Futures End #5 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Keith Giffen, Dan Jurgens (story), Jesus Merino (pencils), Dan Green (inks), Hi-Fi (colors)

The Story: Mr. Terrific blows Steve Jobs out of the water in tech promotion.

The Review: All of us have triggers that instantly take us out of the reality of a story, though those triggers vary from person to person. For me, that trigger is when a character acts with a complete lack of common sense. I don’t mean that the character does something impulsive or takes unnecessary risks. I mean when they do something that just doesn’t make sense by any rational standard. This never fails to keep me occupied with WTF-like questions instead of, you know, immersing into the story.

That’s basically what happened when Ronnie finally decided, for seemingly no reason, to free Jason from the Firestorm Matrix after weeks of entrapment. Maybe there are pangs of conscience at work here that I can’t see, but it just don’t make no kind of sense. The point of trapping Jason in the first place was to keep him from spilling the beans on where Ronnie was when Ollie made his distress call, and that risk hasn’t exactly gone away.

Or has it? Even after his release, Jason seems in no rush to go off tattling on what happened, which in itself is a brain-scratcher, especially after what Ronnie did to him. This wasn’t some schoolboy prank;* this was torture. Jason not only fell into a kind of existential abyss from being trapped that long, he disappeared from his loved ones, work, school (“I missed finals because of you!”), and Ronnie was practically crowing about it:

“Oh, c’mon. You aren’t going all silent on me again, are you? I know you’re in there somewhere, Mr. Lesser Half. Nothing? No comment? Okay, so you’re sore. I get it. But you can’t carry a grudge forever…can you?”

Does Ronnie just not get it? And are we to believe that Jason lets this go just because Ronnie dredges up a sob story about failing to save his mom during the war? Maybe JLAG simply decided to move on to their next plot point in the Firestorm storyline instead of wallowing in the same grievances over and over. After all, Jason has that internship to get to, even if his boss seems strangely accepting his unbelievably shoddy explanation for his absence: “It was a…family medical emergency, sir. And then I lost my phone.”

“Well, I guess that explains it.” Kind of makes it hard to believe when this same man claims to have made a scientific discovery that will put Mr. Terrific’s uSpheres to shame.

The uSpheres are the latest technological innovation from TerrifiTech, poised to revolutionize the world, undoubtedly in some grim way no one’s foreseeing. Indeed, Michael’s rhetoric in describing the uSpheres is equal parts triumphant and ominous, as if Apple, Facebook, and Google have merged into one all-seeing, all-knowing entity that you’ll nonetheless worship: “It’s you. Your lives and the lives of those in it. It’s your brain’s backup. It’s what’s in here…and all around you.”

What Michael and Jason’s boss seem to have in common is a desire to break the paradigm of the elite, including superheroes, from monopolizing the best that science has to offer. They see themselves as folk heroes, essentially, modern-day Prometheus’. They’ll bring ruin to us all, of course, but as always, it’s one of the provocative questions that constantly pops up in superhero comics yet which never lead to any permanent change in status quo.

You have to give Futures End credit in one respect, it’s not lacking for storylines. In talking about Firestorm and Terrific I’ve only scratched the surface of an issue that features Grifter, Faraday, several new characters on Cadmus Island, Constantine, and his two acquaintances, Midge and Tommy. But their scenes are introductory by nature, not really advancing, and generally composed of unproductive, snarky exchanges like the following between Grifter and Faraday:

“Any chance’a me talking with someone who knows what they’re talking about?”

“Ouch. Consider my feelings hurt.”

“Don’t suppose there’s much I can do to stop you.”

“Reluctant cooperation. All things considered, I’ll take it.”

“Then get on with it already.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Merino’s classic style is a step above most of the other art we’ve gotten, but still somewhat short of the high watermark of Patrick Zircher. Like the typical DC house artist, the results are a bit run-of-the-mill and unimaginative, with action sequences in particular looking very straightforward, static, and unexciting. There’s little to complain about, but there’s also little to praise.

Conclusion: Dissatisfactory as the material may be, there sure is a lot of it.

Grade: C+

Some Musings: * Heck, I don’t think Ronnie’s even in school.

– Minhquan Nguyen