Batman: The Imposter

 Batman: The Imposter

 

What am I Reading?

Batman: The Imposter (#1-3). Written by Mattson Tomlin, illustrated by Andrea Sorrentino.

What’s it about?

The rumoured Batman casts a winged shadow over Gotham. His brutality sends criminals scurrying back into their holes. After two years, his nightly hunt is starting to turn the tide. Not officially however: GCPD ousted Jim Gordon as a fool for working with the vigilante. All the convictions Gordon worked on have been overturned, all thanks to collaborating with the Bat. Has this setback pushed Batman beyond breaking point? It seems so as CCTV shows The Batman executing the newly released scum. 

What’s good about it?

I hope Black Label never ends. DC has found its stride in the Black Label range. You want to tell a story outside of cannon? With no consequences? A one-and-done limited mini or maxi? Go ahead under Black Label. It's a brilliant model! Makes for exciting reads.

The pure conceit of this is basically: What if Red Hood happened without a Robin. What if there were two Batmen in Gotham - One who murders the criminals, and one who doesn’t. It's a great idea. It’s a trope I'm not bored of yet.

This really reminded me of episode five of Batman: Caped Crusader, The Stress of Her Regard. The framing of this narrative is Bruce receiving nightly therapy from Leslie Thompkins (Always a favourite of mine whenever she shows up, basically Bruce Wayne’s social worker who can see straight through the mask to the damaged boy underneath).

I’d never heard of Mattson Tomlin before picking this up… He’s a screen writer, director and producer. He is also a writer on the upcoming The Batman part II, and it totally fits! As I was reading this I was getting massive The Batman (2022) vibes: The rainy city, the tactical suit, the brutal hand to hand, and the less than fantastical Gotham. According to Wikipedia he was uncredited for the first movie for script revisions. As a debut comic, this isn’t half bad. After this he’s worked on a BOOM! Comic A Vicious Circle (Shrug, never heard of it) and BRZRKR. I’ve never fancied BRZRKR, the Keanu Reeves passion project that just looks like John Wick the samurai, but this sparks a little more interest. 

I will be brutally honest, I really didn’t like Giedon Falls… and no small part of that was due to Sorrentino’s art. It was too scratchy, too shadowed, too unclear. For a Batman title though? Spot on! Exactly fitting with the tone of the story. The panelling is crazy in this.

What did I struggle with?

Now, I often bemoan comic readers who don’t fully embrace the Elseworld effect of a story. People who don’t accept that non-canonical characters don’t have to act like the canon. But I don’t see a Batman world where Alfred turns his back on Bruce as a child. That just feels… wrong. It's a very strong choice and I don’t think it’s developed enough. I feel that Bruce being abandoned by Alfred would cause as much damage as the death of Thomas and Martha. It’s dealt with in a page and never touched on again. Feels like a missed opportunity.

Spoiler Alert!

Speaking of missed opportunities, let's talk about the twist: I really liked the new cop introduced in this, Blair Wong. She’s a great character and a strong love interest for Bruce. I found it immensely lazy that the imposter was her detective partner Hatcher. There is little or no set up for it being him despite his presence in the book. It's a blind side that means very little. 

Who it should have been in Jim Gordon. Throughout the book Bruce and Blair speak about Jim being disgracefully discharged from the GCPD for working with the Batman, but he stood by the vigilante because he saw the impact the fear was on the streets. Bruce theorises that the Imposter is ex-military, Jim is traditionally a Green Beret. The imposter also has contacts throughout the criminal underworld but also access to police intelligence, Jim would fit both. Jim is also not present at all in the books. You’ve never seen him on the page. It may feel like it was the obvious choice for the Imposter, but that's a big part of writing a mystery in my view: You want the reader to pick up the pieces with the detective as they go. Having the Imposter be Hatcher, makes Blair pretty stupid, and that doesn’t feel right.

Would I recommend it?

This isn’t the Batman Black Label title I would recommend first. Read Batman: The City of Madness by Christian Ward first. This isn’t the Mystery Black Label title I would recommend first. Read Human Target by Tom King first. I also think The Red Hood is this concept done better because it embraces the more comic-booky history and setting of lore. If you like The Batman (2022), this is a good accompaniment to that.

Avengers: Twilight

 

Avengers : Twilight

 

What am I Reading?

