Justice League Dark: In the Dark #1

I solemnly promise I am not reading these hoping they will be bad. I'm not looking for a frustrating time. Nor can you really say I'm not giving these a fair shake: reading over a dozen New 52 volumes is quite generous, considering how unimpressive they are. Take this pail of hogwash, for example. Admittedly, beginning with a nominalization is poor writing, but there is no story here. Truly no story. Instead, we have a jumbled mess of pseudo-introduction stories masquerading as a typical "gathering of heroes for a new team" story - but get this! It's "dark"! Apparently that makes it new and fresh, or at least it did in the minds of the people who gave this project the proverbial green light. Perhaps "dark" is New 52 talk for "draw lots of grotesque things and the people won't know nothing meaningful is happening." Even X-Files had generally good narrative reasons for its grotesqueries. This palaver has nothing substantial to tie its nonsense together

Panels happen in whirly-gig order, as if we are supposed to have some intuitive guide to discerning how this is supposed to be read. Oh, and apparently we are already supposed to know who these characters are, since we are never told who they are, even the ones who are possibly new, except Deadman. We are told his origin every issue. This jumbled mess has some potentially interesting ideas, but none of them come to fruition and we are not given any reason to hope they will mature in future issues. Characters all basically look alike (which is not impressive), and most of the poses and outfits of the ladies are apparently designed to evoke ungentlemanly responses within the male readership. Characters show up, leave, wide gaping holes of what poses as a story rip through and no one bothers to explain why (not that we need moment-by-moment spoonfeeding, but an absence of meaningful continuity is not tantamount to "quality storytelling").

Horrible things happen throughout these pages (children murdering one another, towns caving into madness), but none of these "heroes" care. Then we are to believe it was all a test to get this ragtag group of jerkweeds together. It's impossible to empathize with any of these characters until John Constantine says he wants no part of this. If this is the best this series has to offer, it's hard to disagree.