Justice League Dark Annual #2 Review

J. M. DeMatteis’ latest issue on the title does a lot to flesh that out in its entirety and help answer some of the questions that I found myself raising after getting through Justice League Dark #35. The Justice League Dark Annual #2 is a pretty great story that explores the character relationships between Zatanna and Constantine, which segues into an exploration of how their relationship has ended up affecting the House of Mystery itself. The writing is fairly solid on this one, though I think that it moved a bit too fast and missed out on a few emotional beats, and the same kind of goes for the artwork as well.

This extra-paged issue explores the concept of the personification of both the House of Mystery, which is where the team resides, and the House of Secrets. The issue starts off with a romantic-styled dinner between Zatanna and Constantine where they try to resolve their differences, though it doesn’t quite go as planned since Constantine is still an egotistical jerk and a manipulative bastard. Their bickering quickly segues into a liaison and then we get to the heart of the matter here. The House of Mystery, personified as a man, and the House of Secrets, personified as a woman, are at war with each other and at the heart of this issue is this conflict, which they want to settle with the help of Constantine and Zatanna, or rather, their respective teams.

The great thing about this issue is that it brings back I, Vampire‘s Andrew Bennett to the team. He was kinda-sorta a part of it before, but he has been missing for a long, long while. The same goes for Frankenstein and Black Orchid, both of whom left the JLD team after the events of Forever Evil: Blight since they wanted some serious time-off. And Madame Xanadu as well, who was pretty good under Jeff Lemire when he was on the series, before DeMatteis.

If the issue had been slower-paced, it would have helped with the big twist as well since it could have been setup a bit better, and the consequences of that could have been similarly better-explored.

Klaus Janson is the artist here along with John Stanisci with Steve Buccellato on colours, Dezi Sienty on letters and the cover by the Guillem March and Tomeu Morey duo. The artwork here is pretty decent, with some really good action sequences in the middle of the issue, but the characterwork is often lacking since the characters change from page to page quite often and the consistency just isn’t there, not like it should be. And this is disappointing. The colours are pretty good, of that there’s no doubt, and the pencils are decent as well, but they could definitely be much better I think.


Get the full review from ShadowHawk's Shade here