Broken Frontier

Lobo, Adam Strange, Starfire, and Buddy Baker launch a final, frantic attack upon Lady Styx in her stronghold. Sadly, it’s not a showdown worth half its build-up.

I’ve generally enjoyed the space-faring portions of 52. They’ve been uneven in their efficacy, to be certain, ranging from pure oddity (the thrice-blessed fish god?!?) to effortlessly thrilling (the head of Ekron chasing down its missing Eye – genius!) to occasionally blundering into territory of the downright uninspired and plagiaristic (the entire method of world-occupation as managed by Lady Styx and her armada are unapologetically, blow-for-blow ripped directly from the motion picture Chronicles of Riddick, which isn’t even a Warner Bros. flick, so for shame, DC!). Week Thirty-Six is, thus far, the big climax of all that’s come before for this long-lived subplot, and while it builds properly upon the groundwork laid, it’s overall unsatisfying and inexcusably anticlimactic.

Even taking into consideration that Lady Styx needs to remain alive and a healthy, unhesitant threat well into post-52 DCU, what’s offered in Week Thirty-Six is still a monumentally disappointing culmination. Not only of the long, drawn-out, cat-and-mouse chase between Styx and our heroes (which ends without closure by way of a ridiculously capricious sacrifice), but especially for one particular hero, whose fate is met in perhaps the most pointless death scene I’ve read in years, and considering the number of empty deaths accruing right over at Marvel, that’s really saying something. Forget the slew of third-rate characters that seem to bite the big one in any company crossover (though for what purpose I swear I don’t know – it’s a terrible concept, a surface-level storytelling tactic, and one that needs to be buried and forgotten if crossovers are ever to rise from the miry murk of their 90’s meltdown). The death in Week Thirty-Six, if it proves in fact to be as it appears, is far, far more egregious a waste of a character, and in a moment and via a method that were just plain disappointing. Even should the death be revealed a cliffhanger fake-out, it’s a trite, manhandled management of such. The character-in-question’s final moment – pulling what he did from his jacket at the moment he did – was random, illogical, and obviously placed for a desired "effect" upon the readership, rather than for any for honest storytelling purpose.

Lobo, though, is the one character to walk away with an honest arc, and honest function found for his being a part of the whole Styx shebang. Sadly, as whimsical and intriguing as Lobo’s inclusion in the 52 events has been, he’s never been the most integral, nor even the most purposeful of plot elements. The level of focus he and he alone receives over all the other (frankly) more complex characters, marks the Styx-epic of 52 as an interesting Lobo tale, but not a very well-balanced part of a DCU Event epic.

Beyond the space stuff, Thirty-Six offers an additional sequence with Montoya and the still-amongst-the-living Question; though the developments here are also bit odd, a touch forced. The reasons for Montoya withholding such a decision as the one she makes here, in this issue, until the problematical time she now arbitrarily decides to make it in…doesn’t manage to make a whole lot of sense. There’s a simplification of her bull-headed character enforced by her obdurate, impulsive leap to enact a suicide run for a sake of an effect that may not even work. Still, the good news for Question fans is that – beyond the loosey-goosey story snafus – Charlie may not be down and out and written off quite yet.

As for the art: Jamal Igle (of Firestorm fame) comes onboard for an issue and manages a decent final product, though nothing that approaches the ability he’s been known to produce in the past. I’m not certain if it’s working with Giffen’s layouts or simply having too short a timeline in which to muster up his contribution, but the figures seemed stiff and crowded upon the page, and the action was equally as stultified. It didn’t affect the issue in any glaring way, but when I was finished and found myself honestly disappointed with the chapter as a whole, I began to suspect that perhaps it was in part due to the lack of fluidity in the visual quality of the tale as well as the script.

So Week Thirty-Six was a big ol’ bummer for me, a terrible piece of an otherwise thrilling epic. As the end approaches, I suspect there will be a higher number of slipups in this vein, culminations that are more frustration than actual climax, endings that simply don’t do justice to the carefully laid-out beginnings and middles that preceded them. I’ll hope for more, but lately, this series has got me sweating….