Quote Originally Posted by Robotman View Post
Overall I really enjoyed it. It was a great in depth retelling of Black Lightning’s origin. My only issue is that I dislike it when real world tragedies/conflicts are used in comics and a writer questions why the superheroes didn’t prevent it. Trying to show the ineptitude of superheroes because they haven’t solved world hunger or prevented a war really isn’t a fair criticism. The characters themselves are confined by the fact that they appear in ongoing stories.
Normally I'm with you, but the conceit of the book seems to be growing with these characters through those events. They place it squarely in the 70s at the onset of the story, so it'd be weird to age through those decades with ONLY DC events, and wouldn't feel authentic to the pitch given it's about the disenfranchised during those times. For what it's worth, I think the book does a good job with having Jeff be biased so you could take the commentary more as the view of a citizen on the ground not privy to what is actually going on with the superheroes in question. Even on reflection, he was on the outside looking in for a lot of those years and didn't know Superman was going through the whole Kryptonite Nevermore thing at the time. He just knew that Superman was a thing, basically. The way Jeff speaks of the JLA are how we speak on politicians/celebrities except we know as readers the JLA are actually who they claim to be, but Jeff wouldn't at that juncture.