Review: Dark Crisis #1

The DC Universe is facing another crisis; will this be a fresh story or subpar rehash?

Dark Crisis #1 (of 7)
DC Comics
W: Josh Williamson
A: Daniel Sampere
$5.99

What To Know: The Justice League is dead (see Justice League 75) and the world is morning. Pariah is being manipulated into destroying the Multiverse and took out the Justice League. Only Black Adam, who was with the JL, survived the encounter. The world morns the heroes.

Recap
The issue deals with the fallout of Justice League 75; with the big heroes out of the picture, the villains are running wild. The remaining heroes are doing their best to keep everything under control. Jonathan Kent steps up to create a new League; unfortunately many of the big hitters remaining have other interests. Nightwing is training the Titans. Wally West is investigating Barry Allen’s disappearance. Hal Jordan is investigating what happened to the old League. Wonder Girl wants to protect her tribe. Batman wants to keep order in Gotham. We get a series of panels of other heroes he approaches. Some say yes, some say no. In the end, we get our new team.

At the same time, Deathstroke decides to take on the Titans at their academy. Chupacabra shows up at the academy bloodied and beaten; as he’s being tended to by Nightwing, they discover a bomb strapped to him. It, along with a few other bombs, detonate at the tower. Slade is shown outside, and he’s got a large group of villains with him. Beast Boy is discovered snooping, and receives a bullet to the head from Deathstroke.

Thoughts
While I enjoyed the book, there wasn’t a whole lot to it. It’s mainly recap and fluff until you get to Titan’s Tower. The recap is fine for someone who doesn’t read much DC, but the book is pretty much just setup for the event; my issue with this is they had a setup book already (Justice League: The Road to Dark Crisis).

The book also lacked direction. The first part was Jonathan looking for a new League and the story with Pariah. The second part jumps to Deathstroke taking out the Titans. The second part just felt out of place compared to the bigger picture; and that made the death of Beast Boy feel like it was there for shock factor.

I like both sides of the story, but it felt disjointed because they were so different from each other and there didn’t seem to be a connecting factor between the 2. While I can’t see how they come together, I’m looking forward to how it’ll work.

I also like that this will focus on different characters. The new Justice League is interesting; Jonathan got Robin, Supergirl, Blue Beetle (Jaime), Dr. Light, Frost, Frankenstein, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle (Ted), Aqualad, and Harley Quinn. It’s nice having Booster and Ted back together. I’m not sure on Frankenstein yet, but I know the idea of Harley on the JL would have bothered me at one point. I know this team is thrown together to fight the uptick in crime, but I don’t think they’ll be good on the multiverse stage. I’m curious to see how Williamson pulls it off.

Rating
2.5 out of 5. It’s enough to keep me invested in the series, but I’m hesitant on what this book is going to be.