The last time I really got into JLA, it was during this creative team's epic "The Obsidian Age." However, I eventually found that the story ran too long, and had too many elements I didn't like, to really capture my attention. "Trial By Fire" is off to a similarly-strong start, but as with Kelly's Superman work, there's a certain inaccessibility here, as the script seems to assume we've been reading all along, and I can't always decipher whether I don't know someone because it's part of the story or because I've been only a sporadic reader of the book. At any rate, there are a lot of really solid ideas here, and Kelly's JLA blends characterization and action more effectively than the high concept JLA of Grant Morrison, but experience has shown me that the strong beginnings don't generally wind up with strong endings.
Kelly's script features a number of strong moments. The opening splash, which doesn't tie into the story in any obvious way yet, pitting a crashed ship full of familiar aliens against prehistoric man, is intriguing, and well done by Mahnke and Nguyen. J'onn's new domestic side is one of the more interesting shifts in direction that character has taken, and though Aubrey is one of those inaccessible supporting characters, there's enough here to get a basic sense of who she is and why there are problems with her relationship with J'onn. Batman's reaction to the chaos at Arkham Asylum is perfect, and getting a glimpse of Major Disaster's somewhat sleazy private life only reinforced what I realized after "Obsidian Age," that Disaster is probably Kelly's strongest character on this team.
In fact, the clever moments are found throughout this issue. The problems come from the plot, which is very much in the background this issue and which could turn out to be as unnecessarily convoluted as "Obsidian Age" eventually became. There are some signs of that going on in this issue toward the end, with a telepathic warning for the League from a mysterious villain and a big confrontation at the end between Firestorm and... someone that I feel like I'm supposed to know. Combine that with the enigmatic opening sequence, and I have concerns that these strong moments and interesting potential could be squandered on another story that doesn't quite come together, which has been my experience with Kelly's JLA so far.
Other than a brief stint by Bryan Hitch, JLA has never really had an artist that I thought was great, and that's still true. Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen are two of the strongest artists the book has had, though, even if they're not likely to land on any of my favorite artist lists. Their work here has some real epic moments, including the opening splash, the grim and ominous look of Raven Manitou's interlude and the shot of Arkham from the outside. At the same time, however, they do a very good job with the smaller moments, giving a good sense of J'onn's suburban vacation or the dangerous closeness developing between Firestorm and Raven's wife.
"Trial By Fire" is another arc in the tradition of Joe Kelly's JLA, which is to say that it aims for a mixture of character work and big super-hero stuff, and it looks like it is going to focus largely on new characters and situations that Kelly has developed over his course on the title. While this reliance on supporting characters and villains of his own creation does make the book seem more fresh, it also loses a bit of the iconic appeal of the characters and tends to make the book more inaccessible to casual readers.
