Broken Frontier

Overcome with loss and grief, the full fury of Black Adam is unleashed. And the world trembles.

After presiding over the funeral of his queen, Black Adam gives in to his rage and seeks violent retribution. Not even the compassionate words of Renee Montoya (not yet The Question but honoring Vic Sage’s inquisitive path) can sway him from his revenge. Adam’s rampage takes him to the nation of Bialya, where Death, the last Horseman of Apokolips, has taken refuge. The righteous anger unleashed upon this land is terrifying in its destructive scope and already the rest of the world is preparing for the worst. The Great Ten and the Suicide Squad are mobilizing, while the reaction of Dr. Sivana is not quite what one would expect…

Exciting stuff, eh? Well, yes and no. That depends on how one looks at it and the path that has led us here. I may be in the minority on this but I found the death of Isis last issue to be one of the most predictable and disappointing moments in the whole of 52. While the death of Osiris was handled with an effectively shocking twist, to follow it directly with Isis’ death reduces the Black Marvel Family to plot device. Their purpose in the series seems to stand revealed as providing Black Adam with further angst and anger. And thus, we lose an appealing new heroine in the interest of giving a male protagonist another lost love to pine for (*yawn*) and an excuse to kill lots of people in as gratuitous a way as possible.

The strength of Black Adam (at least as realized by Geoff Johns and David Goyer in JSA) was his moral complexity, a frightening rage kept in check by his own unique sense of justice. He didn’t shy from taking lives in his crusade but never slaughtered for slaughter’s sake alone. The atrocities committed by the character in this issue are on a scale far beyond anything he’s ever done. There’s surely a cathartic thrill in that for anyone who wants to see a Superman-level character go ballistic and destroy a sovereign nation. I can also see the desire for having 52 go out with an enormous bang. But I can’t help feeling dissatisfied that one of comics’ best anti-heroes has crossed the line into genocidal sociopath territory and the character that provided such a fascinating counterpoint to him has been turned into a sacrificial lamb.

At least it looked pretty. Chris Batista and Jamal Igle do a fine job illustrating the berserker fury of an almost-god and the holy hell of a mess it creates. The characters’ reaction shots and emotions are powerful and the Horseman of Death arrives in a stunningly dramatic cloud of carrion birds that takes one’s breath away.

Was all this character assassination (both figurative and literal) necessary? Has Adam been reset to top-level villain and stripped of sympathetic qualities for good? Only time and the outcome of a third world war will tell. For one of the few times in this brilliant series’ run, however, I’m left rather ambivalent.