Justice League #25

Writer: Bryan Hitch

Artist: Tom Derenick

Inkers: Andy Owens, Scott Hanna, and Trevor Scott

Colourist: Hi-Fi

Letterer: Richard Starkings

At last, Bryan Hitch returns to this series! I've been missing poorly-plotted stories and bad villains.

This was mostly boring and nonsensical. Molly, the villain two arcs ago, is having a conversation with Batman in which she basically repeats herself for a dozen or so pages. This part of the story was Tease Central, as Hitch does his usual stuff by mentioning a huge looming threat, but this time he's constantly using the word Rebirth. Hence, this obviously refers to Doctor Manhattan, which we've known for a very long time now.

The second part of the story was slightly more tolerable, but still awful. A character named Shirak is resurrected for some unknown reason and he begins to enslave humanity. In the past, Shirak fought against the entire Green Lantern Corps and was defeated. In the very same museum that Shirak was housed in, Simon and Cyborg are present and have a contrived conversation about Simon's faith, which is never mentioned in this series before this and lightly and nicely touched upon in Simon's own book. The entire existence of the conflict is contrived, as the chances of a Green Lantern entering this museum and witnessing the rebirth of Shirak is very coincidental.

Shirak's obsession with the Green Lanterns is very inconsistent. He makes a show of everything to Simon because he was defeated by the Corps and wants to make a statement, but he doesn't even comment on Jessica being there. At one point he even has Jessica in his grasp and still gloats to Simon.

Tom Derenick is on art here, and it was quite mediocre. Some of his faces looked out of place, especially Jessica's in one of the final pages, where she looked extremely ugly, and it was on the whole very unrefined.

With this issue, we're given a stark reminder as to what evil we've been dealing with for the past year: Bryan Hitch, an immortal being who can't write dialogue to save his life. This over-sized issue is poorly paced and makes little to no sense, and is genuinely one of the worst issues of the series.