Avengers: Twilight (Issues 1-6), written by Chip Zdarsky, illustrated by Daniel Acuña.

 

What’s it about?

I think a snippet from the blurb covers the concept best:

“In the gleaming new world of prosperity, Captain America is no more. But Steve Rogers still exists, floating through an America where freedom is an illusion, The Avengers are strangers and his friends are long dead. But is the Dream itself dead?”

 What’s good about it?

Life has been a whirlwind lately. It’s been months since I properly sat down and read something. I’ve been too tired, too busy or just too damn apathetic to expend the additional brain space. I had the trade paperback of this in my work bag and during lunch I thought “I should really read this… Oh yeah! I’ve got a blog for just this occasion!”.

 How fitting for the book's theme. America is fat and lazy. Blinded by a constant barrage of distractions and personalised good news content. The populous lives in blissful ignorance and bends to the new government's totalitarian rulings (typical dystopian scenario number 2). The aged Steve Rogers is a dinosaur among battery farm hens. A few other fossils still haunt the Neo-fied New York City: Steve goes for coffee with crippled Luke Cage and a white hair Matt Murdock, grumbling about the state of the world. Steve is stirred into action when a revisionist history docuseries about the Red Skull is televised. Things spiral from there.

 This book was just what I needed. It does everything you want: politics as subtle as a brick to the teeth, adaptations of familiar heroes and villains in new and interesting ways, gorgeous art and witty words. It really buoyed me back into comics.

 I really mean it about the lack of subtly. You can feel Zdarsky’s frustration for the aimless direction real life America is wandering into (or perhaps a warning as I believe he’s Canadian). You can’t read this and not see the parallels to the continuing rise of the right wing in America. The cult of celebrity and media control leading to the stealthy return of society's greatest threats. I’ve loved a lot of Zdarsky’s Marvel output but this is the most obvious message to the reader. That being said, we live in a world where people missed the messages in Star Ship Troopers and Robocop… so maybe there’s not much hope for us.

 What did I struggle with?

 

Maybe its just in the zeitgeist for recent years, but I felt the decorative trappings of the dystopia to chockfull of tropes. Acuña’s art is gorgeous but I’m tired of seeing the citizen’s of the future plastered in meaningless circuitry tattoos and bombarded with neon bright holographic advertisements. Its short hand for the dangers of apathetic progression, but its not original.

 

I also found some of the key players don’t get enough panel time. Luke Cage is the worst: Power Man is critical for Steve’s journey in this, and even gets a bad ass page in the finale, but we never see him do anything besides join the fight… Luke doesn’t even throw a punch. Also Black Widow: it's shown through flashback that she survives the event known as “H-Day” (the point where the American people turn their back on superheroes), but unless I missed it she's never mentioned again. I guess it wouldn’t work for today’s audience for a story about misinformation to have a Russian on the good side. I would have swapped her for Black Panther or Namor or someone who has a legitimate reason not to be in America at this point in time. She could have just died of old age, but it would have been nice to see that at some point.

I would have placed a plaque in this panel stating “In Loving Memory of Natasha Romanoff.”. It would be fitting for Matt to be sitting at his old love’s bench.

 There’s a couple of few voids in this story for me, and I think it's an issue in trying to set this story in the Marvel Universe. I understand that this is an Avenger’s story But…

-        Where is the Fantastic Four? It’s feasible that they were killed in H-Day, or off world.

-        Where are the X-Men? This is an America wide problem, the mutants wouldn’t be spared. Also there is a beat where Cap regains his youthful strength through a new character who can randomly reproduce the original super soldier serum, that really comes out of nowhere. I would have done it so Steve’s old ally Wolverine has to sacrifice his healing factor to bring Steve back into the fight.

-        Where are the villains? We see that Spidey rogue’s gallery are being experimented on in the raft, but what happened to all the low level foes? I would have liked to see them join in the battle for America’s future.

Would I recommend it?

I did really enjoy this, but this isn’t Zdarsky’s best work in an alternative Marvel Timeline. That’s definitely Spider-Man Life Story. If you want sad old superheroes battling dystopian regimes in the near future, I would recommend Catwoman Lonely City over this. It's more thoughtful, more character driven, and answers the question of what villains do in the new world order.

