Justice League #53 Review

Not Your Daddy's Justice League!

Written By: Joshua Williamson

Art By: Xermanico, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Tom Napolitano

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: September 15, 2020

Guess what everybody, it's time to stop dicking around and get the Justice League book back on track to being important. Yeah, we might have had some decent issues and some fun stories thrown at us, but they were just around as a placeholder until this book could catch up to what's going on in Death Metal, and now that it finally has, maybe these tie-in issues can do something to make this event feel bigger and not just some random dark stuff that's always on the verge of being silly and what's striving to be deemed "Metal". Let's hope that's the case as we jump into this first issue of Justice League meaning something again since issue #39. Let's check it out.

As we all know, at least those of us reading Dark Nights: Death Metal, the Trinity are on their way to the Dark Multiverse to go and collect Crisis energy and since that convoluted storyline just sounds sillier and sillier every time I hear it, it makes sense that we have a book like Justice League that will show us what's going on beyond that in an attempt to weaken Perpetua to a point where maybe somebody, somehow will have a chance at taking this evil mother of creation down. With that, our book consists of Nightwing, Hawkgirl, Detective Chimp and Lex Luthor as of right now and their attempt to get to Perpetua's throne and retrieve the Legion of Doom who has been imprisoned within it, fueling Perpetua with the dark cosmic energies that they collected during Scott Snyder's Justice League run.

Essentially, we get the beginning of the plans for a heist, which needs to include Lex Luthor, despite everyone's objections because he's the guy that's in the know and has blueprints, plans and knowledge that will see everyone through to the end, but their big problem right away is the guard of the throne, an Omega Knight, which is the resurrected parts of the Omega Titans from No Justice and for some reason, we find out that Perpetua got them from the Dark Multiverse and made this new monstrosity........ even though she's not supposed to be able to affect things made up of Dark Matter. Once we get past that big boy though, we might reach a new member to add to our group in the form of Martian Manhunter, who originally went solo to try and take down the thrown but who hasn't been seen since. Judging by the variant cover to this though, I'm guessing that this series is going to become a Wizard of Oz journey, where we'll be picking up more character along the way and so far, I'm on board with that.

All in all, the art in this issue was really enjoyable, even if I found the colors a little drab but that's expected for the story that's being told here, not to mention that it just shows the end of the world feel that we're supposed to have........ I'm just a sucker for a bright and vibrant book though. As for the story...... Yeah, it's a little slow but it's setting up what the Justice League tie-ins are going to be so that can be expected and it's fun knowing that we have heroes on different fronts now doing what they can to save the world or what little is left of it and because of that aspect and the strange team-up that we're going to be seeing here, I had a decent time with this book and look forward to what it brings us, even if the grand price at the end of the journey is a fancy, energy-sucking chair. 

Bits and Pieces:

The Justice League series seems to matter again and that's an amazing feeling. While I will need to see more from these tie-ins to be fully on board with what we'll be getting out of this series, what we got here was interesting enough to keep me interested, while using its time to explore the world of Death Metal as much as it could........ not to mention that the art was great throughout so yeah, I'm down with Justice League right now.

7/10