By: Grant Morrison (writer), Frazer Irving (artist), Mike Marts and Janelle Siegel (editorial team)
The Story: Bruce Wayne, damaged memory and lost in time, has disappeared from the Stone Age and reappeared in the new world of the puritan colonial Gotham. He’s been given an identity by a local woman who’s been accused of being a witch. Bruce does his detective thing to unravel a supernatural mystery. In the “meantime” (if meantime is defined as being simultaneous with moments before the heat death of the universe), Superman, Green Lantern, Rip Hunter and Booster Gold trace the Omega energy to the end of time. They find Bruce (not the same-time Bruce as the one in puritan Gotham…stay with me…time travel is all paradoxical) but not before he strands.
What’s Good: The whole thing. Wow. What great art. Frazer Irving’s work is a unique blend of stylized and creepy that’s simply awesome. His puritan witch hunt scared me. His scenes of Bruce fighting a spectral evil was moody. His expressions were evocative (the accused witch’s face when Bruce wakes up, Superman’s posture and expression when facing the archivist), requiring no words at all. And the archivist… Holy $#!^! What an awesome alien! It was made all the spookier with the one glowing, off-center eye.
Grant Morrison, who started slow in the last issue, barreled this book along. The story is fragmented, with shards set in the doomed future, pieces set in a monstrous psychedelic mindscape, and scraps hidden dark caves and in terrified puritan Gotham. Personalities grind together. The plot thickens. Superman spills the stakes: “He took your memories and relied on your survival instinct… You’ve been booby-trapped! Darkseid turned you into a doomsday weapon and aimed you at the 21st century!” This is heady stuff and very cool. This is why I like Darkseid. Find me a better evil genius whose name doesn’t start with “Tha” and end with “nos.” This isn’t sharks with lasers on their heads. Think about it. Darkseid booby-trapped one of the greatest superheroes of all time and shot him at the 21rst century. How cool is that? Speaking of being past sharks with lasers on their heads, there are some really great sci-fi and fantasy moments in this book: (1) when the dying witch curses the Waynes until the end of time, (2) the archivist storing all the information of the universe in a black hole (that’s cutting edge physics and information theory), (3) the vanishing point base, 10 minutes before universal heat death, has an anti-entropic field, and (4) the discussions of planar and cubic time and the infestations of hyper-fauna (animals that exist in more dimensions than we do). All very cool.
What’s Not So Good: Booster Gold… Putz. ‘Nuf said.
Conclusion: A great, great book. Tops. Go get it. Now. I’ll wait. It’s a great time-spanning, cosmic mystery, with disaster barreling down on us. This feels more like a bat-book than the first issue did.
Grade: A
-DS Arsenault
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Conclusion