Geoff Johns Gets It

The above panel comes from about midway through Geoff Johns' sprawling "Thy Kingdom Come"/"One World, Under Gog" epic in Justice Society of America (issue 17, to be exact), and it underscores exactly why I find this creator to be one of comics' best.

Geoff Johns just gets it. Whether he's writing Superman or Booster Gold, epic events like Infinite Crisis or single-issue stories in Flash, he gets it. He gets the characters he writes and he understands how their histories contribute to their richness today. He knows the difference between a story that works for Green Lantern and one that works for the Teen Titans.

I'm a Christian and, from the looks of things, Geoff Johns gets me too. I was delighted when I read this short little scene, relatively inconsequential to the events of the Gog story as a whole, because something of its kind feels like a rarity. It zooms in on a sermon being given in a church as the world tries to come to grips with a seeming god dwelling among them. The fact that a Christian church is even being shown at all in this story is remarkable, as mainstream pop culture oft ignores the perspective of faith during its big disaster epics.

Even better, the church is portrayed giving an honest and realistic reaction to Gog's coming. The believers here don't break down into a spiral of existential doubt at the presence of a supernatural occurrence. They instead take comfort in the truths of their faith. Yes, Gog is powerful, the speaker acknowledges. "But he is not our creator."

Before I get too carried away, I'll admit that the scene does still fall into some of the regular trappings of entertainment media's portrayals of the church. First of all, the visuals here are strongly Roman Catholic. For some reason, possibly because their heavy use of iconography makes them easy to portray visually, movies and TV almost always look to Catholicism when they want to include Christianity. Where are all the protestant evangelicals?

Second, a conversation between Dr. Mid-Nite and Mr. Terrific suggests that the promise of an afterlife is that we will be reunited with our deceased loved ones. Though it may seem like a minor gripe to many, this isn't exactly the Biblical emphasis. The real promise of heaven is that we will be face to face with God, and it can be a bit tiresome to continually be fed the world's limited understanding of the concept.

Even so, Geoff Johns' JSA is the prime example of how to respect Christianity within the context of a nondenominational superhero tale. Unless the whole thing was really Alex Ross's doing...