Creative Staff:
Story: Brian Buccellato
Art: Marco Santucci
Colors: Rex Lokus
Letters: Wes Abbott
What They Say:
On a parallel world, an unprecedented alliance of super-villains draws the Justice League into action. But the Joker has a scheme that may bring about everyone’s destruction.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
With the series shifting gears to align more closely with the events from the game, which I haven’t played or truly seen much of overall, Injustice took the twist with the alternate setting the last time around that showed us something that even the mainline DC Universe hasn’t been capable of doing for several years with the big heroes just hanging out and having a good time. This installment largely carries on with the same thing to a degree as Marco Santucci delivers some very solid artwork that runs the gamut of mainline characters, but it does all still have that kind of odd feeling to it. I get what it’s doing and I know the connection, but after investing in the Injustice world for a few years now it feels weird to read about another timeline.
As we saw before, there’s a big battle that’s drawn in most of the Justice League types to go up against them and it has the scale and danger to it that it should. There’s a lot of appeal in seeing these kinds of heroes and villains fight, but the book wants to work a different track instead. What we get here is time spent with this dimensions Joker and Harley as they’re bringing a nuclear bomb into the park in order to cause just a little bit of mischief. The dynamic between the two is problematic for many people and I totally get that, but seeing them in this way here where she’s beholden to him makes for some good stuff to work through, especially in the banter department between them. He’s got his big plan and fills her in on it in pieces and not even full pieces when you get down to it. His control over her is obvious and when we get that big moment when he smacks her away so that he can deal with Batman himself it just reinforces how bad the relationship is.
It is curious how all of this plays out though as we get everyone coming in to deal with the Joker once the distraction is done with. The build up of the power being aligned there is impressive, and it certainly freaks out Harley with what her Mister J will have to deal with, which is made all the better with Santucci’s artwork. While there’s little to no dialogue for most of this among the heroes, Santucci gets to have a lot of fun in bringing them out and having them arrive as it builds that sense of what’s about to hit. The last couple of pages and panels of it delivers it in a big way as everything seems to go beyond what you’d expect from this particular world based on what we’ve seen so far, but it’s just really well presented.
In Summary:
Injustice is ever closer to the end here and I’m really curious to see how they’re going to bring it all together and wrap it up so that it can segue into the game storyline. It does feel like there’s a good bit of ground to cover but part of that just depends on how full circle it’ll go and what we’ll end up with. I’m definitely enjoying this little detour, particularly with Xermanico’s artwork the last time around and Santucci’s this time, but I’m also itching to get back to what we had in the series timeline proper as events have definitely been picking up there.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: August 30th, 2016
MSRP: $0.99