Forever Evil

Forever Evil (New 52!) - Geoff Johns

The Justice League has been defeated, and the Crime Syndicate of Earth-3 have taken over the planet. With the Justice League gone, Lex Luthor is the best chance there is at defeating the Crime Syndicate.

 

This book was just a ton of fun and hit several things I love in my superhero comics—villains and heroes being forced to work together, villains being good guys, alternate universe characters, and tons of familiar faces. It also helped that I had already read several comics that take place after this event and enjoyed the new stories and status quos that came directly from this. Reading this let me see how the characters had gotten to where they were.

 

Lex Luthor is always a fun character to read when he's working as part of a group. I especially enjoyed his relationship with the newly created Bizarro as Lex got attached to him despite his best efforts.

 

I also enjoyed Batman's relationship with Nightwing. One of the things I love about Batman and the Bat-family is how they really had created a family that cared about one another, even if they had their problems at times. That's been missing from a lot of the Bat-family comics I've read lately, so it was nice to see Batman so clearly caring about Nightwing here.

 

My biggest problem with this is how little focus the Crime Syndicate got. Despite the fact that they were the main villains, they really didn't get much development as characters. A lot of what they did seemed to be simply because it was evil. Their evilness was a bit over the top. We got hints at some depth with some of them, but it wasn't really enough to make them compelling characters.

 

Overall though, Forever Evil was a blast to read and laid the groundwork for some fun stories to follow.