By: Too many to list—check out the review.
The Story: Why’s everyone so surprised that people are so hooked to technology in the future?
The Review: Of all the ways a publisher can use a Free Comic Book Day issue, I think this is one of the best ways: offering a prelude/prologue to one of your upcoming big series. The fact that the series in question will be released next week makes the choice even smarter.* The only question remaining is whether this issue makes Futures End seem like the must-read title DC desperately needs and wants it to be. In a few words: not really.
Let’s consider for a moment all of DC’s other weekly series: the acclaimed 52, the disastrous Countdown, and the tepid Trinity. What accounted for their respective successes and failures? A lot of factors, obviously, but the standout has to be the choice of writer(s). 52, the clear best of the group, had a powerhouse team behind it: Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, and Greg Rucka, each superstars, each at the peak of their powers, each with special talents that complemented the others’. Now, compare to the team in charge of Futures End: Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen. That’s a decidedly less impressive roster, and this issue reflects that.**
As far as premises go, the one here is nothing much, being your typical time-traveling escapade to prevent an apocalyptic future—specifically, a zombie apocalypse, except with single-minded cyborgs in place of single-minded zombies. You can’t help feeling, especially with Lemire’s presence on the title, that most of what you see of the Brother Eye-controlled future is a redux of Rotworld, in which most of the world’s heroes have also been assimilated and anatomically twisted, and those that remain are pretty much doomed to the same fate.
As you might expect, this makes the bulk of the issue thin reading, a repetitious series of the world’s last resistors being systematically and inevitably crushed, usually in the same, hopelessly depressing fashion: a hero flies out to make a last stand, only to be infected by a mecha-spider-hero, after which their screams of horror turn into screams of binary. It’s like watching DC’s superheroes transplanted into a cheap B-movie horror. The one exception may be Frankenstein shredding the Flash apart using Black Canary’s sonic scream, which emanates from her terrified face grafted on Frank’s chest.
If there’s any twist at all to this mostly formulaic issue, it’s when Terry McGinnis (a.k.a. Batman Beyond, or more accurately, just Batman) makes a last-ditch time jump to the past to prevent this dystopia from happening, only to land five years later than his intended arrival date. Therein is the only truly attractive feature of Futures End, the promise of seeing how the DCnU may look with a little age and experience under its belt. Here, though, we only catch a brief glimpse of the future, which is interesting, not tantalizing: ads for the Earth Registration Authority (“Carry your Earth Card everywhere you go. So we can ALL be sure.”), a benefit concert for “veterans of E2″, The Fast Lane by Lois Lane, etc.
Art-wise, you get a hodge-podge of work from Ethan Van Sciver, Patrick Zircher, Aaron Lopresti, Dan Jurgens, and Jesus Merino, of which only Van Sciver and Zircher manage to convey a convincingly bleak atmosphere. The others are essentially variations of DC’s unremarkable house art, emotionally broad and bland in both style and appearance. You can only hope that the weekly series will feature one artist at a time so you can get a few thoroughly attractive issues.
Conclusion: It’s a very good thing this issue is free, although that bodes ill for the coming, priced issues of Futures End.
Grade: C
- Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: * In contrast to DC’s 2012 FCBD offering, in which they offered a teaser for the following year’s Trinity War.
** Now imagine if Azzarello and Lemire had been joined by, say, Scott Snyder and Geoff Johns. That title I can reasonably guarantee to stick with until the end.
- Why would anyone have to hold the door open for the Flash? Couldn’t he just vibrate through?
Filed under: DC Comics, Reviews Tagged: Aaron Lopresti, Barry Allen, Batman Beyond, Black Canary, Brian Azzarello, Brother Eye, Dan Jurgens, DC, DC Comics, Ethan Van Sciver, Frankenstein, Free Comic Book Day, Futures End, Futures End #0, Futures End #0 review, Hi-Fi, Jeff Lemire, Jesus Merino, Keith Giffen, Patrick Zircher, Terry McGinnis, The Flash
