A big play is made, a little too late.
Creative Staff:
Story: Brian Buccellato
Art: Bruno Redondo
What They Say:
Poison Ivy enters the battle, and Batman has a final goodbye with Nightwing.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Having been knocked out for a loop myself recently, I got a bit behind on this series with its weekly releases. The title has definitely been fun, though you can sense some adjustment going on in the shift in writers to bring this particular year to a close with the next few issues. With the scale of events that are going on and the shift in location, there’s a lot of active areas in motion, including the whole big fight between Mr. M and Trigon, which is like a giant time bomb waiting to hit and destroy everything that all the other characters are working to achieve. You kind of forget that it’s going on, but how long can a demon like Trigon really be ignored in favor of punching out someone like Batwoman?
This installment actually has a really fun and fairly smart moment overall in dealing with the growing tide of changes that are occurring within the fight as the arrival of Swamp Thing is certainly tilting things in favor of Superman and his side, much to Constantine’s chagrin. But the smart move of Deadwing really hits the right note here as he ended up going back to Gotham and took over Poison Ivy in order to bring her to push back against him, which is a fight that I’d actually like to see play out in a more serious and detailed way in the mainline books. That has a kind of cute approach here since she has no idea what’s going on once Dick leaves her body, but it then turns into a serious sequence as Bruce and Dick really do talk about their relationship over the years in a truly meaningful way that hits the right notes with its heartfelt sentiments as all this chaos is going on around them.
We do get some fun fights in this and the pairings continue to delight, but we also get a darker turn along the way as Batwoman and Huntress try and take down Superman only to have Wonder Woman push back. She ends up going harder against Huntress than she thought she was, providing for another dead body on the field in a brutal way. Comparing that to how Batman took out Shazam in the end is certainly a contrast, but I loved that we had Diana just completely shocked and devastated by what she did, but not given the time to really process it because it is in the midst of battle and Batwoman is going to try and get some justice for her friend. Unfortunately, there’s that whole Trigon thing that comes into play and sens everything into even more chaos.
In Summary:
The very fast paced nature of this series can be disconcerting in a lot of ways, but I enjoy it because it’s giving us something separate and is just pushing through to hit the key points. It’s a battle that doesn’t demand severe characterization and depth but rather one that has it so that you have to know the cores of the characters involved and their motivations, which has to carry it as a whole. And it largely does, which is good, because these are more distilled versions of them facing impossible odds against a backdrop of some real despair with all that’s been lost. There is some surprising heart in here, which comes from Dick and Bruce as they take a moment to talk amid all of it, but there’s also a good mix of humor and utter insanity throughout that keeps it propelling forward. It may not be high art, but it’s damn fun and leaves me smiling with each installment.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: February 17th, 2015
MSRP: $0.99
