Creative Staff:
Story: Frank Barbiere / Randy Stradley
Pencils: Colin Lorimer / Doug Wheatley
What They Say:
The dimension-jumping Blackout suit is a powerful weapon—except when it doesn’t work! And if you’re Scott Travers and don’t know how the suit functions and are facing off against enemies wearing ultrapowerful combat armor, the Blackout suit is just extra weight—dead weight!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The final installment of the Blackout series brings certain aspects of what the miniseries has been about to a close, but it feels more like it serves as a prologue to what’s to come. Which isn’t a bad thing. The title has given us a fairly typical reluctant hero in Scott as we’ve seen him act with a bit of self interest while looking for Bob but also doing the right thing along the way. He’s been thrown into a lot of crazy situations since getting his hands on the Blackout suit before the start of the series, which threw the new reader right into things in a big way, but it’s been fun watching him going through the back and forth of figuring it out and figuring out what’s going on at Mechatronics. The downside is that we really don’t know Scott.
With this issue, Scott is naturally getting his ass handed to him by the bad guys in the big shiny metal suits. They’re definitely playing the role that they’re written for in a classic kind of simple evil, but that’s how they’ve been presented from the start and there’s no real expansion on that here. Their goal is to simply get the suit back, eliminate Scott and get on with their bigger mission. Emotions are starting to cloud things though as the suits are failing them at times and one of the guys leaps out of his and chases Scott into the portal and its utter cold and darkness. There’s some awkward moments to it that Scott goes on about, but mostly we’re just getting the reaffirmation that these are the bad guys and that there’s no real depth or even gradients to them beyond just being the bad guys. Which is fine, but it doesn’t make them compelling.
Though our bad guy loses that fight, he understands how Scott’s suit works in that it steals power to operate and that gets him on the right page on how to deal with Scott. That’s a problem in itself considering that turning off the power to the building is dangerous and Cassius is warning against it, but we get to shift gears during that as Scott goes in search of Alexis in order to get the data drive that she has which could provide his larger answers. There’s a little back story that feels like it’s coming into play, which I believe was covered in another book outside of this series, but it makes Alexis a little more interesting and puts a spin on Scott that against makes him human by adding an unlikable trait. Scott’s certainly a flawed character and that’s been made clear throughout the book. Unfortunately, as things wind down even with another fight, there’s not much meat here and instead it’s all a bit anti-climactic.
The same can be said for the five or so pages of King Tiger that we get here as we see him doing battle with the creature from the other realm while Milo watches on. It’s kind of standard fare here as well, but it gives us a look at this other plane, the Vortex as King Tiger later calls it, and we do generally get a resolution to Milo’s story in this regard. What it serves more as though is a kind of introduction to King Tiger and an origin story for Milo, who is now being drawn into King Tiger’s world by his quick thinking, which earns him a place as an assistant in training. It’s all quick and by the numbers, which you expect for a short form series like this, but it looks like it’s leading into its own series which means we at least get a little bit of a foundation laid down here. I’d still have rather seen this either as its own standalone issue or a first issue with smoother structure and a little more exposition put into play.
In Summary:
The final installment of Blackout and the King Tiger backup story brings both of them to a close, though both feel more like setups for what’s to come. There’s that sense that they’re trial runs for something more, to see if there’s interesting. The idea behind Blackout works for me, but it’s execution didn’t click as well as I had hoped for. It started off mid stride, which can work fine, but it didn’t fill in enough of the blanks along the way for a new reader like myself. I also feel a bit miffed at the end here that there is no end here, but rather just a larger dangling plotline. That’s fine in and of itself, but it doesn’t really feel like the miniseries itself accomplished anything. I like the idea of a series of miniseries that deal with smaller stories while connecting larger ones because they can and do work. But here, it didn’t connect as well as it could have. The King Tiger storyline just suffers from its shortness and breaking things up in a way to accommodate its page count in each issue. If it had gotten its own standard length issue in one go, I suspect it would work better. In the end, I’d definitely like to see more of each character, but both require a lot more work in order to present something really engaging with the story.
Grade: B-
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: June 4th, 2014
MSRP: $2.99
