Justice League Dark #17 Review

Diana's Got The Body, Circe Has The Brains

Written By: James Tynion IV

Art By: Javi Fernandez, John Kalisz, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: November 27, 2019

The war of magic rages on and with each issue it seems like Circe and her Legion of Doom Dark are gaining more and more ground on our heroes.  This became overwhelming obvious in the previous issue, where Wonder Woman's consciousness was trapped in the collective unconscious, while Circe stole her body and put on her very best Diana impersonation so that she could get her hands on the black diamond of Eclipso.  Let's jump into this issue and see if our heroes can start winning and if Man-Bat will ever come back from being a reject from John Carpenter's The Thing.  Let's check it out.

In this magic filled issue of JLD, we see that the Khalid, Bobo and Man-Bat situation was solved off panel, between issues and for whatever reason the idea that we just moved past that here and that it doesn't matter anymore made me a little angry because what we get instead is a couple of pages worth of Circe's origin, which doesn't come off as interesting as I would have liked because she killed her husband thousands of years ago, people didn't like that and sent her away...... she in turn didn't like that and Hecate gave her the power to continue being pissed off.  

I'm not saying that there isn't fun stuff in this issue, but even Circe's ruse of being Diana isn't played well in here.  Yeah, a lot of the team are busy dealing with everything that's been going on around them, but it's only Bobo who realizes that Wonder Woman isn't herself, which is kind of ridiculous because all she does before Bobo realizes is stare at the Black Diamond of Eclipso, yet no one else thought that this was odd.  Once the jig is up though and everyone knows who everyone is, this issue really does take off in the action department and leads to a really interesting cliffhanger.

All in all, I'm not a fan of Javi Fernandez' art, even if I think a lot of the art here is some of his best work, it's just not something I like looking at and don't think I ever will.  As for the story...... Well, beyond Circe's backstory, this issue takes awhile to get going because it takes a lot of time for everyone to find out what we the reader already know and it doesn't play out in an interesting way, not to mention that the whole Man-Bat bit from before was just glossed over to get us to this point.  Once Circe's identity is revealed though this book does become really good and I like the direction we're going.

Bits and Pieces:

While I was having fun with this issue by the end, the first half of this book was a bit of a slog to get through as it just reiterated what we already knew, while completely glossing over Man-Bat's possession/transformation to get there.  Also, I wasn't a fan of the art this issue, which is a shame because usually if I'm not into the story I could always count on the art being top notch.  This is a mixed bag to be sure, but thankfully this did enough to keep me excited for next issue.

6.9/10