The truth revealed?
Creative Staff:
Story: Tom King
Art: Barnaby Bagenda
What They Say:
The Omega Men are back as their space-spanning series continues! The team’s mysterious plan for Kyle Rayner reaches its shocking endgame when the outlaws bypass the energy shield surrounding the off-limits world of Voorl! In doing so, will they discover the true cost of life in Vega?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Omega Men has been one of the most engaging series of the past year for me and while each issue doesn’t have a ton of story payoff in a sense, each issue has been an immense payoff in storytelling and visuals alone. We’ve gone through a lot of material in the first seven issues, exploring the concept of several worlds, several characters, religious elements, and the whole dynamic of this closed system that the Citadel has an iron grip on that even keeps the Guardians out of it. It’s exotic and frightening at the same time and Bagenda and King have brought it to life in a fantastic way. All of that has lead to this point, which if a bit chaotic, gets to the heart of the matter and puts everything on Kyle Rayner’s shoulders.
There’s a good bit of back and forth in the timeline spread across a couple of worlds and locations and that makes it a little more complicated than I think it needs to be, but the reality is simple and devastating. With a whole lot of worlds facing a Kryptonian style crisis and the Citadel having access to what can be injected into those planets cores in order to stave it off, they’re more than willing to do it since it’ll be of huge benefit to them. The downside is that they have to essentially sacrifice one of their worlds with seven billion inhabitants in order to do it. And not just any world, but Voorl, a world protected by a shield that keeps them separate from the rest of what the Citadel controls. It paints a huge target on them in the eyes of the Citadel and it makes complete sense that they’d do this. But it’s such a level of genocide that it truly is boggling to take it in when you really think about it and examine it and that adds to the impact from the few scenes we get as well as the bigger picture pieces with the before and after imagery.
It’s simply brutal.
Where it’s personalized is when the Omega Men land on Voorl, having gotten the keys to get through the shield, and Kyle gets the truth of all of this from Kalista. And through the small but equally important backstories of others with their own complicity or involvement in it. Each is destructive on its own, but I thought what DOC had to go through was just utterly devastating regardless of level of sentience. Kalista gets to the heart of the matter here and a good part of it is an unboxing of Kyle’s personality and why he was the ideal one for this, which as he talks about it he knows that it’s true as well on multiple levels, even as he argues against it to some degree. The dialogue throughout is fantastic, but Kyle and Kalista’s material, with a nod to Tigorr as well, just digs deep into some fantastic stuff that makes you reread it multiple times.
In Summary:
King and Bagenda have crafted an amazing story here that has hit one of its biggest high points yet and has me craving the next installment immediately. Each issue has built this narrative in a great way with all its twists and turns that now take on a new context with what we know and in turn demands a full rereading, which is the sign for me of a fantastic series. A lot of this would not have worked without the simply excellent artwork from Barnaby Bagenda as he continues to do some fantastic layout designs that draws you deep into the story while providing character designs that just grab me in a huge way. I love this book and can’t wait to just consume it all at once when all is said and done.
Grade: A
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: January 27th, 2016
MSRP: $2.99
