Constantine: The House of Mystery (2022)

DC Showcase Animated Shorts:

Constantine: The House of Mystery (2022)

Dir. Matt Peters

C: THoM is a kind of epilogue to the Justice League Dark: Apokolips War (2020) movie, showing what happened to John Constantine after he made his fateful decision therein. [1]

He's now in the House of Mystery and, as is normal for the magic user, his luck is mostly bad. But he's not alone. Many of his friends are there, too. That's good, right? Right?

The story is a 'time reset' scenario, wherein we witness the same starting event more than once, but it moves at a speedy pace and there's a welcome level of dark humour throughout that helps it not feel repetitive.

If he's to escape the cycle, he'll need to use his cunning and his cynicism yet again.

Matt Ryan reprises the role. The honed level of wry wit in his portrayal works better for me in animation than it did in live action.

Batman: Soul of the Dragon (2021)

Batman: Soul of the Dragon (2021)

Dir. Sam Liu

It would be natural to assume that Soul of the Dragon is an actual Batman story, seeing as how it's got his name in the title and he's on the cover art, but it's more accurately a story that just happens to feature Batman a few times throughout.

It's more of a Bruce Wayne (David Giuntoli) story, showing via flashback the time he spent in the Himalayas learning martial arts, honing skills that his Batman persona relies on in the modern era.

At the same time, training under the same sensei (James Hong), are five other students, all of whom are lesser-known DC characters, namely Richard Dragon (Mark Dacascos), Ben Turner (Michael Jai White), Shiva (Kelly Hu), Jade Nguyen (Jamie Chung), and Rip Jagger (Chris Cox).

You can see now why they put Batman in the title. The others may be familiar to long-time comic fans, but for many movie-only fans they may be total unknowns, except for maybe Shiva.