Victory’s final fight?
Creative Staff:
Story: Joe Casey
Art: Nathan Fox, Connor Willumsen
What They Say:
Get ready for an all-cosmic, all-action “zap-out”! The search for Captain Victory comes to a climatic head in this star-studded sixth issue! You won’t believe just how far your mind can expand until you read this issue, utilizing an army of artists to deliver the galactic goods! Feel the adrenaline pulsing through you with high-octane artwork from Nick Dragotta, Michel Fiffe, Nathan Fox, Jim Mahfood, Benjamin Marra, Dan McDaid, Tradd Moore, and Grant Morrison! Yes, that Grant Morrison.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While originally billed as an ongoing series, Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers comes to a close here with this installment. And it’s hard to imagine too many people have stuck with it. I was thrilled with the first installment of the book but I struggled heavily with each subsequence issue, reading and re-reading multiple times to try and piece together what the tale was and what writer Joe Casey was trying to say with it. In the end, it really comes down to Victory’s ability to survive seeming anything and everything that the universe throws at him, but that doesn’t make him all that engaging of a character. Especially since the things that were built up in the earlier issues feel largely jettisoned here.
The finale puts all the things in place to have Victory’s crew to do what they can to save him, having arrived at the two main destinations where his not finalized clones have lander. For Klavus, working through time and space to inhabit Dante’s body, he interacts with the young Victor there and tries to get him to realize that he really is part of something bigger and that Dante has, in his own weird way, prepared Victor for it. Conversely, we get some time with the adult Victory that has been gaining reputation on the alien world where he’s been fighting all sorts of things. Amid all that, there’s the whole essence of saving who Victory is while Ranger Central realizes what it is that his crew has done and they demand they return due to all the rules they’ve broken and the chaos caused.
With a fair number of characters in play, a variety of art styles due to the large number of artists used with it and a lot of time spent looking at past exploits of Victory through them, the book has a very chaotic feeling to it. It worked early on to some extent in the series in showing us the different places that events were unfolding, but here it just feels like so much that its overload. And a lot of it is tied into young Victor trying to connect and return through his mind with Klavus to the ship while also dealing with said chaos on the ship itself where they’re contending with attacks on them. It moves through a lot of material and there are intriguing moments, especially some of the past fights that are touched upon, but at the end – even after Victory is largely told that he’s gone above and beyond anyone in history – it feels like we’re back at square one from the start of the series, complete with the big speech from him and the push to deal with new dangers. What dangers? Who knows, it’s all just muddy here.
In Summary:
This series started off with so much promise that I was just smitten with the first issue and still enjoy going back to it. But the rest of the series has left me feeling like I was sold one bill of goods but got another. The finale does bring everything together in the end, but it feels heavily clipped and aborted with the storylines that are going on that there’s no satisfaction with it. Bringing in a slew of guest artists so they can pay their tribute to various aspects of Kirby’s past exploits with it is nice, but the series itself has felt meaningless and without clear direction for some time that it just becomes more noise amid the chaos. I can understand easily how the book got greenlit, but as it progressed it just didn’t know how to engage on an issue by issue basis and I suspect it won’t hold up well in a full series reading either because of the chaotic aspect of the artwork, something that was neat at first but fell apart as it progressed. It’s a fascinating series in some ways, but more of a fascination you have with a wreck that you can’t pull your eyes away from.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: March 25th, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