Secret Wars

 Secret Wars

Essays on essays have been written about Secret Wars (2015). I doubt I can offer anything that hasn’t been observed before. I highly recommend All of The Marvels by Douglas Wolk if you would like an expert's opinion. But to me, this is The Event comic, and absolutely deserves the capital letters, bold print and italics. 

For those of you that only follow Marvel through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and are curious and hungry for the next big thing, I’m going to issue a spoiler warning now. Avengers: Secret Wars is slated for release in 2027, and although there are two distinct events that bear the name Secret Wars (1984 and 2015), I think they are building up to this one. 1984 is a balls to the wall crossover event where heroes and villains compete for survival on Battleworld as orchestrated by The Grand Master. I think the MCU already played this card in Thor Ragnarok (2017). The current and future phases of the MCU have been heavily circling the multiverse idea; with the events of Spiderman: No Way Home (2021), Loki (2021) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) laying the groundwork for Secret Wars. What's even more intriguing is the mess that's happening over at Sony. Besides the two phenomenal Spider-verse movies, they have brought multiverse shenanigans to their live action offerings.

Last chance to drop off before I give potential spoilers for the Movie.

Secret Wars (2015) is the death of all Marvel Universe as it crashes into the Ultimate Universe. Marvel Comics committed to the bit so intently that they literally stopped producing comics for months after the fatal incursion hit shelves. For the comic fans of 2015, this page was an image scorched into their brain. 

I think we are going to see the same thing happen with the MCU and the Sony Pictures Marvel movies. But two big ingredients are missing for this to work… Dr Doom and Reed Richards. 

What am I Reading?

Secret Wars, 2015, issues 1-9. Written by Jonathan Hickman, illustrated by Esad Ribic. 

What’s it about?

I think this page sums up Secret Wars better than I ever could.

What’s good about it?

As I said earlier, I think this is The Event. Hickman plotted the end of the universe and spun the long yarn through his Fantastic Four (64 issues) and Avengers (77 issues) runs into this climactic crescendo.  Thousands of pages laying down the foundations for the end of everything. Everything dies. Hickman is fantastic at this. The seeds are so meticulously planted, the crop so carefully nurtured, that the fruit of it all is outrageously devastating. If you were reading it at the time, the sense of dread from issue to issue was palpable. Also… the stones on this man… imagine having the balls to pitch “Lets kill the largest piece of collaborative collective fiction so far in human history. Fifty plus years of stuff, just chuck it in the bin and start again” with a straight face.

There is also such a clear devotion for the history of Marvel. Battleworld and Warzones(the names themselves being a callback to 1984) are a patchwork quilt of Marvel’s greatest hits. It's a genius twist on the recognizable. It's What If..? turned up to eleven. What a good idea! It must have also made the pitch more palatable, as it spun off into forty eight additional books set in the new world. Forty eight! Incredible! I’m an avid collector and I’ve only got seventeen of these… It's a feast. 

However grand and cosmic the scale of this event is, it ultimately boils down to two main players: Reed Richards, and Victor Von Doom. Which is pure poetry for the turbulent history of this universe. Marvel was always about these two characters. They are the pure essence of Marvel. Scientists, friends, enemies, testing each other, proving each other right, jealousy and narcissism battling with duty and compassion for each side both internally and externally. Drama distilled and mixed with the impossible imagination. Exactly what Marvel is all about. I don’t think you can point to any other arch nemesis pairings in comics and come close to the chess games between Mr Fantastic and Dr Doom. They are the perfect reflection of each other, not the opposite of each other, and that's what makes it special. Hickman understands that is the crux of this dynamic and Ribic captures it beautifully.

There are also a myriad of little moments amongst the enormity of the action that really bring a level of heart to the book. Sometimes I feel that Hickman is too focused on the big picture to remember the joy to the page, I especially felt that in his Avengers run and House/Powers of X. I love the idea of all the street level villains revelling the end of the world in a bar… until Frank Castle walks in. Miles securing his space in the new world because he had a three week old burger in his pocket is incredibly funny. Namor skewering Zombie M.O.D.O.K… no notes. 

What did I struggle with?

