You made it! After four weeks and four issues, you've officially run the NO JUSTICE gauntlet right along with, like, more than half of the DC Universe, and now things are never going to be the same.
But before we start taking a look at the actual fallout from this event (there's a lot), we should probably talk about what actually happened because it's kind of a doozy—but, I mean, what else did you really expect? If you've been following along with the last three issues, total mayhem probably doesn't come as a surprise to you at all. And if you haven't? Go back and catch up! Trust me when I say this isn't a book where you want to just jump into the final issue and hope for the best.
Brainiac’s homeworld of Colu is no more, the cosmic trees have sprouted on Earth, Amanda Waller is ready for the nuclear option, and Vril Dox has decided that our heroes are getting what they deserve. Sure, that’s partly because he's a huge jerk, but he also did just watch his entire planet get reduced to space debris, so I can at least see where he's coming from on this one. If I was a resident of Colu, I wouldn't exactly be impressed with the Justice League either.
Thankfully, Ollie has friends in high places, and Hal and the Green Lantern Corps were able to swoop in and intervene with Vril's plans to make sure that Earth followed in Colu's footsteps with the League hot on their heels. And that’s where things start to get really crazy. To actually stop the Omega Titans from pulling a Colu part two, the League and the GLC had to essentially trick the Titans into believing that one of their own was their meal rather than the planet itself. They launched the "fruit" from each cosmic tree right into the Entropy Titan and watched nature take its horrible, horrible course.
"Nature" in this case meaning a horrifyingly unnatural act of cosmic cannibalism that may or may not be breaking the rules and the structure of the universe itself all over again.
In other words, this is definitely one of those "but at what cost?" situations. The League managed to prevent the Earth from being consumed, but in doing so, may have paved the way for even more problems in the future—ones that might not be so easy to solve. After all, breaking the rules is a solution that is bound to have some diminishing returns.
But for now, in the wake of the remaining Omega Titans’ retreat, we're left with a totally new landscape to worry about. First, as Vril Dox has named it, we've got the "Ghost Space Sector"—the chunk of galaxy in which all the bottled-up planets set free from Colu are going to be making their homes. The problem with this, as Vril pointed out, is that dumping a bunch of formerly isolated worlds into the same galactic neighborhood and expecting them to all get along is a bit of a stretch. This new sector of space is going to need some real work, or it's going to crumble into a war zone almost immediately.
Next, we've got Batman putting together a team of his own with Jefferson Pierce, aka Black Lightning, at the helm. They're going to be a team that can keep the League covered from "the outside," which, if you ask me, sounds suspiciously like the mission statement of the Outsiders, a team we haven't seen around in quite some time. Black Lightning and his new team are going to be coalescing in DETECTIVE COMICS, so our best bet is to keep an eye on them and see just how things are going to shake out. Historically, the Outsiders have teetered on the line of moral ambiguity whenever they're active (something that just so happens to be Batman's specialty), so this new incarnation might mean some tension building between friends and teammates down the line.
Then there's the matter of the new Justice League, under new chairman J'onn J'onzz and...whatever is going on with Lex Luthor. We already know that the Legion of Doom under Luthor's control is something that is coming, but the intricacies of just how this rivalry is going to play out remain a mystery. We know that Luthor has very much tapped into the cosmic force of entropy (his connection to it was stronger than even Deathstroke's, which is saying something), but we don't know what he plans to do with it just yet.
Needless to say, Lex Luthor is a dangerous man regardless, but he's an especially dangerous man when he's on a mission.
In short, I don’t envy this new Justice League. They’re going to have their work cut out for them.
JUSTICE LEAGUE: NO JUSTICE #4 by Scott Snyder, Joshua Williamson, James Tynion IV, Francis Manapul and Hi-Fi is now available in print and as a digital download.
Meg Downey writes about the DC Universe for DCComics.com and covers DC's Legends of Tomorrow for the #DCTV Couch Club. Follow her on Twitter at @rustypolished.