Letting go of that baggage.
Creative Staff:
Story: Adam Warren
Art: Carla Speed McNeil
Colors: Carla Speed McNeil
Letterer: Carla Speed McNeil
What They Say:
Empowered and Sistah Spooky’s hellish high-school ordeal climaxes with a brutal hallway battle pitting the nearly powerless pair against Spooky’s final surviving classmates, who have ascended to blonde godhood after inheriting all the hellscape’s infernal magic. Can our hellbound heroines finally ”graduate”–or will they be lethally expelled?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The series finally draws to a close with another sizable gap between issues, which I have no real problem with in one sense because Carla Speed McNeil puts in an amazing amount of detail and work into each issue and Adam Warren keeps us going with a whole lot of dialogue to it all. But at the same time it is very, very, hard for a lot of people to keep the momentum and energy going with a book when it’s four months between issues. Thankfully, this series has largely worked a familiar pattern so it’s just been changing up the trappings for most of it while the finale expands on it a bit in order to tie it all together and move our characters forward once more.
The finale works events as you’d expect as we get Emp and Spooky, depowered still, in the hands of Ashley and Ashlee. Queen Bee Ashley has been waiting for this forever and is intent on acquiring so much power because of it. There’s a lot of great intensity to how she’s presented here, including the lettering, but the coloring with the purple really clicks for me. Her view of how to handle the power and what it really means to be a bully is wonderfully handled as we see both Emp and Spooky really looking at this like there’s no real solution or out to be had here. But the truth of the matter is, where there’s two women like this and a whole lot of power to gain, betrayal is in the cards. And Asheel does just that in order to have her final revenge on Spooky.
With Ashlee, she throws Spooky into a dream piece that has her all curled up with Hannah in a really fun way, giving her something that means a lot and tempts her from reconnecting with the world. The dialogue between the two is fun and it leaves you wanting more of that, but the sacrifice is what has helped define who Spooky is. And she also knows the reality of who Ashlee is and exactly what she gave up in order to become powerful like this. I can imagine some of this is going to be problematic for some readers since it’s race-changing material through the power of a demon and all that, but it also feels like that it was a given that a few would be changed in such a drastic way to get power. But it’s an interesting way to get Ashlee to handle herself in the end, making it all the more problematic for our Infernal Service Provider.
In Summary:
I’ve enjoyed some of the Empowered spinoff books over the last few years and this one definitely played to some creative moments throughout it even if the structure of almost every issue was the same. There’s a good energy between the creative here to bring it all together and it made me grin for a lot of it even if the repetitive elements let you know how it would all end up. There’s a lot to like here and I can imagine the trade will be a lot of fun for those that wait for it. The worst aspect of this run was the release schedule as they really killed a lot of enjoyment even if you understand why it went like it did. I’m definitely curious to see how it would hold up in a collected edition.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: October 17th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
