Justice League Dark, Volume 2: The Books of Magic Review (Peter Milligan, Jeff Lemire)

Ah Justice League Dorks, the Paul Daniels version of the Justice League. However, unlike Paul’s catchphrase “You’ll like this… not a lot, but you’ll like it”, you won’t like this, not even a little! 

In Peter Milligan’s portion of the book, the JLD fight an army of vampires while trying to recruit a special vampire just cos. Things move laterally from terrible to terrible as Jeff Lemire takes over writing and the JLD try to get The Books of Magic before some evil magicians do. Boring doesn’t begin to express the experience of reading either of these stories. 

All the action is tedious as characters hurl colourful beams of light at one another with no sense of scale, limitation, magnitude of power – this is why magic in general is a load of old bollocks, because you’ve no idea what’s happening and there’s zero tension as a result. Anything can happen and therefore nothing that does is interesting. 

The characters are a naff bunch – “Nick Necro”? Ugh! They’re not at all a convincing team and nothing they do is remotely compelling. We desperately have to add this person to team because they’re magic too even though once we do our collective strength remains the same! Let’s quest for a MacGuffin because we gotta do something! Yawners. 

Neil Gaiman fans will recognise some of his more obscure Vertigo characters here. Tim Hunter from The Books of Magic (hence the subtitle) and Black Orchid. Neither were good characters in Gaiman’s hands and aren’t improved by Lemire/Milligan. Black Orchid looks like a purple female Midnighter for some reason, Lord Faust(!) looks like a Richard Corben castoff and Zatanna looks like a Goth stripper more than usual. 

I can’t imagine there are many people with the same bad idea as me to revisit old New 52 titles but, if you’re contemplating it, I’d steer clear of Justice League Dark – it’s abradacrapra!