame. I’m sure everything from issue #1 will come together quite nicely and I won’t have as many complaints later… at least that’s my hope.