Brandon Borzelli's Geek Goggle Reviews
Justice League Dark #22
DC Comics
Lemire & Janin
The Trinity War rolls forward and into a new title: Justice League Dark. Part three of the crossover features a lot more characters and more mystery as the plot thickens. The book is a little tough to follow as the characters sort of mix up the teams and head off into various directions. At times the book is really difficult to follow the characterizations and rationalizations pitched within it. It feels like Lemire is being asked to move the chess pieces on the board but leave no explanations as to how or why. The book is a fine read but the crossover appears to be stalling for time in this installment.
Basically, Wonder Woman finds the Justice League Dark and attempts to use them to find Pandora. As you might expect there is a lot of muscle flexing and sizing up and plenty of information dumping.
While this is going on, the others that are watching over Superman become antsy and splinter off bit by bit. This is lead by Batman believing what the Phantom Stranger tells him.
This is where the characterizations begin to not make sense. Stranger tells Batman what Wonder Woman is up to and Batman, blindly, believes him and charges off after her. This seems totally out of character and it simply appears that the story needs Batman to be the force behind the next confrontation. It’s really odd.
More strange characterizations occur when dealing with Superman. Specifically, Superman himself. The character seems like a shell of a character that behaves a lot like Bruce Banner where he needs to reassure those around him that he is controlling his anger. The more Superman I read these days the more I realize DC has no idea what to do with this character so they are simply taking the scattershot approach and aiming for everything.
The artwork is good. The book has a lot of standing around and yelling and the splash pages add a lot to look at. I didn’t find a whole lot of the drama getting sold by the artwork and that might have really aided the story. Overall, it’s a decent super hero comic visually.
The Trinity War crossover is going through a bit of a lull with this issue. It feels like stalling, but not on the Brian Bendis level. This issue does move more characters around which is probably necessary for the future issues but it makes this one a throwaway. One of the bright spots is the mystery at the beginning and at the end. This is an okay read but not as good as the first two installments.
3 out of 5 Geek Goggles
