My powers of plot prediction are notoriously weak, but bear with me on this. Jeff Lemire is taking over Justice League Dark soon, and he’s adding Black Orchid to the team. At Toronto ComiCON, he said this would be a Black Orchid that “we’ve never seen before.” And here we have Abigail Arcane, freed from the Rot’s mind control … by orchid seeds. And she has orchid powers now. Meanwhile, over in Lemire’s Animal Man this week, who should appear but John Constantine, esteemed member of Justice League Dark. I sense a plan coming together. Maybe Abigail won’t be the new Black Orchid; maybe she’ll just give the powers to someone else. Either way, I can faintly hear the gears turning in Snyder and Lemire’s heads. And that’s why I love reading the Dark books, particularly Swamp Thing: Because it’s the one corner of the DCU with the greatest potential for long-term payoffs. One of the great payoffs of Swamp Thing is Yanick Paquette’s art, though admittedly, there’s not a lot of it here. The transition from Paquette to Marco Rudy is slightly more jarring than usual — Rudy’s a lot less smooth and polished — but their design sensibilities work really well together, and I’m still digging the layouts a lot.