Isn't it old news?

I was thinking, I keep reading a lot of complaints that Geoff Johns has suddenly become very violent as a writer. Mostly because of Infinite Crisis and the new JSA. And I have to admit to being a bit nonplussed by the accusation.

I won't say that Geoff Johns doesn't have a knack for random gratuitous violence, but crossover events are known for that sort of thing. Crisis of Infinite Earths and Zero Hour both featured a lot of deaths. Infinite Crisis perhaps lingered a bit more on the gory death scenes, but I'm not sure that's not a product of the time.

The part about JSA baffles me. I can definitely understand why the murder of the new Commander Steel's family is too much for some people but honestly, when I read the issue, it hadn't really occurred to me to be surprised by the violence at all.

I mean, this is JSA. The series that actually began with a teenaged hero getting hunted down like a dog, an octogenarian taking a nosedive off a mountain and a poor schmo keeling over, his own weapons in his back like in one of those old murder mysteries. (The lights go out! Suddenly the butler's on the ground, stabbed)

My perspective might be different because I'd actually read most of the Robinson-Goyer-Johns JSA stories all at once, sequentially. But honestly, nearly every story featured gratuitous death as far as I could see. The aforementioned deaths in the first issue, (coupled with Mordru out to slaughter an infant), the way Obsidian murdered his abusive father while torturing many of his teammates in the next story...

Atom-Smasher's mother and Courtney's family were both killed pretty gratuitously, even if they were restored at the end of their respective storylines. Johnny Sorrow's introduction came rife with a bunch of dead Golden Age heroes bleeding from still-open eyes. The Geomancer ended dead via a passing reference in Stealing Thunder. And poor poor Alex Montez's death was pretty damned shocking to me.

Now admittedly, most of the aforementioned deaths are costumed types rather than innocents (much in the same vein as Infinite Crisis), but the death of innocents did seem to happen a lot in JSA as well. Especially in the set-up issues of the storylines. Honestly, maybe I am jaded, but the deaths in the current arc really didn't seem to be that much more over the top than what came before.

I can definitely understand why the violence in the new JSA is getting to some readers. It's definitely a bit on the gratuitous side. I can also understand why a lot of readers find Geoff Johns's particular tendancy toward violence alarming. But when people start acting like it's something brand new, I can't help wonder what comic they'd been reading all along.