How Come Mindwarp Isn't On the Cover?
This series really emphasizes this notion that The Dark titles are all in their own little corner of the DC Universe, which is kind of odd, but what they did with it here is pretty cool. I complained last issue about not seeing any other heroes reacting, but this addresses this by showing us how what some of the other Dark heroes are dealing with in the wake of this threat. It ends up being a neat little touch, though I think Frankenstein should've helped the serious fiction readers in their fight against reality tv fans.
This is not the traditional team book. Things come and go at odd paces, and it all works out surprisingly well. John Constantine fights Deadman to save the villain Enchantress. The villain who was never the villain at all really, just a broken mind without an anchor. If anyone is the villain its Madame Xanadu, who's definitely channeling Dharma at this point. She thought this was the threat the team needed to stop, but it turned out to be the threat she created to create the team. She thought she knew the future, but everything went horribly wrong.
There's a lot of nice touches here. I loved the way the rhyme June kept awkwardly shoving into her dialogue came into play. It was obvious it would play a role, I just didn't know how. The end is kind of anticlimactic, even though parts of it do build properly to a climax, but the partial anti-climax sort of works in the story's favor, and definitely works with the off kilter pacing.
And there's other ways in which this series feels more 'real' than the others. The artwork has an unnerving quality to it that makes it feel almost Marvel-ish tied to a more normal world. The mentioning of politicians blaming single mothers and video games also gave everything a grounding in reality.
In Conclusion: 4/5
Less flaws than previous issue but still not a whole lot I can say about this. I think its an excellent quality series, if a little hard to completely praise. But I do have one question, How come Mindwarp isn't on the cover?
