Creative Staff:
Story: Jeff Lemire
Art: Caitlin Yarsky
Letterer: Nate Piekos of BLAMBOT
What They Say:
Things have gotten crazy in Black Hammer! First a parallel Spiral City collided with the actual one, spawning a multiverse nightmare of heroes and villains from both worlds going to war, and now Lucy Weber picks back up the mantle of Black Hammer and teams up with Skulldigger for answers on how to end the madness..
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Black Hammer delivers some big material here as the two Spiral City’s are closer to a full-on collision and there are some amusing twists along the way. Lemire’s got a knack of expanding and introducing things while playing off the core material – and the classic comics of decades from long ago – and that makes for an intriguing turn of events. Lemire’s pick to work with Caitlin Yarsky was a huge high point for me and I’m glad to see them back on the book at this point after some really good material with Weird. 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.
The opening element of this story has some recap to it, which is helpful, but it’s basically Skulldigger and Lucy making their way through the Asylum so they can find the real Doc Andromeda and bring him back in an attempt to fend off what’s happening. There are some fun bits in seeing the “opposite world” here but they find him easily enough and the rescue happens fairly well since they are able to get away from the anti-Spiral folks who are trying to stop them. It’s a fun sequence and seeing Lucy going through this in regular clothes is an amusing bit of it as well. She does get concerned along the way in how Doc Andromeda seems just a bit off, but if he’s been captured and in the other side for the past twenty-plus years, wouldn’t that be expected?
Of course, Sherlock is waiting for them at the place the other Doc had made to deal with things and he reveals another Doc Andromeda there that’s definitely in rough shape and appears to be the real thing. Because the one that was rescued was Barbalien! There’s a host of back and forth elements to a lot of this as it plays out and it’s a whole lot of fun as Lucy has to decide who to really trust. But when she finds out that her father from the other Spiral City is behind a lot of this because he lost Lucy and her mother in the original attack, and that he’s orchestrating all of this to find them in another timeline to be a family again, we get a familiar villain story unfolding. Which doesn’t bother me because half of Black Hammer is about taking the familiar and putting a new spin on it, and seeing all of this from Lucy’s point of view makes for an engaging experience.
In Summary:
With the sense that a lot of the Black Hammer world is close to wrapping up, there’s a good feeling about this in what it’s tackling and how it can re-align things by the end so that if Lemire ever decides to return to it, there’s a host of possibilities to it. I’m glad to have Caitlin Yarsky back on the art duties for this installment as I like their take on things and just the larger feel of the book works well here, especially the recap narration elements and just how it’s presented, reminding me of a lot of things I read in my younger years.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: February 23rd, 2022
MSRP: $3.99