The trick of it all revealed.
Creative Staff:
Story: Brian Buccellato
Art: Bruno Redondo, Juan Albarran
What They Say:
The final chapter of Year Three. Differences are temporarily put aside to stop the threat created by Mxyzptlk and Trigon. And the final fate of John Constantine is revealed.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The final installment of the third year of Injustice has arrived and like most of the series, it does things in a quick and kind of chaotic manner that works even though it shouldn’t. One of the appealing things about this series for me has been the fact that it can just do what it wants and run with it while not worrying about impacting dozens of other books. There’s a freeing sense about it in that way as it plays with the field as a whole, minus those obviously killed off or removed from the table already, and that allows it a certain unpredictability, such as in the previous issue where we see Huntress getting her neck snapped. This run has been fun since Constantine has been a key player, though he shifted more behind the scenes in the last few issues.
The push here to stop Trigon and Mxyzptlk from pretty much destroying everything is where the focus had turned and the idea of using Dr. Fate and Billy Batson through his transformation process to try and zap the two major powers elsewhere so they’d be contained is a risky but smart one. It also allows for the book to finish things in this regard in a lickity split kind of fashion since they’re running out of time to really work it. The drama is all appropriately there as young Billy is reasonably freaked out by this, especially as all these adults encourage him on into the chaos outside to work with Fate to do this. The potential fly in the ointment is Raven waking up just as things are about to hit and she ends up flying out to her father thanks to Sinestro filling her in. While she doesn’t succeed, it’s easy to imagine her becoming a bigger player in the next year of this series with what’s happened to her and how she must view most everyone now that Trigon is gone, gone, gone.
The epilogue side of the fight is where things are interesting, even as it does return to a kind of status quo. For Superman, he realizes just how badly his mangled things by allowing Batman to make it so personal in the fight and that he intends to shift away from that because their cause is right. The flip side is seeing Batman and his group, having been hidden by Zatanna when she rescued them after the battle, coming to the realization of just how badly he and the others got played by Constantine, who brought Trigon into all of this for his own agenda. It’s a pretty smart little moment as Constantine basically reveals why he did it all, and it totally fits into his character traits, and how it just hits Bruce hard when the reality of it all sinks in – and that Detective Chimp realized it weeks earlier before he died. It’s a kind of comical ending in a way, but the event has overall served to remove a few players for the moment and realign aspects of each team.
In Summary:
I had gotten into this particular season through a free issue back in the late fall of last year online and that ended up causing me to pick up everything I had missed for this specific series. I had a heck of a lot of fun with it because of the way it’s on its own and just runs with all sorts of ideas and combinations, even if we have things that don’t work well or don’t make sense. It shifts in its views quite often and there’s a certain compressed nature to various events that’s a disservice to the material overall because it really needs to be explored. But what they try to do here is pretty much tell a big story in sweeping colors and scale with punctuated character moments that hit well. It’s a very fun series with a low barrier to entry that made for great reading week after week without having to keep up with dozens of other books or the spiraling impact of others on this book. I’m definitely game for year four.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: March 10th, 2015
MSRP: $0.99
