To support the launch of the movie itself and potentially establish it as a continuity in its own right, Gods & Monsters received prequel comics and a web-series. Let’s take a look!
Justice League: Gods & Monsters – Chronicles
In the weeks leading up to the release of the movie there were a trio of shorts generously classified as a web series co-produced by Machinima (who WB had poured a bunch of money into a year earlier), each focusing on a different member of the team.
All three episodes are directed by Bruce Timm and written by Alan Burnett, with all actors reprising their roles (though Wes Gleason voice-directed them instead of Andrea Romano.)
They intended to do a second season of ten episodes but it never came to fruition, presumably due to the film performing worse than anticipated.
‘Twisted’ (Batman)
Release Date: June 8th, 2015
Recap: Batman infiltrates Harley Quinn’s hideout, which is filled with taxidermied corpses. He rescues a hostage and takes down Harley who invites him to take her to jail… but he instead feeds on her.
Review: They went all-in on the gore factor here, with a lovingly rendered serial killer lair, filled with rusty hooks, bloodstains, chopped up body parts in a freezer, and my personal favourite, the human taxidermy and Jack-in-the-Boxes. However they’ve also got Harley in lingerie and are so heavy-handed about her being ‘Like, SO Crazy, Man’ that I think it becomes Bad, Actually. She calls one of her would-be victims a bitch, for goodness sakes! Talk about edgy! Tara Strong is a shitty person, but as she spent a decade proving, she’s not a bad substitute for the late Arleen Sorkin.
The thing is, all those visuals and atmosphere kiiiind of stand in for any real story, because narratively everything is centred around the twist that Batman bites Harley instead of capturing her. Now I’ll give you that these episodes released ahead of the movie so you may not have known his ‘deal’ if you watched them on first run, and it’s intended to be an ‘Opening Statement’ for the entire universe, but I could have done with them having something else going on to bolster the reveal for those that already knew what was going on.
‘Bomb’ (Superman)
Release Date: June 10th, 2015
Recap: Brainiac, created as a safety measure against Superman, is on the verge of wiping out Metropolis. Doctor Sivana advises President Waller to use a ‘small’ nuke or risk losing the entire eastern seaboard. Superman asks for five minutes before they launch, fighting his way to Brainiac, revealed to be a small child unable to control his powers and agrees to being fucking euthanised. Grim!
Review: I didn’t enjoy how vague they were about what was actually happening at the start, having Lois Lane report on a nebulous threat while Waller and Sivana talk around what’s going on for a bit. That really didn’t achieve anything in my opinion, and they could have just said Brainiac from the start because they still had the admittedly good reveal that Brainiac is a scared child instead of a huge killer robot.
Again, it looks good. They convincingly sell the enormity of the wind gusts emanating from Braniac’s energy bubble, with Hernan battling hard just to get to the centre. I don’t know if they intended it to come across this way or not, but this version of Superman ignoring the bus full of civilians so he can tackle the threat felt like a stark contrast to my estimations of what Clark Kent would do (save the bus first, or at least tell them they’re going to be okay). That and the murder of a child, of course. Hernan looks vaguely sad about it after, and I guess asked for and was given consent, but like… Clark would never, and that’s the point, I suppose.
‘Big’ (Wonder Woman)
Release Date: June 12th, 2015
Recap: Kobra capture Steve Trevor, investigating a new weapon they intend to unleash at Amanda Waller’s presidential inauguration. Wonder Woman makes the save and they slaughter the Kobra cell. In dying vengeance they unleash ‘Giganta’, a huge robot, which puts up a solid fight but Bekka eventually rips out some crucial wiring and brings it down. They fuck to celebrate.
Review: Where the others went for shock value, this is a pretty ‘meat and potatoes’ superhero story, very much a random adventure for their take on Wonder Woman. It looks pretty nice, and I enjoyed the way she fights as her sword comes back to her like Mjolnir, leading to a lot of throwing it and then charging in after it, fists flying, as well as the built in Mother Box letting her teleport quickly around the battlefield, which she didn’t do as much in the film. I generally enjoy characters that are highly mobile in fights.
Unfortunately Tahmoh Penikett is awful as Steve Trevor despite being fine in the movie. The banter about their one night stand is truly heinous, but Bekka deciding she wants to fuck to celebrate their victory while Steve looks frankly afraid was kind of funny.
Chronicles Overall
Each of these works and is flawed in different ways.
