“I always play fair. Read the ink.”
Last issue, the time displaced heroes from We Are Yesterday made peace with the fact they are merely echoes of their real selves and will eventually fade from existence. So, leading an expendable team already at death’s door, Mr. Terrific dives straight into Hell to confront Neron, a demon intent on supercharging the villains of earth while its biggest heroes are busy in the Omega Tournament. But even with their expendability, the Terrific Ten are not prepared for the horror to come.
Opening with a narration from Kingdom Come‘s Alan Scott, we are immediately thrown into the fire as he realizes the scale of his magic powers pales in comparison to the realm of devils. There is hardly time to blink before bodies begin to drop, and in rather surprisingly brutal fashions that add a further tinges of tragedy to their limited short existences. While not every echo of these heroes is written with a depth, with Owlwoman in particular getting very little to do, the premise feels wholly fulfilled by the issue’s effective sense of dread. Alan Scott and Guy Gardner are particularly helpful in getting such a tone across.
However, undoubtedly the strongest aspect of this issue, and of the series as a whole, is once again Mr. Terrific himself. As a hero of many years, he has led or directed many such teams, namely the JSA and more recently the Terrifics. Michael Holt has always been a very focused character; he’s a man with a lot of mileage; thus has grown as a leader, an evolution which is very much on display here. Whereas previous plot threads such as the Air Wave incident showcased a more tenderhearted Terrific that was overwhelmed from coordinating an unprecedentedly large team, this arc returns him to his logical locked in self. After all, with an expendable team backing him, despite his sympathies, his own life is really the only one on the line, and that really speaks to the complexity of his character.
As DC’s flagship book, JLU was an obvious pick for a book centred on what the rest of earth’s heroes are doing amidst the events of DC.K.O. And while it does serve that purpose very eloquently—a pleasant shift after the inconsistencies of We Are Yesterday—it acts as a rather self contained story that is more interested in propelling its own established plotlines rather than just serving the overarching story. Not to mention the focus on magic and the supernatural is dialed up to eleven, even acting as a spiritual successor to Waid and Howard Porter’s 1995 miniseries Underworld Unleashed with the return of Neron.
As horror fanatics, we can really appreciate the inspiration Dan Mora takes from J-Horror and classic western horror in this month’s installment. The setting of Hell itself is more basic but he makes up for that with the overall crazy and imaginative visual style each demon has. The most striking design out of these demons is the Gatekeeper, who looks a lot like the average creepy Japanese Medusa-esque monster you’d see in stuff like Ju-On and The Ring with some crazy looking snakes for hair. The design is insanely simple but Mora uses that to his advantage as he plays nod to those movies, which is highlighted by a haunting close-up of the Gatekeeper as she reacts to Mr. Terrific’s taunting.
Horror elements aside, Mora and Tamra Bonvillain just rocks this issue with some very clever action set pieces and dynamisms. We’d say that this is probably the closest his work has gotten to the vibe that Howard Porter once had with Grant Morrison’s JLA, pushed even further by the inclusion of character iterations that were active at that time such as Aquaman and Superman Blue. If this book weren’t already a love letter to that iconic run, and to 90s DC on a whole, then I don’t know what is.
Justice League Unlimited #13 is yet another hit, and is among the strongest of DC.KO.’s tie-ins. Effective horror and the varying themes of self-sacrifice shown by the Mr. Terrific and his time-displaced Suicide Squad make for an occasionally disturbing, often tragic, and consistently entertaining action romp. And while not all of the Ten have very important things to do in this issue, the tension promises that this underworld mission is far from over.
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