Justice League Dark #18 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire & Ray Fawkes (story), Mikel Janin (aart), Jeromy Cox (colors)

The Story: Nothing quite like having your dad step in and show you up in your own story.

The Review: While I still think the higher-ups at DC are a bit foolish for their prejudice against recap pages (which are just practical, especially for new/late readers), they have a fairly sensible rationale for it.  I agree that readers aren’t dumb and in a lot of ways, gathering information from context is several times more valuable than having it handed to you.  But if a writer just ends up dumping all that into the front-end of the issue anyway, then what’s the point of rejecting recaps?

If nothing else, that kind of clumsy exposition signals a major red flag for the rest of the issue, especially if it takes up a two-page splash as it does in this issue.  With DC’s shortened page count, two pages is quite a lot simply to summarize the same bullet points that have been summarized in every issue before: Zee and Tim in trouble, Tim as savior, Xanadu growing old, Orchid turning monster, Constantine as an honest Abe, world going to ruin, etc.  It just seems like Lemire-Fawkes have run out of ideas and are stalling with old material as much as they can.

Justice League Dark Annual #1 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Mikel Janin (art), Ulises Arreola (colors)

The Story: You got swords—three of them!—and you got sorcery.  That’s some legit fantasy.

The Review: I’d never have thought this series could get an annual of its own.  Generally, you associate annuals with already established bestsellers that the publisher can try to exploit even more sales out of.  But as I noted in Action Comics Annual #1, DC has taken a different route with these kinds of issues post-relaunch.  Now that they have more importance and purpose, the annual can be an invaluable tool to close big storylines in a splashy way.

Ultimately, I’m not quite as enthused about the way this arc ended as I thought I’d be, but there’s no denying that Lemire delivers a fairly spectacular conclusion to the search for the Books of Magic.  On paper, it’s everything you want it to be: a big group of DC’s most prominent occult figures, facing off against fire trolls and wood spirits and evil sorcerers, in the most sacred land of the DCU, all to retrieve the very sources of mystic power.  What’s not to like?

Justice League Dark #13 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Mikel Janin (pencils), Victor Drujiniu (inks), Ulises Arreola (colors)

The Story: Anyone know of good insurance for a magical house located in outer space-time?

The Review: Besides the sheer lameness of a name like “Justice League Dark,” I mostly dislike the title because I feel the Justice League operates in such vastly different world than its Dark counterpart that sharing a brand doesn’t make sense—particularly if no one recognizes it.  Still, the title does give you the idea that where magical threats are concerned, we’re dealing with some League-scale villains, which requires League-class heroes.

Certainly the potential for a major showdown between the mystic forces of good and evil is there.  The introduction of big ideas (the Houses of Mystery and Secrets, the Black Room, the Books of Magic) and big names in DC’s occult universe (Felix Faust, Dr. Mist, Timothy Hunter, and Dr. Occult) is evidence that Lemire wants to write that epic.  At the moment, though, he hasn’t quite put all these elements to the best work possible.

Justice League Dark #11 – Review

By: Jeff Lemire (story), Mikel Janín (art), Ulises Arreola (colors)

The Story: Everyone knows the best part of a magical quest is the loot.

The Review: It’s been a while since my last lecture on magic in fiction, but now that this title has started to get its mystic cred again with Lemire on board, the time seems ripe to talk about it once more.  To start, let’s discuss Harry Potter.  A major part of that series’ appeal is its finite, highly constructed, almost scientific approach to its magic.  Spells must be done in a certain way, have limited effects, and bear enough resemblance to real world physics for us to understand.

But J.K. Rowling had the luxury of establishing all the magical laws of her story-world herself.  The sprawling universe of a major comic book publisher is a whole different deal, with each writer and artist having their own ideas for how things should and shouldn’t work.  But DC has a grand opportunity here, with its relaunch, to set some clear stakes for future writers to work with, even if those stakes are only tenuously propped up and stretch far and wide.