The origin of Brittania slows down events as the war starts to escalate.
What They Say:
Lois Lane stands on the brink of revealing to the world the extent of the Amazons’ ruthlessness–assuming she manages to survive a betrayal by one of the Resistance’s own! Plus, learn the history behind Britannia!
The Review:
When it comes to this series, it’s another that’s been fairly uneven but has had some bright spots. The opening issue did a good job of showing us the way things went to hell for Lois during the upheaval and how she ended up in England after that. Getting a firsthand look at things that the Amazon’s were doing in Diana’s name, without Diana knowing, gave her an edge and ended up making her rather wanted when she snuck out of there while doing the work of Cyborg. Unfortunately, it went down pretty badly after that when she hooked up with the resistance as lead by Grifter as the whole thing seemed poorly executed and generally kind of wonky. I liked the diverse group he had with him, especially the Canterbury Circket, but they didn’t really seem to have a whole heck of a lot of a real plan.
With this issue, it’s almost all about the action but Lois herself gets the short end of the stick in the end. The book actually opens with Penny Black’s origin story of how she became Brittania and why they’re going after the 2.0 armor suit that’s hidden underground in London along with a lot of other military hardware. It’s not a bad origin story, brief as it is, but it reminded me a lot of The Philadelphia Experiment in a way which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it’s an awkward start to the issue since it has only so many pages to tell its tale. Brittania does dominate a nice chunk of it, and Lois gets to help out along the way, so we do have a fair amount of action through her on it.
We also get two catalyst points here that help to set up the finale when it comes to Flashpoint itself. The first is that Brittania gets an early one on one encounter with Diana that she didn’t expect so quickly but it allows her to show the Queen what’s been done in her name on the island since their conquest of it, from the prisons to the experimentations. To say she’s shocked is an understatement and it definitely sets her off, leading to things we’ve seen in other miniseries where she’s ready to have some heads roll over it. The other thing that happens here is we get Lois’ message out to the general population about what’s going on which reinforces their desire to stop the Amazons and the war in general. Unfortunately, it’s a short sequence overall and the impact of it was lessened in a diferent book as Lois’ fate is dealt with by the Amazons that were hunting her. Penny Black had far more important things to handle than making sure Lane was safe before leaving.
Digital Notes:
This Comixology edition of Flashpoint – Lois Lane and the Resistance contains the main cover as seen with the print edition with no variants or other extras included.
In Summary:
This was a series that started off with an interesting viewpoint but didn’t manage to hold onto it for long as it went down some more predictable and less interesting paths. I like Lois Lane as a character and having her as an involved participant of the war is a nice way to shake off some of the journalistic approaches that stymie her at times. But that didn’t really factor in here and we instead had a fairly straightforward action story that didn’t get a lot of its material really dealt with as the finale focused more on Brittania and Lane with a nice small dose of Hyde to flesh it all out. The series could have been a lot more, and could have gone more out of the box than it did, but it had its moments. Certainly not a bad spin, but the potential for something more is pretty obvious.
Grade: C