STORY BY J.M. DeMatteis, Ray Fawkes

ART BY Mikel Janin, Vicente Cifuentes, Guillermo Ortego, Francis Portela

Blight is the Jungian Shadow projection or manifestation of all of Humanity’s fears and evil thoughts. Unlike other stories which claim evil is an outside antagonist influencing people’s actions, evil in Fawkes and Matteis story is created by people themselves. When the Crime Syndicate invaded earth causing massive amounts of death and destruction, people’s fears and anger enhanced Blight’s strength and presence until it became it’s own devastating force. This imbalance between good and evil disrupted the natural order of Earth thereby forcing heroes like Swamp Thing and new Justice League Dark member Nightmare Nurse to find a way to restore balance. Meanwhile, Constantine remains self-invested in finding his lost lover Zatana. This was a nice throwback to the silver age of DC comics when writers would borrow heavily from new age philosophies.

With two writers, it’s impressive the characterization of everyone remained consistent. This keeps the story focused and although there are times the characters get in their own way, such as John Constantine, the story never undermines the characters in order to gain a cheap win. For example, Nightmare Nurse goes against her antagonistic nature in order to heal her team mates. Phantom Stranger goes against the league in order to save his friend. Constantine ends up being exiled for his bias towards self preservation. However, got to give Constantine credit for his uncanny ability to find a way to be naked around every female character in this story. Although we see character development, the writers never go against their protagonist’s natures. Each motivation, flaw, and strength makes the characters believable and relatable.

Another excellent feat is this is a eighteen issue story arc, yet it never slows down by throwing in filler and fluff. The action is steady but they weight it down with just the right amount of exposition boxes to give it the needed tone and danger. With an eighteen issue story arc of adrenaline action it could have been easy to just let the action push the story along; however, the writers take this opportunity to use inner dialogue boxes to further flesh out each person’s motivation. This is a nice contrast to some of the other Forever Evil story arcs which have villains being evil for evil sake or other shallow and unimaginative plot development.

Despite the heavy concept and high octane pacing, the story arc still manages to find room for humor to completely round out the story’s dynamic. The epitome of this comes when the protagonists are asking the great and powerful God for help and the writers rip a page from Wizard of Oz. Yep, the voice of god comes through a dog who is a mirror image of Toto and explains to John Constantine that he really does have a heart. Needless to say, it doesn’t take long before Constantine grows tired and walks out on God’s divine ability to state the obvious and take credit for other peoples work. Relax, this is a story where one of the most powerful heroes is a talking tree trunk. It isn’t exactly scripture although there was that talking bush that one time. Hmm, with all the other biblical references it wouldn’t be too far fetched for Matteis and Fawkes to write a scene about the Parliament of Trees speaking to Moses. After all, half the fun of reading Justice League Dark and Trinity of Sin is to see how the writers weave different religious mythology into the DC world.

Overall, Forever Evil: Blight is definitely one of the better installments. Although it lacks A list villains and heroes, the readers will inevitably care for each player involved, even the villains are able to earn the readers sympathy. In addition, these writers have proven they are capable of more than sitting on the sidelines cheering on the main Crossover event. Instead, they have crafted together an intense ride which showcases the difficulty of flawed individuals with conflicting motivations working together to achieve one goal.