Days of Future Magic Past: Justice League Dark #15 Review

Editor’s Note: What is it with you people? Do I have some kind of sign on me back, “Walking Spoiler Bank – Withdrawals Welcome”? Is that it?

What with the news about Guillermo del Toro having a movie in early pre-production about basically every character from DC’s Dark line, it seems like as good a time as any to check back in with Justice League Dark, which features just about all the characters del Toro want to work with.

Frankly, my enthusiasm for the title has waned in the face of Vertigo’s cancellation of Hellblazer (sure, John Constantine’s in Justice League Dark, but that ain’t Hellblazer), despite the title being taken over by Jeff Lemire, who is a damn good writer of weird shit, and who seemed to understand that if you’re going to see people a team book, it’s probably a good idea to have them be a fucking team. But the fact of the matter is that there’s nothing like knowing a movie is coming out about a comic to ramp up your excitement about a book. And God knows, Justice League Dark #15 will remind you that, yup, there’s a comic book movie coming out.

Unfortunately, that movie is X-Men: Days of Future Past.

We are in the aftermath of the team and Tim Hunter finding the Books of Magic, which has zapped Hunter and Zatanna to some unknown province where magic appears to be amplified, trolls and fairies wander the land, and the use of supernatural powers is a death penalty offense, enforced by heavily armored cops with the authority to use lethal force. So it’s basically the worst possible place for Zatanna and Hunter to be, kinda like if a hamburger enthusiast vacationed in Mumbai, or if I went to Singapore. Anyway, Constantine, Deadman, et al remain on Earth, trying to find a way to follow Zatanna and Hunter, before they discover that the key to the Books of Magic isn’t anything magical about Tim, but is, in fact, a cryptographic solution based on his DNA. So, with the help of Tim’s Dad and a needle, they open a 48 hour portal to the new world… and find that their powers aren’t exactly what they would expect there.

So let’s address the elephant in the room: yeah, I get a strong smell of Days of Future Past off of this story. Having heroes blasted into a world where their very powers have been criminalized, and where people with those powers are living underground to avoid persecution by brutal authorities is, at the surface level anyway, a few X’ed out John Byrne-drawn “Wanted” posters away from the core of that old X-Men story. So right at its most basic level, writers Lemire and Ray Fawkes are playing with some fire here. This is only part one of a four-part story, so it has a lot of room to spread its wings, but the parallels up front are distracting; it’s like reading Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan for the first time if you’ve already read Hunter Thompson’s Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail; the work might overcome it, but you start out almost seeing a ghost image over the comic while you read it. Particularly since, if you are a Hunter Thompson fan, you have probably been drinking. But I digress.

What could prove to be interesting as the story progresses is the effect that this new world, Epoch, has on each of the protagonists. We see it alternately amping some people’s powers – Zatanna seems jacked up and intoxicated on the power there – and reversing others’ – Deadman is alive, and John Constantine can’t lie (but with God as my witness, if I see Constantine tell a cop the truth about speeding, I will go utterly berserk). So the setup that we will eventually see these guys trying to get out of their situation without using their powers is intriguing, especially since the writers seem to have set themselves up to not be able to use Constantine’s bullshit artistry to get them out of it, which seems to be most writers’ first inclination in this kind of story. But here, we get the barest of setups; make no mistake: this is the first part of a decompressed story. Your excitement over the events of this story will depend on your ability to get psyched up over what is purely setup.

And then we get to my pet peeve about the issue, and it comes back to the cancellation of Hellblazer, with DC Editorial’s assertions that it doesn’t really matter, because we’ll get the DC Universe version of the character: this guy? His name’s John Constantine, but he is sure as hell not Hellblazer. I’ve been reading about John Constantine since I was nineteen years old, and that guy would never say that his deepest desire is for his buddies to like him. John Constantine doesn’t put himself out for anyone. John Constantine would trick you into selling your soul to the Ninth Circle of Hell if you were trapped with him in the desert and you had a half pack of Merit Ultra Lights. John Constantine killed his own twin brother in the fucking womb in order to survive… he does not care if the guy in the red circus / pervert suit thinks he’s nice enough. It’s a small part of the issue, and I have no doubt that the characterization is consistent with what Robert Venditti and Renato Guedes have planned for the Constantine book… but it reads wrong for any long-time Hellblazer fan – actually, it reads wuss for us. It’s a characterization that, for any long-time Constantine fan, just rings utterly false.

Mikel Janin’s art on the issue, thankfully, remains a high point. As he has done since the series started, he works with a fine line, doing detailed figures and highly expressive faces, and he runs the gamut here from regular people to Frankenstein to armored cops to a variety of classic supernatural creatures, and he switches the contexts with ease. He opens strong, with an Eisneresque, full page establishing the scope of a giant tower while splitting that page into panels to overlay action occurring around that tower, and his storytelling and panel layout are clear and simple to follow… although that late panel of Deadman screaming at the heavens reminded me a little of Darth Vader shrieking, “Do not want!” But overall, this is a damn good-looking book, and I’m glad that Janin has been able to generally hang on the series through its creative changes.

Looking back at my review, it might seem like I didn’t like the issue, and that’s really not the (entire) case. Yeah, it’s all setup, and as the first part of a longer story, it suffers from having some strong and distracting parallels to Days of Future Past, and for good or ill, I don’t think I am ever going to be able to reconcile the DC Universe version of John Constantine with the Vertigo version. But as setup, it could be worse. The tease of the protagonists being unable to control their powers is intriguing enough to make me curious to see how they’re going to get out of it (although I’m hoping we get an explanation as to why some people are getting their shit reversed, while others seem to be amped up and as happy as pigs in shit). Justice League Dark #15 is a reasonable, but flawed start to a four part story… but if nothing else, it accomplishes one thing.

That thing being that it makes me pray that Guillermo del Toro has handed the screenwriter for his Dark Universe movie a fat stack of Vertigo issues of Hellblazer as part of his terms of employment.