Nothing goes right or wrong when Colonel Weird is involved.
Creative Staff:
Story: Jeff Lemire
Art: Caitlin Yarsky
Colors: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Nate Piekos of BLAMBOT
What They Say:
Twenty years ago, Lucy Weber fought Spiral City’s greatest villains as the heroic Black Hammer–today she finds her marriage falling apart and her children in danger with new threats wreaking havoc on her world and some of Black Hammer’s greatest heroes returning to aid her in saving it from destruction.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Bringing back a certain character or two from the past that makes sense is always welcome but there will always be real trepidation when we see Colonel Weird step onto the stage. Jeff Lemire’s look at the life that Lucy has led since getting involved with the Farm and where it’s landed her is definitely interesting while expanding on the larger universe. Lemire’s pick to work with Caitlin Yarsky was a huge high point for me with the previous issue when it came to the artwork and I really like that it’s held up here and builds on what came before. It reminds me a lot of what the original series had, which I can attribute to Dave Stewart’s masterful use of color design, but it has a different kind of expressiveness that works just as well to amplify the situations. I
Weird’s arrival at the end of the last issue has certainly put Lucy into a panic and rightly so based on how this issue plays out. The reality is that Weird knows she’s instrumental in helping to bring to an end a certain part of the story and that she, in her future form, has requested that he go this route in order to get her to do it. So much of it seems to revolve around the fact that she is plainly done at this point with as much of her old life as she can be but it keeps peeking its way in. So future Lucy knows that Weird is the only one that can really bring it to a solid close. His taking her into the para-zone is exactly the off-putting experience she knew it would be, especially since he does it so suddenly, bringing her Hammer back into existent in front of her family and then tossing her into the other realm where he travels.
What Weird is doing here is exactly what Future Lucy wants, which is to remind her of all that she has in her life with her family. We see her viewing a lot of those experiences from the past twenty years, including the time she went up against Robinson, but mostly focused on her family. But Weird also shows her the lives of her family, with the things they’ve hidden from her in explicit detail that really does a number on her mental wellbeing. The look-back also delves into more than the first time she dealt with Robinson but also a later encounter that reveals his connection to the para-zone, events of the past, and the anti-god. We get a lot of things that feel connected here and it has me wondering if Weird is grooming her to the hard task of having to kill Weird because of his connection to the para-zone.
In Summary:
Black Hammer Reborn did some strong stuff recently in really exploring Lucy’s past and the issues between her and her husband that really helped the book a lot to find its emotional weight. Here, we see Lucy pushed into some dangerous directions with a lot to deal with and no control over any of it. This is really solidly executed, right down to the ending, and the visuals to accompany it all helps to take the story even further. I’m really excited to see what comes from the next installment and where Lucy’s path will really take us.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: October 13th, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