‘Big’ is a lot of fun as pure action but is a bit clumsy in its exposition and tries to anchor itself to a relationship dynamic that didn’t work for me. ‘Bomb’ probably works the best as a story in a vacuum but Superman is impossible to connect with and I was frustrated by them dancing around the premise. ‘Twisted’ has some wonderful art direction and the strongest voice acting, but little actually happens. Maybe I’m being too hard on it because I can’t un-know that Batman is a vampire who has no qualms about killing criminals, but I also think if you hinge a story entirely around its conclusion you’ve messed up. The other two may not be terribly exciting either, but they’re self-contained stories that don’t revolve entirely around the changes to the characters.
I think if you Frankensteined them together – the action of ‘Big’, storytelling of ‘Bomb’ and the atmosphere of ‘Twisted’ – you have something genuinely good, but split into three none of them are worth going out of your way to see.
With 20 minute episodes and the full cast (and ideally some new faces) to play with, I think this could have been a decent little cartoon. But we’ll never know.
Gods & Monsters Comics
In the weeks immediately after the movie they also put out a series of one-shots, each an origin story (of sorts) for one of the characters, followed quickly by a 3-issue series featuring the whole team. They were all written by Bruce Timm & J.M. DeMatteis, which I take to mean they talked about it together and then DeMatteis actually wrote it.
All six of these stories were collected as a single volume in 2016, and for whatever reason they chose to flip the order of the Batman and Superman issues. I used the collected volume to write the review so will be following that order. Call your congressman.
‘Fallen’ (Superman)
Release: July 29th, 2015
Art: Moritat
Recap: A teenage Hernan deliberately lets a plane crash to spite his father after a lifetime of being told not to use his powers and bickering about the American Dream. He accidentally paralysed his sister in childhood and then spent the next few years ignoring her out of shame. He lashed out after being hate-crimed, injuring several bigots and then skipped town when his dad called him a monster. He travelled the world getting ‘a taste’ of everything humanity had to offer, and then slaughtered a bunch of Cartel in order to rescue kidnapped children. His sister says that his actions were ultimately good, empowering him to adopt the Superman persona and murder the Cartel boss.
Review: I hated this, and not just because it reminded me of Man of Steel. Absolutely no part of this elicits any sympathy for Hernan, who is a shitty kid despite having loving parents and a doting sister, and then becomes a mopey teenager who allows people to die out of spite. Then he does the ‘travel the world’ thing, fucking, fighting, gambling etc.
They try to redeem him by having him lose his shit because one of the kids vaguely resembles his sister… but in the process he explicitly confirms he wasn’t bothered by any of it until that moment. He admits he enjoyed murdering all the guards, shit talks his sister’s life a little and then takes tacit permission from her to be violent so long as it’s in the name of broad good. He spends his life resenting the American Dream and Catholicism, but neither of those things seem to really matter to this tale or his character overall, so it just feels like a token effort to make this seem like it has mature themes. And not for nothing but I didn’t care for the art.
‘Hunger’ (Batman)
Release: July 22nd, 2015
Art: Matthew Dow Smith | Colours: Jordie Bellaire
Recap: Kirk murders and feeds on a man abusing his wife and is shocked that she hates him for it. He tries and fails to reconnect first with his parents and then Francine (his wife in main continuity – who is instead married to ‘Harvey’). He struggles mightily with bloodlust, locking himself in his basement to starve himself but caves and goes out to feed on criminals for weeks, with the papers calling him The Batman.
He slaughters the mobster Lew Moxon (the man that hired Joe Chill to kill Thomas Wayne in older comics, which is probably no longer canon) and his goons, including Chill, but feels guilty upon seeing Moxon’s wife and child at the funeral. He befriends the son, Jeremy, eventually telling him about his condition and they work together on a cure. Chill rises from the grave and while taking him down Kirk learns Jeremy was always a part of his father’s operation, putting on a front as a good person. Kirk kills him but doesn’t feed.
Review: Having Kirk kill Moxon & Chill is an interesting choice. Your mind immediately wonders if that means the Wayne’s are safe but who knows what age Bruce would be in the world of Gods & Monsters. Overall, Kirk wrestling with his hunger is a decent enough story. His internal monologue is pretty well written, and you do feel sorry for the guy most of the time, more so with his open struggle with loneliness, heartbroken when his new friend turns out to be corrupt. Dunno if it needed Joe Chill to also become a vampire just so Kirk could hack him to pieces with an axe, but hey. It’s also kind of insane to me they went with Moxon at all given more famous mobsters like Falcone and Maroni seem like better candidates for this story (Rupert Thorne appears but commits suicide on Moxon’s orders), especially given the Long Halloween of it all. Even the art feels like it’s perhaps trying to evoke Year One.
