The battle intensifies as the Spectre has to make a choice.
Creative Staff:
Story: Tom Taylor
Art: Trevor Hairsine, Lucas Meye, Andy Lanning
Colors: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Saida Temofonte
What They Say:
Some of the most powerful entities in existence are now slaves to the Anti-Life. Undead Darkseid’s forces have spread the virus across whole galaxies. Even Kryptonians and the Flashes may be too slow in the race to cure worlds before everything is overwhelmed. The final stand for the universe begins.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
As the series gets closer to the end with this penultimate issue, DCeased continues to be a property that just delivers in spades for me. The way of seeing characters not re-imagined but actually progressing forward and showing how they’d cope and deal with issues. Every time I think Tom Taylor is done with this story he ends up doing a bit more and I fall in love all over again. The series has Trevor Hairsine handling the pencils on it with a great team behind him inking and coloring it so that it shows a real richness in design and layouts and captures both the power of the events and the humanity of it as well.
With it done by narration through Alfred as the Spectre, we get a lot going on in this installment as the tide is slowly turned but the battle has not yet been won. Erebos is definitely gaining more and more control in its journey to destroy this universe but the scale of the fight continues to grow. The losses stack up quickly in some cases, such as Mister Miracle when he and Barda come across their son, as well as Damian. But that’s a key moment where he quietly tells Alfred to fight against the vengeance that the Spectre wants and to find another way. It’s a little ham-fisted in some ways that we get the Spectre going to Earth amid the battle to bring back cargo crates full of the cure all chained up together, but it helps to put a lot of things in a better place by the end.
So much of the book is battle but it’s definitely interesting and fun battle to watch play out. As bad as things get, it gets worse when Darkseid and WarWorld show up and that has Jon facing off against him first and then trying to stop WarWorld from destroying Earth-2. It’s a good moment to showcase Jon nicely and it plays well against what Cyborg is doing in trying to stop Erebos after it takes over Brainaic. It’s a good sequence to see the two face against each other on Brainiac’s ship and gives the clues on how they can gain some additional fighting power in the short-term since there are so many captured people there, including a lot of Kryptonians. It’s the kind of thing where there’s a lot of things going on and it could feel busy but it hits that penultimate installment feeling well in showing how quickly the narrative can shift in a battle.
In Summary:
This is a pretty fun issue that lets things happen, though it avoids going for the big deaths like it could. Which makes sense as we’ve had so many over the course of the whole run and there need to be some dashes of hope along the way. I like most of the small character moments and the pivot we get with Brainiac adds some extra fun to it, as well as the fallout with Darkseid. It’s a solid installment that again looks great with so much fun action and emotion that’s tied well to the script that gives us a lot of good stuff. It continues to delight me as it has from the very first original installment.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics
Release Date: March 21st, 2023
MSRP: $3.99
