Justice League #52 Review

Dream Warriors

Written By: Jeff Loveness

Art By: Robson Rocha, Daniel Henriques, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Tom Napolitano

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: September 1, 2020

It's time to get back to the Planet of the Black Mercy, where previously we saw our team psychically led there without them knowing it and when they went to inspect the strange planet...... well, by that point it was already too late. That's right, even with the world's greatest superheroes all together, this parasite planet took them one by one and sent them into their ultimate dreamland. Let's jump into this issue and see what this entity plans on showing our Caped Crusader to keep him placated throughout its feeding. Let's check it out.

While this is a Justice League book, we're primarily going to be focused on Batman this issue, which is a shame because Batman gets a lot of flack for taking up too much of comic shelf space and hogging up all the stories that DC wants to tell and if that wasn't enough to really grind your gears or make you sigh or roll your eyes, we're dealing with Batman's mind here, where he's seeing his dead parents in Crime Alley. Alright, I've thrown a lot of things at your right now which normally piss people off or at least make them wish that they got something else out of the book and or character, but I have to tell you that the Black Mercy Planet consciousness that is making Batman see his dead mother, where she wants more out of the Caped Crusader than just being vengeance and the night is actually an amazing look at our Dark Knight Detective.  

On top of doing something interesting with Batman where we use the death of his parents in a way to reach him on a deeper level, we're presented this dream state with a stylized look that enhanced the storytelling and makes everything that you're dealing with more interesting than it would be with just a simple style. Ultimately, this two-issue arc does just kind of end in a way that we realize we're dealing simply with a story that is going to haunt Batman instead of an all-out adventure dealing with the Justice League, but even with an ending that just comes out of nowhere and rushes to get to a heart to heart between Batman and Superman, this was a surprising addition to this series that I didn't see coming from what we got previously and one that I'm happy as hell that I read.

All in all, I love the way that the art is used in this issue because not only does it look great when we see what's going on with our heroes in the real world, but the style that is used for the dreamscape of the Black Mercy just elevated the feel of the story overall and just really blew me away by the end. Do we deal with the death of Bruce's parents one again and go against what Batman decided about becoming Batman from the end of Tom King's "I Am Bane" arc?.......... Yeah, but thankfully the former is done in an interesting way....... and the latter I don't give a shit about so all in all it works out well. The biggest problem with this book overall besides for what I previously mentioned is the fact that this is more a Batman story than a Justice League story for the way it plays out and I would have loved the time to deal with what everyone with the group saw when they were taken over by the Black Mercy Planet, but even with these gripes, we get a solid story here that looks great throughout.

Bits and Pieces:

While Batman takes center stage this issue and leaves the rest of the Justice League pretty much forgotten about until the book needs to conclude, this is a great look at the Dark Knight and while it comes off initially as familiar territory for our hero, this story is presented in a way that makes what we get here not only interesting to look at, but interesting to read and contemplate as well.

8/10