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. 

After a semi-successful attempt at horror with Justice League vs. Teen Titans, we return to the ongoing animated cinematic universe with another horror-adjacent picture as well as a revisitation of supernatural themes. Following an opening sequence in which the big three—Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman—each deal with acts of violence instigated by normal civilians seeing other people as monstrous demons, we find DC’s resident occultist, we get our first glimpse of John Constantine (voiced by Matt Ryan, who played the character in live action on his own short-lived live action series that premiered in the 2014 TV season, and was later imported into the CW’s “Arrowverse” proper). He and Jason Blood (Ray Chase), a functionally immortal former medieval knight permanently bonded to a noble demon named Etrigan, are playing poker against some of Hell’s bigwigs. When Constantine wins big, it turns into a magic fight, in which Constantine and Blood/Etrigan emerge victorious. Elsewhere, Batman, who has faced off against magical villains multiple times, remains skeptical about the supernatural elements of his current cases, until he begins to receive messages telling him to seek out Constantine. To do so, he must first reunite with an old flame, the stage magician Zatanna (Camilla Luddington), who supplements her prestidigitation with real sorcery. She reveals that the messages he has been receiving are from Boston “Deadman” Brand (Nicholas Turturro), a former acrobat who was killed mid-act and who is now a roaming spirit with the ability to possess the living in order to fight crime. Once this “Justice League Dark” is assembled, they learn that their fight has something to do with the long presumed-dead villain Destiny, and that reality hangs in the balance. 

Personal confession time: Zatanna is one of my favorite comic book characters. I’m revealing my age a little here, but back when I still had a Tumblr, my custom background was a repeating image of Zatanna’s face from Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers run, which was one of the first comics that I read and, although it’s not as fondly remembered now as it once was, it was formative for me. I wish that she was in her more traditional magician’s outfit in this instead of the goofy ass New 52 costume that they’ve stuck her in here (it may be purely to make the animation easier, but the fact that they’ve given her detached sleeves here instead of those fishnet gauntlets from the comic book improves this look a solid 10%), but at least we’ll always have Young Justice for that, at least until Max cycles it off to some internet backwater like they’ve done with so much other programming. I also really like Ryan’s take on Constantine, and he’s played the character across so many mediums now that I can’t help but feel like he’s stamped himself onto the character just as much as the late Kevin Conroy did with Batman. There’s something deliciously Kolchak-like about his portrayal; everywhere that Constantine goes, everybody knows him, and they all hate his guts. It’s fun. 

As far as the horror elements go, this one is more understated than JLvTT. How scary it is depends on how weirded out you are by the demons that we meet. It’s frontloaded a little bit in that regard, as when we see the points of view of the characters who are enspelled to see demons in the form of those around them, the monsters they are seeing are truly repulsive and nauseating. The ultimate villain of the piece isn’t as imposing or uncannily inhuman as Trigon was, and while the magical fight at the end is cool, it doesn’t have that opening-scene-of-Wishmaster viscerality that made JLvTT stand out. That doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive or interesting, however. In fact, as this one gets to do a big magic battle that doesn’t come down to a big punch-’em-up at the end. Those vary in quality, but I can say that having watched so many of these in quick succession, a lot of them have become an undifferentiated battle sequence in my memories, if I retain any of those parts at all. This could have easily degenerated into a blue-beam-versus-red-beam fight as well, but some real detail went into differentiating the kinds of magic that each character wields and creating a sequence in which they work together and in conflict with each other at certain points. Like I said, it’s just not scary. But it is cool. 

Speaking of cool, we have to talk about the omnipresence of Batman in this series. So far, this seventh film is the fourth “Justice League” title, while all three other films have been “Batman” movies, and of the ones that have “Justice League” in the title, he’s been one of the major players in those plots as well, with him being the only member of the League in this movie with more than five minutes of screentime. It’s clear that DC Animation knows that he’s the moneymaker, and they’re not afraid to milk his presence for all that it’s worth, or overutilize him the same way that Marvel did Wolverine in the nineties or Star Wars is still doing with Darth Vader. Those aren’t positive comparisons, but I don’t think that this is as detrimental to the product. I would probably feel differently if this wasn’t following right on the heels of The Killing Joke, so I’m willing to account for viewer saturation fatigue as I remind myself once again that these films were never meant to be watched so shortly after one another. I just felt it was worth noting that the Leaguer most closely associated with the “dark” Justice League of the comics was Wonder Woman, which makes sense as she is a demigoddess and therefore a magical being. It’s Batman here for purely marketing purposes, and although that hasn’t created a negative effect yet, any time that becomes the case, the art itself declines.

Narratively, this one felt a bit like a Clive Barker novel. There’s a sequence in the movie where Constantine and Zatanna have to go into an enspelled victim’s mind, and the villain takes advantage of them being out of play in the physical world to make a move on them there. In order to do so, it creates a monster out of shit by backing up all of the toilets in the hospital where the man lies comatose. I know for sure that there was a shitmonster in Everville, and although I wouldn’t bet money on it, I think that there’s one in Imajica as well (as with these movies, I read those two in too-close proximity to one another and there’s a few things that are blended together in my recollection). That lends this rendition of Constantine a little bit of Barker’s Harry D’Amour character, which mixes well with Constantine’s constant—no pun intended—escapes from the consequences of his actions at the expense of those around him. It really comes back to bite him in the ass in this one, and it’s well-conceived. This one also feels like it can be watched separately from the rest of this series, if you’re just a Constantine (or Zatanna) fan and can’t be arsed with consuming the others. It’s a little more cheaply made than some of the others, but the seams are still pretty intact. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond