There is just too much crime, even supernatural crime.  So they have a special task force of Justice League for the ‘Dark’ stuff. This is DC collection of supernatural characters.  Some characters like Constantine and Shade come from the Vertigo line, and have now been brought into the DC mainstream.  Don’t worry, Hellblazer is still being printed in Vertigo.

Peter Milligan comes from the Vertigo writing style.  Show lots of strange stuff going on and add some weird literary references, and the shake.  But it works.  Some of his lines are great ‘as real as I can make you’ , cow gives birth to mechanical meat-slicers’ , ‘what is the smell of sanity’, and ‘the stench of torn fingernails’.  All strange, but at least they are fresh.

The art fluctuates.  Sometime I think it is better than good, and sometimes I wince at how the flying teeth look when they swamp Superman (like bugs, and that is not scary).  But for the most part is enjoyable.

B-  —  Don

Justice League Dark bridges whatever gap there is between the Vertigo characters and the mainstream superhero (kinda should be an oxymoron, but…) universe quite well. Milligan is a prolific and accomplished writer of all kinds of books, and has done a lot of Vertigo work in the past. His take on Shade the Changing Man is prevalent here (with a sad reveal about his friend and traveling companion), and characters like Zatanna, Deadman, Madame Xanadu, and John Constantine all mesh well and still manage to keep their unique voices.

The art was more polished than I’m used to from “horror” themed books, and while it’s dark and heavy on the ink, it still looks nice. Has it really been since Crisis on Infinite Earths that John Constantine has rubbed elbows with Superman and Batman? This book makes me wonder what took them so long.

B+ — Ed