Barreling toward a conclusion.
Creative Staff:
Story: Patrick Kindlon
Art: Stefano Simeone
Letterer: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
What They Say:
Bringing it all home in this wild, violent, and fun final issue! Caucasus goons and underground radicals are on a collision course, with Nussbaum as the X on all their maps! Pick your fighter: hyper-capitalists, competing militias groups, or lone gunmen with personal grudges! It’s a game where winning isn’t possible!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The opening issue or two of this series was a real treat in creativity while getting you to try and imagine what it would look like in reality. Patrick Kindlon has put together with this and his previous AfterShock series a pair of really interesting projects that are unlike most of what the publisher – or most publishers – put out. I won’t quite call it experimental scripting/storytelling but it’s trying to carve out a niche that nobody else is working with. But at the same time, it has a hard time maintaining the energy that it infuses it with at the start and it becomes so weirdly convoluted as it progresses that it’s hard to really hold onto. A two-month gap between this and the previous issue didn’t help either. And as much as I like Stefano Simeone’s artwork, the cast of characters here just became more and more indistinct as time went on, sadly.
All of that, unfortunately, makes the finale something of a slog to get through. We get the one group that wants to use Nussbaum as a spy/assassin of their own but they’ve discovered that he’s a True Believer when it comes to the company and there’s nothing that they can try and manipulate there. And even Nussbaum comes to the realization that the two sides are at their core just enemies and it makes it a very black and white deal for him, allowing him to operate without any guilt. While this goes on we get Lyhard rallying the farmers to mobilize as an army to fight Caucasus but they’re only in it for the barrels of alcohol that he’s promising. Throw in the CEO celebrating their ability to not sell the Right to Die element and another pair trying to work some insider trading and it crams so many things in here that are really disconnected that it ends on an incredible whimper. It just… ends without a sense of actual finality.
In Summary:
With a lot of promise at the start, the book ends flat and convoluted. I really like the strange concepts that Kindlon comes up with but the execution after the foundational elements are a struggle from what I see, resulting in a lackluster ending. Simeone’s artwork is pretty good and I like the color work here but when you have characters that have made little to no connections, even the best artist can struggle to make someone recognizable. I’m definitely still interested in projects that Kindlon will be working on as I can see how each work is a growing experience but I really hope the next one sticks the landing far better.
Grade: D
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: March 25th, 2020
MSRP: $3.99