JLA/HAVEN: ARRIVAL

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Tuesday, November 20, 2001

I'm writing this on the evening of November 11th, the day that a plane crashed into a neighborhood of Queens, New York. In the first three pages of JLA/HAVEN: ARRIVAL, the city-ship Haven emerges from warp space and crashes into the town of Lamont, California. When did comics get so eerily prescient?

Once the wildly inappropriate TWILIGHT ZONE music stops playing in your head, you'll be able to appreciate JLA/HAVEN for what it is: a JLA special that's actually worthy of the name, and a solid introduction to the upcoming maxiseries, HAVEN: THE BROKEN CITY. Problem is, an introduction is all it isthe story starts here but doesn't finish, and as such it turns into a big tease. Bear in mind, though, that a "tease" only gives you a taste of what you're really wanting to begin with, and this book certainly gives you something to look forward to.

The JLA are trying to save the world from aliens again, but this time the team's trying to stop a runaway ship that's quickly scudding along the west coast, taking out several towns and cities as it goes. But the ship itself is a city, home to a group of aliens who speak a language that even J'onn J'onzz can't decipher. Some of these aliens have super-powersand much to our heroes' dismay, wherever there's super-powered heroes, there's bound to be a matching set of super-powered villains.

The members of the alien superteam The Alliance whip by a bit too quickly for my likingthere's not enough of a chance to learn more about them here, even though each and every one of them is visually arresting and potentially interesting. Ariel Olivetti is responsible for that; her artwork comes out of the Moebius school, giving the aliens the same kind of day-glo realism we've seen in movies such as THE FIFTH ELEMENT. Even if you didn't care for that movie, you'll like Olivetti's art. This book simply looks terrific.


The script's not bad, either, though Nicolaus and Schuster go a bit overboard in making the aliens act too much like us. They may not speak our language, but they use some of the same idioms that we doexcept for the villains, of course, who either talk in the stilted syntax of Darkseid or the street-punk lingo of just about everyone else. That one flaw aside, this story grabs your attention and never lets it go, so that by the end of it all you'll really be kicking yourself that this is a one-shot. Just when things really get interesting, it ends. Don't you hate marketing ploys like this? Don't you know you'll be going out to buy that maxiseries once you've finished this book? If you don't, I certainly will.

JLA/HAVEN: ARRIVAL

Grade: B

Issue: N/A

Author(s): Ashley Jayne-Nicolaus, Matthew P. Schuster, Ariel Olivetti

Publisher: DC

Price: $5.95