It’s time to nuke Themyscira! It’s the only way to be sure…
Creative Staff:
Story: Brian Buccellato
Art: Tom Derenick
What They Say:
While Superman is away from Earth, world leaders debate how to deal with the tyranny of the Gods of Olympus.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As we enter the final run of this year of the series, I’ll admit there’s a certain sense of finality about what’s coming that really is interesting – provided you let yourself feel it. Each of the year’s have been building to different events and they’ve each had a lot of danger and real threat to the world to them. That’s a fun element to it but it’s also kind of hard to sustain without it just becoming silly. This year has worked rather well with its push towards the gods, giving us something different than before, and with the larger manipulations having come into view recently, it also ties back into the first series (that I haven’t read) with Darkseid and his seething and burning hatred towards Superman. That’s always been there on some level, but also some kind of respect. This time though, well, it’s all about ending things.
Events this time around are certainly curious in some regards. With Zeus having laid out his ultimatum we get to see how the leaders of the world (and the all-knowledgeable punditry) chime in on what’s going on and their own agendas. It’s little surprise that some effort was made to restock the world of weapons of armageddon even after Superman disarmed the world since there’s always a fallback of some sort in place. Of course, you can’t nuke Olympus, but with the gods residing for the moment on Themyscira that gives them a potential target. Can a god be nuked? I’ll admit, I hope the book goes the distance with it and tries. It offers up an interesting path to explore both with how the world reacts and how existence would change because of it. You know a lot of people would be behind it after they see Zeus essentially leveling a large number of churches, mosques and more around the world to make clear his intention for everyone to abandon their religion.
A decent chunk of the book takes place on Apokalips where we get Darkseid out in full now and enjoying his plans to torture Harley and her group, though he really should be above all of that at this point. It’s all time killing until Superman shows up and he can exact his revenge for Kalibak’s death. There’s some great layouts here that shows the power of the fight between the two, though I don’t think Derenick can quite capture it in this form and with the space he has. This should be an epic fight and the design strives for it, which is great, but it falls short. It’s one of the few times I actually liked watching Superman in this series though since he’s quite intense and, as Darkseid says, he’s unleashed now and intent on ending this once and for all. That gives him a kind of intensity that’s still mostly rare for the character.
In Summary:
Injustice is going into the final run full throttle and there’s a lot to like here. Buccellato keeps the script going well with the cast, shrunk as it has been for a bit now, keeping it lively and reacting to things well. Spending time with how the rest of the world is viewing events as crafted by Zeus was also welcome, though once again I just want to punt Jack Ryder out a window. The smaller subplot material is moving along well with Harley and her group, Diana getting anxious about what’s to come and Bruce naturally preparing something himself. The main focus is on the action on Apokalips though and while it doesn’t quite hit the high it needs to it does work pretty well and keeps the momentum moving in a very solid way.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via ComiXology
Release Date: September 22nd, 2015
MSRP: $0.99
