The team becomes fully assembled.
Creative Staff:
Story: Fred Van Lente
Art: Maurizio Rosenzweig
What They Say:
The entire team of Resurrectionists has been unlocked, but Lennox is closing in on them. If they want to defeat him, prevent their own deaths, and stop the cycle they’ve been stuck in for thousands of years, they’ll need to pull off an impossible heist as the Sojourn Corporation, a gang of angry criminals, and the NYPD bear down on them. Can Jericho Way and his team steal the past to fight the future?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While my interest in the Resurrectionists has faltered in the last couple of issues, the concept and the approach to it all is still definitely something that I find engaging. The problem, for me, is that it started feeling far too convoluted and without enough clarity to see it through. Of course, it doesn’t help that the book shifted to digital for the couple of issues and that it looks like this is the end of it, but there’s still a great concept here that feels like it just needed another round of refinement and a way to make it feel more cohesive, both in the past and in the present. The past, for me, was far more engaging with what it wanted to present there, as that felt a lot more coherent and accessible. The present day material with Jericho, while not tacked on, felt out of place compared to the rest of the book and even with all the past life aspects, it never made me feel connected to the characters in that form, locked or unlocked.
This installment thankfully gives us a lot of time in the past as we see the group trying to do what they can to work the job and get what they need for their continued lives but also to deal with the threats out there. Getting an in with the Pharaoh, who has set it so no ordinary man can hire them, puts them on the right path but is largely a trap to bring the resurrectionists crew under his control and cement more of his hold on being a lord of the afterlife. There’s some fun in seeing Tao and Sabu in this form, though the naming conventions again make this more complicated than it should be on a monthly basis, and what we get out of it is fun as the caper starts to come together only to fall apart in a way that sets them on their new mission in the present. This is the area I’ll miss the most about the book as it feels like the writer and artist just really had a lot more fun here than in the present and it shows.
The present day isn’t bad, but with it being what feels like a fraction of the past overall in the six issue series, it’s anti-climactic while setting up for where it can go. The main trio have managed to get their initial prize here they were after, but the situation got set up in a bad way where there was no way out for them for the most part, stuck at the end of a pier with a wall of cops at the other end. Naturally, another way out is revealed, but it comes with some sacrifice as the Scout ends up taken down and she provides a little bit of the connection to the past here herself, and to the next life. There’s a good bit of emotion to it and a bond that casts over centuries to make it all engaging, but it again requires the weight of the past to make it effective. The team that exists here at the end is decent, and the shadow of their past selves is what’s driving it, but there’s simply not enough in the present for the characters to connect to them. The idea of the job that they could go on next is certainly appealing, but honestly I’d rather just have a more expansive series about the past fleshed out than this, particularly the Egyptian era days.
In Summary:
Fred Van Lente and Maurizio Rosenzweig put together a pretty intriguing book here, one that practically requires a couple of read throughs and re-reads when new issues come out in order to really connect all the dots. It’s something that suffers a bit from the monthly format because of it. While the series faltered for me along the way in a couple of places, there are so many areas that I’d love to see explored more and more cohesively that I’m craving for this to continue in some form. The concept is an intriguing one and I’m glad that they worked with the Egyptian mythology and really had fun with it in all the flashback sequences. But when the book shifted to the present, it simply felt less compelling and really didn’t feel like it knew what direction it wanted to take beyond the whole unlocking. Hopefully this isn’t the last we’ll see of the Resurrectionists and that they’ll get a new life to further explore the potential here.
Grade: C+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: April 15th, 2015
MSRP: $3.50
