Justice League Dark #1 Review

Writer: James Tynion IV

Artist: Alvaro Martinez Bueno

Inker: Raul Fernandez

Colourist: Brad Anderson

Letterer: Rob Leigh

 

I’ve been looking forward to this issue for a while, mostly because it heralds another issue from the art team of Alvaro Martinez, Raul Fernandez, and Brad Anderson. This is one of the best art teams in comics and to see Martinez draw all these characters is very exciting for me. But what about the plot by James Tynion IV?

The issue centres around Wonder Woman recruiting as many characters as she can in order to get to the bottom of why magic isn’t working as well as it should in the DCU. People have been wondering exactly why Wonder Woman is playing a large part in this series since many don’t consider her one of DC’s “magical” characters, but this actually plays a role in the story and Tynion handles that aspect very well. As for the team, I think it’s nearly the perfect storm of characters. Wonder Woman is already there, and Zatanna is such a great choice since we’ve barely seen any of her recently. Tynion wrote her pretty well in his Detective Comics run so it’s nice to see him returning to the character. Swamp Thing is one of my favourite characters and his role in the story makes complete sense. One of the World Trees that have grown on Earth following the events of Justice League: No Justice are a cause for concern for Swamp Thing since it isn’t connected to the green. Detective Chimp is a left-field choice but makes enough sense given the role he played in Metal. The final member, Man-Bat, needs to convince me a bit more. I haven’t seen Man-Bat appear recently so I’m not sure if his personality matches up with what we see here, but he’s a bonafide man/bat combo instead of being a human that turns into a bat. It’s kind of dumb and seems to be the comic relief, which is odd since you have a character named Detective Chimp on the team.

All this to say, Martinez and his team blew me away. He makes this world and this tone his own; there are some fantastic monster designs with some obvious but cool homages to classic monsters from cinema history, and Anderson’s colours tie the whole package together.

 

This is a rather chunky issue, even though it’s regularly sized. It seems that Tynion wants to get as much out of the way as possible in order to continue with this story, which is admirable. By the end of this issue, the team is ready to go. As for the threat the team has to deal with, it’s not entirely unique but given what we know about the series coming up, I’m excited to meet this new villain.

 

Martinez and Tynion impress and have me excited for the rest of this series. The characters are all present and look awesome, and it’s just up to Tynion to continue giving Martinez weird things to draw.