While Zatanna and Constantine venture into the Rot to stop its machinations, the rest of the Justice League Dark must contend with the already infected. Spoilers for Justice League Dark #22 follow.
The past two issues of Justice League Dark have kept the quality of the series up after writer James Tynion IV left the series to begin work on Batman. This is something the really should be celebrated because quick shifts in creative teams can often spell disaster for the quality of a series, but luckily Ram V, along with Alvaro Martinez Bueno who remained on the series, have been able to maintain the quality of the series. There have been some early learning moments though and that is most obvious in this otherwise solid issue.
What Justice League Dark has done well from the beginning is incorporating nearly every facet of the mythical side of the DC universe into its pages. The only thing that it hasn’t used really, up until this point, is the expansive mythology behind the Green, Red, and Rot. These past three issues have changed that, with this issue going even farther.
It brings Abby Arcane fully back into the DC universe as the Avatar of the Rot as she was at the end of the most recent Swamp Thing ongoing series, which ended five years ago. Personally, as a massive fan of Abby and the Swamp Thing mythos, I love to see her back and the way that she’s written feels like a great combination of Alan Moore’s version and Charles Soule’s.
Beyond just Abby being though, this issue delves much more into the parliamentary nature of the elements beyond just the Green, Red, and Rot. Nothing is fully fleshed out yet, how could it be in one issue with so much else going on, but it presents a nice mythological expansion moving forward.
The biggest problem with this issue is the balancing of the characters. In a team book like this, there will definitely be cases where some characters take on the spotlight more than others, but in the best cases, each member has time to shine in every issue. Well, that isn’t the case here. Constantine, Animal Man, and Zatanna, specifically Constantine and Animal Man, have great, great moments in this issue with Zatanna getting one of her own, but the rest of the team feels sidelined, namely with Bobo and Wonder Woman, who barely appear in this issue. With as many characters as this book has, its hard to juggle them all, but it can also be distracting when some of the team only appears briefly.
Martinez Bueno continues to kill it in the art department though with this issue, which isn’t all the surprising. He’s shown time and time again that he’s one of the most underrated artists working in the comic book industry today. One scene, in particular, stands out in this issue which is when Constantine is waking Abby from her stupor. It’s a pretty simple scene to convey, but then Martinez Bueno blows it out of the water with his art.
Each panel has an encroaching feeling of dread to it due to the way each panel is drawn. The main focus, being Constantine and/and Abby, is complete art; pencils, ink, colors, the works. But the edges are just the penciled artwork with a sharp distinction between the complete art and the penciled. This is just one of the many ways that Martinez Bueno has used the comic medium to tell the story so inventively on this series.