‘The Dream’ (Wonder Woman)
Release: August 5th, 2015
Art: Rick Leonardi & Dan Green | Colours: Allen Passalaqua
Recap: In the 1960s, Bekka’s planet-hopping brings her to India where she’s nursed back to health by a kind couple. She uses her Mother Box to study the planet and spends the following years exploring the world. She ends up joining a hippie commune where she becomes suspicious of Doctor Psycho and his advanced lab equipment. He is a former member of MkUltra, bringing some test subjects with him and keeping them locked in the basement where he tries to help them become ‘gods’. The test subjects are eventually mutated into monsters but Bekka is able to fend them off and turn them all back. Psycho vanishes, and Bekka follows suit, leaving her commune friends in a better way than she found them.
Review: This was my favourite of the three focus issues, featuring my favourite art style, and in my opinion is the breeziest read. The mash-up of New Genesis and Apokalips and all the Fourth World character cameos in Bekka’s drug trip was a real treat, and I really dug the update to Doctor Pyscho, linking his psychic powers to MkUltra, tying the story to real world history.
I found Bekka getting a quasi-religious vision from a statue of Ganesh charming, befitting the New Gods mythos. Conversely, I rolled my eyes at her getting inspired to take action after Kennedy was assassinated for ‘speaking up’, but it fits with their attempt to fully embed her in 60s history, tangling with racial violence in the South, seeing Jimmi Hendrix in New York, and trying to advise hippies on how to bring about the revolution.
Justice League: Gods & Monsters – ‘Genesis’
Release: August 12th, 19th and 26th 2015
Art: Thony Silas | Colours: Tony Avina
Recap
Jackson Alpert, a reclusive tech mogul, unveils ‘The Forever People’, genetically altered humans with power akin to Superman. Curious, Superman seeks out Alpert and is surprised to find Wonder Woman already there and working alongside the Forever People. Alpert suggests his upgrades could even work on Superman, and after sleeping with Bekka, Hernan takes him up on the offer. Bekka interrupts the process as it appears painful.
Batman arrives at the institute having been investigating Alpert, learning that he is in fact Doctor Psycho. They appear in public for the first time to take down The Forever People, who had developed ambitions of conquest.
However Psycho utilises harvested DNA from the trio to transform himself into the colossal Imperiex. He’s able to briefly mind-control them into going on a rampage (hence the public’s distrust of them) but they break free and defeat and execute him. President Waller meets with them for the first time and they form an uneasy alliance, building them The Justice Tower and assigning Steve Trevor as their liaison.
Review
This is a very bad book, guilty of so many of the worst trappings of modern superhero comics, escalating just to escalate and collapsing under the weight of too much shit happening.
Issue 2 is particularly egregious, one of the most deeply unpleasant reading experiences I’ve had in a very long time. It’s an assault on the senses – a fever dream, and not in a good way. It tries to stuff five issues’ worth of ‘Things’ into one and absolutely none of it has any time to breathe. For example Batman is taken down by automated security on his arrival at Psycho’s institute… only to reveal a few pages later he’s absolutely fine because he appeared dead to the scanners due to his ‘condition’. Nothing overly wrong with that if you split it across two issues as a cliffhanger, but with so little between the two events it feels wholly pointless instead. Next up, The monstrous ‘Never People’ are revealed, beat up and capture The League… only for them to be freed a few pages later by Fastback, whose own mini arc is fighting for its life in this bloated tale. The Never People do not appear again.
That takes us into the atrocious ‘and then, and then, and then…’ nature of The League’s clash with The Forever People, who started and finished a fucking world-conquering civil war in only a couple of pages, achieving nothing in the process. It initially seems they’re doing something clever by having Batman drain the chemicals from their blood by biting them… only to instead say he ‘administered an antidote via his fangs’. Like… can he actually load his fucking teeth up with any chemical of his choosing???? He then mass-delivers it via Batarangs, which he never uses elsewhere or in the movie. Likewise, Bekka seems to briefly wield an enchanted lasso for a few panels and then it vanishes. And THEN after all that Psycho returns as Imperiex to confront them.
All of that was just one issue! Issue 3 does it too to a lesser extent, with about half a dozen of the pages looking broadly the same at a glance. Imperiex can mind control them… but only for a couple of pages. Imperiex destroys Wonder Woman’s Mother Box and Superman tells Batman to get her to safety… but they’re both back in a couple of pages. Kirk uses a shard of the Mother Box as a weapon and then they just use their Power Rangers team finisher (all holding Bekka’s sword which makes it glow and fire a huge energy blast), and even all of that just turns him back to human form to be executed as Bekka beheads him and Hernan sets his corpse on fire.
