Howling At the Moone
The Good: The cover is sickeningly compelling, with such intense grotesque detail, I absolutely love it.... except, the extra words seems so unnecessary, and they pretty much eat up and ruin the effectiveness of the blank white space. It's frustrating because it appears that DC laid out the words in such a way to eliminate as much of the white space as possible, which is baffling because the white space is what makes this cover so gorgeous.
The artwork continues to be something hard to properly praise, but undeniably great for this series. Things have a tendency to be a sort of tasteful grotesque, which underlines the creepy nature of the series.
After all the lack of forward momentum, it's nice to see the characters starting to come together to actually form a team. We've gotten deep into the heads of most of the characters, so now its time to see how they'll interact with each other. Some of them form very fluid and solid connections, while others are quite literally at each other's throats. So this team isn't exactly going to be a group of best buddies, there will be friendship and hatred amongst them.
And forming this team we have a nice variety of unique and well defined characters. Constantine actually calls Dove out on her attempts to be intimidating, showing us that these characters aren't just simple copy-paste personalities who can believably spout off any line for any situation.
Wait, my entire conceptualization of this series was shaken hard by this issue. Enchantress gets her big true debut as her true self, and I feel nothing but sympathy for a tragic figure. And Constantine's pissed as hell at Madame Xanadu for causing tragedy? Some REALLY interesting things are happening, but especially I'm impressed at how much sympathy I felt for Enchantress so intantly after seeing her as a nightmarish monster who's setting the world ablaze for 3 issues.
The Bad: I'm a little wierded out that we've got an inexperienced Zatanna in The New 52. I thought her interaction with Constantine had implied their past romance or whatever. I don't know, something about it just doesn't feel right to me.
So, the whole world's going to shit in the bizarrest of ways, and we don't see ANY of the other heroes? I feel like NOW would've been the good time to have the regular Justice League cameo, showing them facing some side threats. Trying to deal with the symptoms not knowing about the disease. But the Dark League knows about the disease and they are the direct cure.
There's a bit of Zatanna dialogue where Shade says something and Zatanna says 'What?' backwards in more ways than one, and it seems REALLY out of place.
After a great previous issue, the development of the plot has kind of slowed down again. The team is meeting each other, and that's almost the only thing that happens.
In Conclusion: 3.5/5
This series is always odd to review. The writing is extremely excellent, and the artwork is creepy and unique, and the characters are deep and varied.... but the plot needs a kick start in the right direction. I WANT to praise the hell out of this, but I can't, there are too many flaws. But I still highly recommend it, especially for people who want a little more out of their superhero team comics than Justice League's "Smash and Smash."
