The magic of science.
Creative Staff:
Story: Frank J. Barbiere
Art: Jonathan Lau
What They Say:
Ah, great. Just when Erica’s getting the hang of the Solar powers, she’s gotta deal with magic. Doctor Spektor is in town, to cause chaos and confusion, pretty much just because he can. Find out what happens when indefinite cosmic power meets untamable mystic might!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
You can tell a series is winding down when things start moving fast and it takes unexpected turns in order to accomplish its goals. Solar, Man of the Atom has been a fun series overall, but it also shifted some of its initial plot points out of the book entirely before it decided to just spend time in space with Erica and Phil as they dealt with everything Phil did prior to the book starting. That had its fun and we got to know Erica pretty well and understood a bi more more about Phil as well, but when we go back to Earth things just started to feel a bit uneasy in a way. With its push to having Erica reveal everything to her boyfriend and then run that alongside the nuclear reactor facility being taken over, it was a hard push towards something big where you could sense that change is on the horizon.
With this installment, we get some decent time in establishing a little more about Erica and her past with her father in regards to the complications they had since she struggled with things that he was brilliant at, which leads to all sorts of insecurities. Made even more so by the fact that her brother is good at them and that just created more of a wedge in her mind. Erica has struggled with that over the years as we saw and though they’re working better now because of the situation they’re in, there’s still that core psychological issue there for her. She certainly has trust issues, and having someone like Doctor Spektor show up in the middle of the facility that was under attack and trying to get her to figure out how to deal with it all is definitely big, complicated and messy. But it gets the job done, for the time being at least. Unfortunately for Erica, it shifts her into something completely unexpected.
And that’s a lot of exposition and talk that has her listening to not only Phil and Spektor but also her brother Colin, who reveals that he has a sliver of their father’s powers as well from when the original event happened. What we get through all of this is a push towards some big event to come that’s going to threaten everything and a sense from Phil that Erica has to work with all three of them in order to combine and restore their powers back to the proper balance in order to face what’s to come. Amusingly, especially in regards to Phil, there’s a push towards what happened to them being more about an almost magical event rather than hard science and that something is orchestrating it all. We do get a look at the personification of it towards the end, but most of this issue deals with Erica struggling to understand what it is they’re really trying to say and not exactly believing it since it’s so outlandish. And that’s saying a lot considering what she’s seen and done since the book started.
In Summary:
Since the series pivoted when it got back to Earth, we’ve seen the push moving us towards the finale in order to bring everything to a close in a kind of neat and tidy way. Bringing Colin back isn’t unexpected, but it reminds that there was a whole storyline being set up at the beginning of the series with him and the corporate side which has been ejected completely at this stage. Some of the reveals feel very out of place and it’s more of a wing and a prayer kind of scripting to get things in place to do something big. It may have been planned from the start, but the execution makes it seem anything but that. Erica’s struggles through all of this is definitely fun to watch, with some added context from her youth, and her intent on fixing it by her own strength of will definitely fits her. Spektor’s inclusion was a surprise, but he manages to come across better here than he did in his own book, which is pretty damning. I’m curious to see where it’ll all go at this point, but I again keep finding myself in the position of hoping for a whole reset and another attempt made at the property going forward.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: March 18th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
