Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

Here we go, boys and ghouls, the “Tomorrowverse” is officially on, as we now have our second film in this subfranchise. That title is a little on the silly side, but it is a fair sight better than “DCAMU,” and I’m hoping the number of times I have to type that particular acronym will now be fewer and further between. Justice Society: World War II is a narrative about the current-day Flash, Barry Allen (Matt Bomer), apparently traveling into the past as a result of moving so fast that he breaks the Speed Force barrier. Finding himself in the middle of World War II, the fastest man alive finds himself face-to-face with the Flash of the past, Jay Garrick (Armen Taylor), as well as a team of commandos who are operating on behalf of the Allies. There’s Hourman (Mathew Mercer), who can take a serum of his own invention that provides him with super strength and durability for an hour, but which he cannot take more than once per twenty-four hour cycle; Hawkman (Omid Abtahi), an infinitely reincarnated ancient Egyptian who possesses wings; Black Canary (Elysia Rotaru), a street-level vigilante and occasional scofflaw who harnesses sound as a weapon via her sonic scream; and the group’s leader, the Amazonian Wonder Woman (Stana Katic), as well as her longtime boyfriend and U.S. Army liaison Steve Trevor (Chris Diamantopoulos). Together, they are on a special mission to stop Hitler’s ongoing search for supernatural artifacts that he hopes will give him an edge in the war. 

I’m still not won over by this art style, but it does fit a bit better here, with the thick line animation being more akin to the cartoonery of decades past. It still feels a bit Venture Bros. for something that’s supposed to be taken a bit more seriously, but within the context of this being a story set in a different time it manages to work, more or less. If this were the aesthetic solely of this time period (which, spoiler alert, is actually a different timeline, meaning that they’re going multiversal in only the second film of this new subfranchise—yikes), I’d be more accepting, but I guess for as many of these as I’m going to have to watch (four to eight, depending on how you count things), I’m just going to have to stomach it. For what it’s worth, before starting this project, I had already watched the upcoming-within-this-project Legion of Superheroes of my own volition—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love Supergirl—and found it less distracting there, although it’s entirely possible that I assumed it was a one-off and not the defining visual style of a film series. 

There’s not much to say about this one. It falls right in the middle ranking of these movies: solid, but unremarkable. I guess it’s fun that Matt Bomer and Stana Katic are together again after they previously played Superman and Lois Lane, respectively, all the way back in Superman: Unbound, if you’re into that kind of thing. As far as character work, the Flash/Iris relationship is really thin, but the stuff between Trevor and Wonder Woman, who has promised to marry him “one day” but who rejects each individual proposal, is probably the most interesting thing about this flick. Their ongoing incomplete engagement serves as a kind of good luck charm to get them through the war, and we start to believe in its efficacy just as much as they do, until that luck finally runs out. It’s the emotional crux on which this narrative hangs, and it reads and even elicits a twinge in the heartstrings, even if it never manages to pluck them. It’s also a welcome reprieve to see what may well be the only team-up movie in forty-odd movies that doesn’t feature Batman, especially given that the next few are set to be very Bat-heavy. The perfect place for this movie is on a Saturday afternoon on Cartoon Network ten years ago. Where it belongs now is where it is: near the end of an assembly line that’s starting to wind down (like Cartoon Network now). Not bad, but not special.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond