A review by talon1010
Justice League Dark Vol. 1: The Last Age of Magic by James Tynion IV
2.0
Though less so than some DC comics, it feels like a children's comic with adult content papered over. I read this after reading James Tynion IV's indie project, Memetic, and while the edginess and blood (and even certain cosmic horror analogues) carried over, the quality of the story and narrative did not.
In a comic, I look for fun, compelling art, which this had a reasonable degree of, over a complex, interesting, well-told story, which this lacked. It's a prescriptive case of magic causing all of the problems and solutions, while the reader is left entirely ignorant to what magic is. Fixes to problems, especially in the second half of the collection, were pulled from absolutely not precedent or context, so they seemed tactless and unimportant. Soft magic can work, but not when magic is every part of the plot, characters, devices, etc. And what's more, most of the problems didn't even really seem solved to me, despite the characters' acting relieved at the end of an arc.
Most strangely, I found the use of omniscient narration both confusing and very strange. This is perhaps the widest difference from Memetic, which had very dynamic, multi-point narration from the limited first person, where it was ambiguous who was speaking for several points of this book's. Sometimes, the narrator was eventually made obvious as a character, though sometimes it was just Tynion IV, which felt very noir-cliche.
In a comic, I look for fun, compelling art, which this had a reasonable degree of, over a complex, interesting, well-told story, which this lacked. It's a prescriptive case of magic causing all of the problems and solutions, while the reader is left entirely ignorant to what magic is. Fixes to problems, especially in the second half of the collection, were pulled from absolutely not precedent or context, so they seemed tactless and unimportant. Soft magic can work, but not when magic is every part of the plot, characters, devices, etc. And what's more, most of the problems didn't even really seem solved to me, despite the characters' acting relieved at the end of an arc.
Most strangely, I found the use of omniscient narration both confusing and very strange. This is perhaps the widest difference from Memetic, which had very dynamic, multi-point narration from the limited first person, where it was ambiguous who was speaking for several points of this book's. Sometimes, the narrator was eventually made obvious as a character, though sometimes it was just Tynion IV, which felt very noir-cliche.