Earth 2 #28 – Review

For those of you interested in the bottom line in a review, here it is: I’m out. As you’ll see, my decision has less to do with the actual quality of the series—although that does have a part—than with the fact that Earth Two has clearly become a companion title to World’s End. I just don’t approve with the feeling that I’m missing out on half the story just because DC decided it wanted to push its profit margin a little more.

Since I’m not reading World’s End anymore, I can’t tell you how that series and this one fit together, which one is the dominant title and which is hanging onto the other’s coattails. All I can say is there’s no narrative flow between last issue, which at least had a bit of plotting going on between the character moments, and this one, which is just plain exposition from front to back. All that suggests to me is Earth Two is now a tie-in series, filling in the cracks while World’s End handles all the action.*

Even as a purely expository issue, what you read here is a bit of a failure in that it skims over the backstories of the four Furies of Apokolips, only rarely providing insight into how they tick. Without exception, Bennett-Taylor don’t even bother to give them actual names. At the end of the day, you still only know them by their titles as Furies of Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death, respectively.

The only Fury who manages to come out of the issue somewhat well-rounded is she of Pestilence, an unnamed Czarnian who fought against her planet’s caste system and lost, leading to her willing alliance with Apokolips. It’s the classic story of the people in charge arrogantly mistreating the people below, which inevitably bites them in the butt. Pestilence’s sadness over her unjustly doomed parents just barely registers in her tale of vengeance, but it’s the closest thing to a relatable motivation as we get.

There’s a suggestion that Famine, a top gladiatrix from WarWorld, became the corpulent, flesh-hungry cannibal she is due to Mongul’s twisted society, but that requires a lot of extrapolation to dig up. Anyway, that doesn’t change the fact that she’s currently a mindless war machine and proud of it, so any sympathy you might have is out. As for War, she’s just a bad seed even as a Tamaranean child, and don’t even get me started on Death’s incomprehensible choice to be Darkseid’s baby-mama when he was the one responsible for the death of her first child (who, grimly enough, narrates his/her mother’s tragic tale). If this is the result of Bennett-Taylor’s attempts to give some dimension to the Furies, I think I preferred it when they were just brutally conditioned zealots of Granny Goodness.

I admit, too, that I’m not liking the revolving door of artists DC’s subjugated into piecing together the series nowadays. The quality is not terrible, which is about the best thing you can say about it, but despite the variety between the different styles, it mostly comes out to the same middle-of-the-road house art that DC’s infamous for. It’s inoffensive and clear, but plainly uninspired, art delivered for a paycheck than out of true enthusiasm.