Justice League Dark #5

Use your spells not your fists!

Justice League Dark begins with a rash of strange occurrences happening across the country. This used to happen every few issues in Shade the Changing Man.

My basement is still flooded with Vic 20s.

In one of her narration boxes, Madame Xanadu admits that it was she who separated June Moon from The Enchantress. How? I don't know. Why? Probably because it needed to be done for something else to be done to help out some obscure future event that she can see. And at what cost? Cost is something magic types never consider. Or they do consider it and they just don't care. They're kind of like modern day pharmaceuticals. They solve one problem while generating a host of crappy symptoms. So Xanadu freed June Moone which caused the whole country to turn to shit. Eh. It couldn't be helped!

John Constantine appears to help June Moone escape the giant Enchantress made from little Enchantresses. Like a Magic Katamari.

Isn't John Dee the guy in the first Sandman story who traps all of the people in the diner in the issue called '24 Hours'? And Choronzon was a major demon player in Morrison's The Demon. I think.

June hops into the magic circle with John before the scene cuts to Shade, Deadman, Zatanna, and Xanadu. Their discussion about how to proceed is mostly composed of Deadman shouting at them. Deadman ditches them all to go help June Moone. The rest M-Vest to the Envelope Farm and find themselves in the Rotten Teeth Tornado.

The title of this comic may be Justice League Dark but it's as much Shade the Changing Man as ever!
The JLD aren't overpowered by the rotten teeth like those wimps in the normal Justice League were. But each member of the team begins seeing things and start slipping from reality. Shade is brought back to his senses when Zatanna makes out with him. But soon after, Zatanna and Xanadu begin speaking nonsense.

Through speaking with June, Constantine realizes the spell which Xanadu used to separate Moone and Enchantress was the rhyme that June kept trying to remember. Constantine also learned that Moone's personality being buried inside the Enchantress actually kept the Enchantress sane and in check. June Moone was both sanity and conscious to The Enchantress. Without June, the Enchantress will just destroy the world. So Constantine begins saying the rhyme that will merge the two when Boston Brand shows up trying to be chivalrous.

What is Deadman going to do? Fly through him a bunch of times?

Deadman does try to possess Constantine but finds Constantine's mind/soul/essence disgusting. Deadman does the ghost equivalent of vomiting and is ejected from Constantine's body and giving Constantine time to finish up his rhyme. June Moone and Enchantress are once again merged and the chaos ends.

During this, Mindwarp appears in his seizure soul and doesn't actually do anything. And really, none of them did anything except for Constantine. But none of that was really the point anyway. As I predicted, the whole thing was caused by Xanadu simply to get these people together to stop a certain future from coming true. But once the Enchantress issue is dealt with, none of them stick around anyway. And so Xanadu failed.

But her failure is only going to mean something horrible is coming and that horror will have to be dealt with by the same group of magic folk. They'll probably realize after the next catastrophe that it might be wise to at least get everyone else's contact number so they don't have to spend four issues finding each other.

If these guys were normal Super Heroes, they would have formed a group and thought up a cool name and started wearing matching costumes after their great big semi-success. But it wouldn't be believable for Constantine or Shade or Mindwarp (probably) to join a group. So they're going to need at least one more near world ending catastrophe to convince them.