Justice League of America Vol. 1: The Extremists (Rebirth)

Justice League of America TP Vol 1 (Rebirth)  collects the first six issues of the Rebirthed team, along with the Rebirth issue itself. This story flows out of the  Justice League Suicide Squad HC (Jla (Justice League of America))  event, via  Justice League of America The Road to Rebirth TP (Rebirth): 1 .After the Rebirth issue, we get a four-part story, which gives the collection its title, and a two-parter which appears to be mostly about team-building, while being very political about modern-day America.The Rebirth issue sees Batman gathering a team (“Mortal. Not gods.”), and houses them in what turns out to be the original JLA cave – “This isn’t a cave, Killer Frost. It’s a relic. A remnant of a bygone era.”The title story involves a super-team from another universe who have ‘lost’ their Earth and have come to ours in the hope of stopping it going the same way as theirs.This is not a rehash of the Injustice League, or subsequent invasions, but is still pretty dire – and apparently based on a complete lack of understanding of post-WW2 Europe, eastern or western. I forget when the last “absolute monarchy” disappeared – I suspect it was 1917, and there certainly haven’t been any in Eastern Europe since Stalin and Hitler used it as their playing field.However, this is comics, so we can forgive that, but the sheer preachiness of the characters I found annoying, whether alien, American or faux-European; and being American, of course, there is no ‘leftist’ voice in any of this.Otherwise it was a pretty-much standard superhero story, though with good character-development among the League members, as well as superb artwork.The second story does pretty much the same, but in a ‘failed’ American city rather than a failed European state, but with more cartoony art and a villain who needed more background or depth of character – maybe the story needed another issue to flesh it out, or maybe there was nothing there to flesh out.The character-development for the team still continues, and this is what holds this comic together. The writer has produced good stuff and bad in his recent career – Midnighter (and Apollo) on the ‘credit’ side and “Virgil” on the ‘debit’, for example.This book just seems a bit shallow when compared to the Justice League, despite having much more interesting character-development possibilities, due to the roster not having their own titles and therefore being free of other continuity constraints. Lobo and the Atom look as if they are slated to become the Booster Gold/Blue Beetle combo for this group.Hopefully, this book will improve, as it has a good writer and, on the whole, excellent art. And, of course, not everyone will be of my opinion.