The end of the beginning.
Creative Staff:
Story: B. Clay Moore
Art: Stephen Molnar
Colors: Stephen Molnar
Letterer: Thomas Mauer
What They Say:
Revelations about the true nature of Amara Bishop and her daughter lead them into a frightening new chapter of their lives, and “retired” killer Moses Graves must decide if he’ll follow them past the point of no return.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review WIlL contain spoilers):
With a bit more than a three-month gap between releases of the third and fourth issues, a four-month gap between the fourth and fifth basically means that I had forgotten about this series. As we had said with the fourth issue, it just feels like everything is barreling ahead quickly here and there’s almost a sense that it’s rushed, though I know it’s pretty much planned but just ran into issues in bring brought to reality. Moore has a lot going on with this installment and it works well while Molnar’s artwork is strong here once again with some great character designs and approach to the layouts that draw you in. I love how well he handles this cast of characters across the board with the little details that really bring them to life.
With the finale, there’s a lot going on here and a few new characters are brought in along with a good infodump of the past. Bringing in Amara’s mother to the story as a way to try and draw out Amara so they can get to Alea isn’t a bad idea, and to be fair to the mother, she didn’t even know anything about her daughter even being alive until this happened, if she’s to be fully believed. But the introduction of her mother into her life has Amara even warier about what’s going on. And rightly so because, as she comes to understand, the powers that be want Alea to basically breed her because of a genetics project that ended up happening that makes her an information/training sponge when she hits puberty. So getting her back and having her in-house makes plenty of sense.
But it’s all pretty hard to really get behind for previously mentioned gap reasons. I did like the plot points that have Moses getting in contact with one of his old handlers that he knows must still have some form of contact with the company and using him to get the information he needs to understand what’s going on. It helps to make Moses feel like a more fleshed-out character combined with other bits that we get here along the way. It doesn’t make Moses a great character but you can see why this configuration with Amara works and even with Alea. He’s pretty efficient and cold here as needed and it serves to move everything forward in the way that makes this less an ending and more a beginning as Amara has even more reason to protect Alea as does Moses.
In Summary:
I can imagine this working a lot better when read in full but I read the first of these five issues back in August 2020 and that’s a long time to go with the gaps that happened. It’s easy enough to piece things together here so that it all makes sense but there’s no connection or emotional response to it because of all the production problems. I liked the concept overall and the designs that we got were pretty great across the board. But it just suffered too much longterm and makes me envious of those that get to read it in full in one sitting.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: September 1st, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
