Justice League Dark #18 Review

Dungeons & Dragons

Written By: James Tynion IV

Art By: Alvaro Martinez Bueno, Raul Fernandez, Brad Anderson, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: January 1, 2020

The war for magic rages on between our Justice League Dark and the Legion of Doom Dark........ not to mention the Upside Down Man, who's just hanging out in the Collective Unconscious, creeping the hell out of Wonder Woman and Witchfire.  Previously, we saw our JLD team realize that Circe was in Diana's body and made sure that the impostor wasn't able to unleash Eclipso, while also locking themselves in the Hall of Justice magical vault.  Time's running out though as the baddies are breaking down the door.  Let's jump into this issue and see if our heroes will be able to win the day.  Let's check it out.

In the Collective Unconscious, we see Wonder Woman confronted by the Upside Down Man and while a lot of this is to catch people up with the monster's backstory, it does lead to a really cool deal between Diana and him, which will allow our hero to return to her body and give our heroes a chance to fight back the magical baddies.

Too bad that they're not having that right now though because our team is up to their eyeballs in bad decision because while Circe has brought back that dragon skeleton that hangs in the JLD's headquarters to break down the magical vault door, Constantine has the brilliant idea to use all of these items in the vault to fight back the Legion of Doom Dark and for how much these items have caused the Justice League a headache over the years with their power or their curses...... it's probably the last ditch effort that nobody wants be a part of.  This does lead to a really great cliffhanger though, where we see Khalid in his desperation thinking about putting on the helm of Fate one more time in order to help save him and his friends.  

All in all, the art in this issue is great besides for a few small panels that left me scratching my head, but overall I did really enjoy what we got here.  As for the story, Yeah, there are some moments that are just recap masquerading as a threatening part of the story, but it did lead to a change that felt interesting, not to mention ending in a terrifying way for poor old Witchfire.  As for the rest of the team and their story, we did just see both our good team and our evil team sitting around and either trying to figure out how to keep a door up or how to break a door down, but even this lull in progression led to some interesting action once the pace of the book picked up and once we got to the cliffhanger I had a huge reluctant smile on my face. 

Bits and Pieces:

There's not a ton of progression this issue, but we did have some elements that will lead to some very interesting developments in issues to come and for the most part I enjoyed everything we got here.  The art was great and the tension is high as our heroes decide that there's little recourse than to take a terrible option to defend themselves and I can't wait to see how it turns out as our story continues.

7/10