The pieces start to come together.
Creative Staff:
Story: Cullen Bunn
Art: Eman Casallos
What They Say:
Peter Cannon AKA Thunderbolt smashes his way into the struggle against the Red Death! The mysterious villain has plagued the heroes of three different timelines. Her scheming is even more dangerous than anyone could possibly guess, but now the adventures of the masked heroes of the last 80 years are coming together in a way no one could possibly imagine!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The first two issues of this Masks series have had their moments, but that weird disconnect between them certainly made it weird going into the second issue since it moved forward a few decades and focused on just two characters from that 1970’s time period. With this installment, it moves us forward again to the present, which may be something that fans of Thunderbolt understand, but for someone like myself that’s never read the character, I had no clue that it was present day until one of the homeless guys pulls out a cell phone and talks about his service plan. Moving forward another few decades isn’t a surprise, but the why of it all is what we do finally get an answer for towards the end here.
The focus here is familiar enough as it delves into the Red Death plague problem again that we saw as the central focus before in the earlier time periods. Here, it’s Peter Cannon fighting on board a cargo ship with various thugs and an overpowered type or two in an attempt to stop the cargo from getting to the shore. With help, or rather commentary, from his non-corporeal friend Tabu that nobody else can see, we get caught up on some of what makes Thunderbolt who he is and that he’s been out of the routine for awhile having been thought to have died two years earlier. While wanting to be out of the game, he does what he has to in situations like this and there’s some good action sequences here, especially once Black Bat shows up, guns blazing, and does his part to eliminate the ship by blowing it up completely.
While Peter wants to lay low, the whole thing is far too public and the media is aware of it. But his bigger problem is that there’s a group of masks that come to him and want to bring him into a meeting about the Red Death and what’s going on since he’s plainly involved at this point. It’s fun to see characters like The Spider, Green Llama and Lady Satan crashing his hotel room for this since he’s already quite wary. When brought in with the others though, it’s here that we learn the truth about how the masquerade that the Red Death runs every year is the commonality across time and that The Spider is using that to draw people in from across different time periods together in order to deal with the larger threat. It’s a slow coming together of the various forces, but with a little tension in the mix, we finally have what seems to be most everyone together in the same place.
In Summary:
Masks 2 has felt like a whiplash kind of series in some ways because each issue has been so different with the cast of characters involved and the time it takes place in and its connection to the Red Death. I’ve liked the individual pieces of it but haven’t really connected with it in the larger sense since there’s not felt like a good cohesive element. That’s coming into play a bit here more towards the end of this issue, and we get drawn into it through Thunderbolts eyes, which works well enough when you get down to it. The Thunderbolt story here is definitely fun and well illustrated and played out, especially with Black Bat dropping in, and it’s certainly interesting enough to get me wanting to check out more of his books if there are more in the future. The series hopefully will take more shape in the next installment though.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dynamite Entertainment
Release Date: June 3rd, 2015
MSRP: $3.99
