There’s a rather large blackness splitting the fabric of time and space. Two teams of heroes from two different eras are joining together to combat the darkness. Now they just have to figure out exactly how to do that in Justice League vs. The Legion of Super-Heroes #2. Writer Brian Micheal Bendis juggles a great many characters in a very small span of pages that are rendered with striking clarity by artist Scott Godlewski and colorist Ryan Cody. Gold Lantern rests at the center of a largely entertaining issue with a huge ensemble. The unknown menace at the heart of the series isn’t terribly clear. Still, there’s more than enough to keep the pages turning through the end of the second issue of the mini-series.

Green Arrow awakens in bed. It isn’t his own. Wonder Woman appears to have been watching him sleep. Only it wasn’t Wonder Woman. Like the rest of the Justice League, he is waking up in the far future. The Great Darkness is splitting its way through space and time. The JLA want to go back to their native time to battle it from their end. Still, the Legion is reluctant to let them do so in light of the instability that might accompany the massive tendrils of mysterious darkness. If they’re going to be able to defeat the anomaly, they’re going to have to do so together.

Bendis opens the issue with a telling of the origin of Gold Lantern. He’s an interesting character contrasted against the darkness that evidently forms the central conflict of the mini-series. From there, the novelty of seeing contemporary heroes lost in the pulpy sci-fi of the far future is largely played on a social level between the two teams. It’s an endearing character-centered approach to establishing the plot. There’s a horror resting on the edge of a weird near-utopia. Bendis is structuring things very carefully, but there isn’t a great deal of forward momentum in the plot as the six-part series ends its second chapter. 

Godlewski and Cody deliver the world of the future to the page in sharp, crisp lines with minimal extraneous detail. It’s all so very, very clean. Intricacies of human emotion play across characters’ faces in subtle manipulations of line. The architecture in the background is gorgeous in places. Cody’s graceful transitions of simple color throughout the issue give the Great Darkness an ominously sinister look on the page. The purple highlights in and within that darkness are more than a little strange. It’s supposed to look like an amorphous monster of some sort. (That’s kind of the way everyone is reacting to it in the story.) The purple highlights make it look more like a really dark grape jelly than something truly evil.

There are quite a few indicators that Bendis is carefully constructing a big, sweeping plot arc for the six-issue series. It’s kind of difficult to judge a work in progress, but what’s been presented so far lacks a whole lot of narrative momentum leading into the end of its first half. Which will arrive next month. It’s a beautiful-looking interaction between the two teams. Still, as of yet, the real center of the drama hasn’t revealed itself.

Grade: B