The close of one story, the opening of another.
Creative Staff:
Story: Cullen Bunn
Art: Blacky Shepherd
Colors: Adriano Augusto
What They Say:
The new Voltron Force has defeated Haggar’s Robeasts and driven back the invading forces. But before they can celebrate their victory, they must defeat one last enemy – one with a titanic robotic body and the cruel cunning of a conquering warlord.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The final chapter of this new miniseries arrives and it’s again an interesting one in what it attempts to do. In an effort to possibly jump start a new cast of character and storyline, From the Ashes has to cover a lot of ground while respecting the past. The past is woven through this final installment as well as we see Jayce and Vega as old men wandering the desert looking for the place to store the keys to Voltron until they’re needed again. It’s all in the hope that they won’t be and that the peace accords will stick, but running this parallel to the fight in the present time undercuts it because the peace didn’t last and bad things are still going down. Since part of the premise has been that there hasn’t been a need and that meant we got a lot of inexperienced teams over the years that had nothing to do, it just shows that the proper vigilance wasn’t set in the past from the original members.
The present day material has some of the current group dealing with the events of the previous issue and all the destruction that was caused, something that definitely weighs on them. It’s a decent if brief moment because it at least humanizes them with some concern. Of course, it doesn’t take long for just one more Robeast to show up and cause even more destruction, turning a large area into chaos and likely killing a lot more. Even worse is that one of the reasons it happened is because most of them didn’t keep the keys on themselves but actually left them in their rooms – in the building that just got destroyed! Yeah, a really good lesson to learn right now. It’s comically awful in how it plays out and it leads into the group doing their best to overcome and face this last Robeast with all that they can muster while being worn down and in some cases wounded.
Amid all of this we also see things going on up in the mercenary crew’s ship where things are dicey with the loss or Gr’wrar that last time around. While there’s dialogue about who should lead next, Haggar is just moving forward with her own plans, which is what we see throughout the book on the planet with the Robeast attack. It’s a kind of odd piece up in orbit as it takes place as there’s a sense of disconnect from the rest of the book – on top of the flashbacks to the distant past, and that it all ends in destruction and the supposed death of Haggar doesn’t exactly give it any meaning. It’s just a piece that’s there in the end to pad it out and try and show that things were going on, but beyond Haggar and Gr’wrar there wasn’t a lot of character material there to work with – and those two have little enough as it is.
In Summary:
Voltron: From the Ashes is a mess of a series. It’s caught between the past and the present and is written like a half thought out idea for the opening episode or two of a new kids TV series. It pays some homage to the past throughout the run yet these areas are just distracting and don’t add anything. The new team didn’t even get on board until past the halfway mark of the run and they weren’t exactly an engaging bunch themselves. While I like Voltron in a general sense and have watched pretty much all of the original material over the years, From the Ashes is pretty much why I dislike Western attempts at building onto the franchise as they invariably miss why it works. There are decent touches here and there but I can’t figure out who the real audience for this truly is.
Grade: C
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: March 9th, 2016
MSRP: $3.99
