Justice League Dark #24 - A Review

JM Dematteis can craft a psychodrama like no one else.  His Spider-Man story Kraven's Last Hunt still stands as one of the greatest comic book stories of all time and one of the best stories told from a villain's perspective in any medium.  His story of a reformed Joker - Going Sane - delved deeper into the mind of The Joker than any other story I've ever read and remains a personal favorite to this day.  He also did a fine job exploring the internal conflict of Hal Jordan in The Spectre, back in the days before Parallax was a giant yellow space bug.  It is fitting then that JM Dematteis should be the one to truly bring John Constantine into the new DC Universe. 

Let me clear - Jeff Lemire and Ray Hawkes have done a fine job of establishing Ol' Con-Job as the world's reluctant magical fix-it man.  Yet nothing in the Constantine title thus far has really spoken to the overriding theme of the late Hellblazer series - that as bad as various magicians, demons, angels and other horrors may be, nothing is quite so horrific as what one human being can do to another.  This issue largely concerns itself with John - pulled away from the conflict of Forever Evil by the House of Mystery - coping with his realization of this fact and the revelation that he may be all that's left to stop the evil posed by The Crime Syndicate of Earth Three. 

It's brilliant stuff and a must read for all fans of John Constantine.  Yet DeMatteis also takes care to make this all accessible to new readers, on the off chance there's someone picking this up who hasn't been reading Constantine, Forever Evil or Justice League Dark.  It's probably not necessary but it's a nice touch.


I've said before that Mikel Janin is one of the most underrated artists working today.  I'll stand by that statement even now, because his work on this issue is breathtaking.   The darkness of the world is apparent in every panel of this book but Janin makes that clear without resorting to heavy inks or an overly shadowy palette.

Bottom Line.  This is one of the best looking books on the market today and with DeMatteis's writing, it is well on the way to becoming one of the best.  I'll continue skipping Forever Evil in general but I won't be skipping Justice League Dark. 

Justice League #24 - A Review

Is it possible for a good fight scene to salvage an otherwise uninspired comic?  Perhaps, but Justice League #24 is not the book to make that case.  Geoff Johns has written many great books but this, I'm sad to say, is not one of them.

Most of the issue is devoted toward telling the detailed origins of the villainous Ultraman - Superman's evil counterpart from the parallel Earth Three.  Alert fans will note that this story is largely identical to the origins of Superman as depicted in Johns' own Superman: Secret Origin, with a little bit of Grant Morrison's Earth 2 thrown in for good measure.  We see Jor-Il (gedit?) fighting the equally evil masses of Krypton over the last escape pod off their world and The Kents as opportunistic drug addicts rather than as good and decent farmers. 


If this sounds bleakly depressing, it should.  Johns goes over the top in showcasing what a miserable a place Earth Three is and in establishing Ultraman as a conscienceless rapist and murderer.  The whole affair is technically well-written yet seems drab and dull in spite of that.  Most readers are already familiar with this story and discussing the details of how Superman and Ultraman's backgrounds differ, while undoubtedly a fun intellectual exercise for comic geeks, makes for a dull story.

Johns almost manages to salvage this affair with the eleventh-hour arrival of an unexpected hero.  Fans of Johns' excellent JSA run will appreciate this sequence and it is a good, old-fashioned superhero fight.  And yet, it is not enough to forgive the monotony of the early parts of the book. 



The artwork is similarly mixed.  Ivan Reis' pencils are excellent as always but this book proves that an inker can make or break your artwork.  Three different inkers worked on this book and the differences in their styles are obvious.  The Krypton sequences are under-inked.  The sequences where Ultraman terrorizes the staff of The Daily Planet are over-inked.  A few pages manage to be just-right but the credits page annoyingly offers no details as to which inkers are responsible for which pages.

All in all, this book is giving me little reason to continue reading Justice League and further reinforcing my opinion that skipping Forever Evil was a good idea.  With an uneven and overly familiar story backed by confoundedly inked artwork, there is little to recommend this book.