Broken Frontier

Black Adam claims a bride, and transforms her into the new Marvel-family powerhouse called Isis! Meanwhile, Cassie Sandsmark confesses to a startling crime!

Much like Week 10, this big three-month mark claims a principle focus – that of Black Adam and his reluctant refugee companion, Adrianna.  The issue allots the lion’s share of its pages to the hesitant relationship burgeoning between the two; it opens on a sequence wherein the reader is granted a spectacular view of Adam redirecting the waters of a river into arid, parched (but populated) wasteland, and then quickly there follows the revelation that Adrianna has awakened the big black cheese to the plethora of peaceable onuses carried by leadership.  He has moved rivers; he has unearthed and disarmed mines buried beneath the fields of Kandaq; both of these acts fill an emotional, personal gap that has lain hollow in his life for centuries.  Fueled by such a powerful impetus, and wishing only the best for the woman who has restored his faith in kindness, Adam leads Adrianna to the one being who could grant her the gift of godhood – the big red cheese himself: Captain Marvel, the new Shazam.

As I mentioned in my review for Week 10, the Black Adam subplot of the entire 52 epic is unequivocally the most deftly handled of the horde.  The line Adam walks is one balanced between hero and villain, savior and tyrant, as he neither fulfills nor avoids the actions necessary to be claimed as either, and blessedly the writers understand the tumbledown moral inexactitude of this ground in which Adam ventures.  The diuturnity Week 12 takes with reevaluating Adam’s motivations, his desires, and – most importantly – his world-altering decisions, is spectacularly structured, with an effortless, flawless pacing: a density of significant scenes which present the entire execution as an exhaustively explored one, and even dramatically unimpeded.  Or, to state that a hell of a lot more simply: it rocks.

Even better, when the events of the Black Adam segments move toward a more fantastical shore, readers are treated to a Billy Batson/Captain Marvel/Shazam that, while trapped inside his Rock, is winsomely off his rocker.  At first I feared we’d been given a stereotypically dangerous lunatic – this guy’s Superman-level, and he’s unhinged due to the Seven Sins constantly whispering to him in his head; he will, ergo, be ready to pummel the nearest living creature that dares approach, or at least that’s the casual comic book logic approach for you.  Thankfully, though, I get to give additional props to the scripter of this arc: Shazam is presented as a beguiling, unsteady, yet still for all of that honorable and methodical figure.  It’s perhaps one of the most out-of-the-blue yet captivating characterizations I’ve read in years, and I lapped up every panel and hope to lap up more in weeks to come.

On a down note, my one invective upon the issue’s main feature is this: the scene in which Ralph Dibney, the Elongated Man, confronts Cassie Sandsmark, Wonder Girl, in order to persuade her to confess to the reasons why his wife’s grave was recently vandalized.  While a well-done sequence in and of itself, the culminating revelation it grants makes not one iota of sense, not even following internal, campy, funny book logic.

Additionally, I should give passing mention to the ridiculously platitudinous, two-page back-up “Origin of Wonder Woman”.  Not only does it not contribute a single fresh idea between her pre-IC origin and this supposedly “new” Earth’s Diana.  It equally does not contribute to priming readers for the odd (though creative) introduction of “Agent Diana Prince” in the new Wonder Woman.  Taking a cue from the previous “History of the DCU” back-up, the material offers nothing original, nothing innovative, and nothing worth having spent even the five seconds it takes to read its contents.  With the understanding that 52 is emphatically not a new-reader friendly series, I couldn’t for the life of me figure why this unenlightening back-up was even printed for the hard-core fans.  Well, maybe because Adam Hughes art was breathtaking as always, but still….

Regardless, and swinging right on back to the happy, happy, joyous stuff: Eddy Barrows – hot off a two-issue run on Firestorm during the IC months – turns out a powerful number of truly thrilling pages, magnificently dynamic and stoically dramatic, one might even say mighty.  There pops out an occasional expression twisted comically to the extreme, but overall the work is brilliant, redolent of a true comic book “event” and, indeed, this is the first issue of the series wherein I honestly felt that I was reading one of those overly-nurtured, core company crossovers.  Why this man doesn’t have a steady monthly to call his own, I haven’t the slightest.

Week 12 is, therefore, in my perfect, infallible opinion (I mean, why else would I be writing this, right?), the best 52 that DC has yet produced.  The art is top-notch, and borderline extravagant, plus the principle story racing through its pages was intensely absorbing (I nearly flipped past the few other vignettes to continually get back to the Black Adam plot).  So a hallmark of the series, though still far from perfect, yet with any luck it’s only the first benchmark of a steady series aggrandizement.