Speaking of this execution, I guess they thought this story is meant to explain why Wonder Woman becomes okay with murder after she behaved far more like Diana up to this point, albeit with more of a libido. She’s horrified by everything Psycho did in general, but crushing the Mother Box is treated as an unforgivable action. Likewise the brief mind control incident is used to explain why people protest against them which was absolutely not necessary. Lex tells Batman to fuck off when he asks for help, telling him the three of them are more of a danger than The Forever People, who he states are a natural response to their existence.
Just like this entire project, Superman gets the absolute worst treatment. They triple down on him being a sex-pest, harassing Bekka every time they’re alone (I hate that she opted to sleep with him despite this, but hey!) He also has an inferiority complex, admitting he wanted to undergo the Forever process so he could once again be the most powerful person in the world. This would nicely underline how different Hernan is to Clark if not for the fact they already smash you over the head with that notion in every scene in the comics and movie. For example he calls Bekka a bitch to get her to fight him harder in a sparring session. There’s not a scrap of likability anywhere in these pages. Batman’s mostly fine and Wonder Woman is a mixed bag.
The whole story uses a framing device of Lois Lane writing about their emergence, which is really overwritten, desperately trying to tell you how EPIC this whole thing is. She adds little tales of Batman murdering a kidnapper to save a young girl, Wonder Woman preventing a helicopter crash (for which she’s rewarded by harassment from Superman) and Superman gleefully slaughtering a cult. She ends it by saying they’re not Gods… they’re Monsters. Yeesh!
It’s also very weird to me that between this and the 3 solo origin stories they didn’t attempt to show the first meeting of any of the three. Kirk and Bekka had both met Hernan before the story begins, which is one thing. But to have Kirk and Bekka canonically meet for the first time ‘off camera’ during Issue 2 is absolutely criminal. As a result it doesn’t feel like their big debut as a team. It feels like they’re already a team who just happened to be in different locations for a bit.
OH! The legendary Darwyn Cooke gifted them with some art at the end and it’s naturally the best looking thing in this collection by a mile.
Rogues Roundup
I was pleasantly surprised that Dr. Psycho returned from Wonder Woman’s one-shot as it makes those stories feel more consequential. Turning him into fucking Imperiex for the final confrontation was an insane call though. The design looks like one of Marvel’s Celestials; perhaps Bruce Timm’s thinly veiled Fantastic Four fetish finding a Galactus surrogate? He also reveals his plan is to use his telepathy to enslave the world, which is way too close to Magnus’ plan from the movie for my liking.
I do think this is a clever reinterpretation of The Forever People, partially emulating the ‘Splicing‘ process from Batman Beyond or 52’s ‘Infinity Inc’ upgrades. There’s a brief aside that shows Psycho trying to up-sell ‘Fastback’, who already gave him every penny she had to survive terminal illness, telling her she needed upgrades to make the treatment stick. Fastback ends up rescuing The League and ostensibly killing Psycho as one of the many ‘and thens’. Again, not a bad mini-arc for her, but horrifically rushed.
Comics Overall
Generally your goal with this kind of tie-in media is to enrich the characters and flesh out the world. These don’t really do that.
In theory you get origin stories for the three main characters, and from that perspective the one-shots work better, but I don’t think they actually add all that much to the mix. In an attempt to explain why Superman is an asshole they just give you way more reasons to dislike him and nothing resembling sympathetic qualities. He’s a shitty kid who becomes a shitty adult, and then his sister, who he treated awfully, kiiiind of co-signs on him becoming an angel of vengeance or whatever. Batman’s struggles to control ‘The Thirst’TM and depression after making and then losing a friend both make sense for this version of for the character. Wonder Woman is written to be far closer to Diana, which makes for a decent story incorporating Doctor Psycho, but it also goes completely against type for their version. These things are similar to Chronicles in many ways, giving a little slice of something that works amidst some stuff that does not.
The team-up prequel though? Absolute fucking garbage. Do not read this under any circumstances. I think it makes this overall project collectively worse. Their first adventure together feels entirely perfunctory and adds nothing you didn’t get from the movie. I liked them bringing The Forever People into the mix, but even that wraps terribly. Generic, repetitive art, bad narration, death by a million speech bubbles, and a totally pointless story.
For those keeping score that means I hated 4 of the 6 issues, and still had some issues with the other 2. Would not recommend! Grab the solo issues if you’re curious, but avoid ‘Genesis’ at all costs.
The Matt Signal 
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