This is going to be controversial; I love Esad Ribic, really I do, I think when he does a big splash spread or an experimental composition or when you need the flow of a sequence to be visceral, you can’t find anyone better. But… and it's a big but… I don’t like his faces. They have this uncanny valley thing for me. They have this level of additional detail, like Frank Quitely or Moebius, without the benefit of their stylisation. It's also not quite alive enough for a photorealistic face like Alex Ross. I think it leaves the subjects with too much of the dead fish eyed look. That feels horrible to say, but every time I read this book, that feeling intensifies. Dr Strange is the worst for some reason. Something about his Dr Strange gives me the heebie-jeebies. They also lack subtlety in their expression; everyone has this slack jaw open mouth, or the deepest frown, or the most maniacal smile, or the moodiest pre-teen pout. 

There is a clear three part structure to the final battle as well. Thanos Vs Doom. Black Panther Vs Doom. Reed Vs Victor. Thanos being dispatched so nonchalantly is perfect. Reed besting Victor through words was inevitable. But T’Challa was disappointing in my view. He has an infinity gauntlet and does precisely nothing with it. He just punches on with Doom. What’s the point in the glove? He could have achieved the same with a mech-suit. It would have been far more interesting to have a battle of magical wills, shaping reality around them in the fight, writing and rewriting the universe to gain advantage, a true clash of kings turned gods. Maybe it was too difficult to put on the page, or they ran out of space / time in the book, but I feel it's a missed opportunity. 

Now the ending of Secret Wars and the birth of the new universe is very nearly perfect in my view. Reed, Sue and the kids going forth into the blank pages of the unwritten, uncreated multiverse, to study reality and be better than superheroes and be a family is absolutely spot on. Jumping into the crossroads of infinity is how Marvel should be reborn.  The fact they leave Ben and Johnny behind is unforgivable. 

Would I recommend it?

If any Marvel comic fans haven’t read this, where have you been buddy? This is a must read. For anyone jumping on to Marvel comics, this is a perfect point; It's the birth of something new and a love letter to all that’s come before. You can use this to look forward and look back. It is the junction to everywhere. If you only know Marvel from the movies… this is batshit mental and would confuse the hell out of you.

Factory Summers

 Factory Summers

I’ve been really enjoying non-fiction graphic novels at the moment. I was planning on covering Joe Sacco’s Palestine… but then the world happened and now I really don’t want to… 

What am I Reading?

Factory Summers, written and illustrated by Guy Delisle. (2021)

What’s it about?

This autobiographical work follows Guy's teenage summer job in the local paper mill, where his estranged father has worked for decades. 

What’s good about it?

Delisle’s angular cartoon style is endlessly charming. It's so digestible, with each page being a delicious mix of simplistic subjects with complex compositions, or entirely the reverse. The lack of fat is extremely refreshing. Each line is necessary, no word is excessive. 

I’m going to jump ahead to the recommendation now: I know a few of my readers are from my previous work places (Big shout out to my readers from Apollo and SMR), and this is the perfect book for you. I’ve worked in factories for most of my career, and the skills and tricks and knowledge and patience the average factory operator has about their job is miraculous. That’s fully captured in this book. The little things people in factories do to improve their work and improve their lives should be taught in schools. It should be bottled up and sold to people who think they are worthless because there is absolutely no such thing as unskilled work. I’ve seen it nearly every day of the last decade or so. Of course there is the occasional oversight, but that's why companies employ engineers like me, but the solution nearly always comes from the bottom up. 

I’m not joking either: Delisle’s observation that the astounding ingenuity, resistance and muscle memory whilst performing this style of job is exactly what I feel when walking the factory floor. You see little things that people do and think “Well that’s fucking smart, lets teach that, lets make that standard practice.”. What also is preserved in this book is that strange them and us feeling between the white and blue collar workers in the same building. Engineers wander through this book like ghosts, whilst the operators fill the pages with life. I sure hope I’m not one of these aloof clean shirt engineers.

What did I struggle with?

I chose this because I didn’t want anything too depressing, and although there is nothing overtly sad about it, I found it very bittersweet. It made me very introspective about my career and my relationship with my father. There were too many unexpected parallels between Delisle’s experience and my own. I’ve often wished I had a dream: something that I actively strived towards and shaped my life around, like Delisle’s (and Healy’s in Americana) feeling towards animation and comics. I’ve just sort of fallen into my engineering career. Of course this is nothing against the comic. The fact it elicited this kind of emotion speaks to how much impact the comic had.

Would I recommend it?

Absolutely, it's a tasty little snack of a book, especially if you’ve worked in a factory environment. 

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 3: Century

 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 3: Century.

Have you ever got caught in a media slump? That feeling where you only want to consume the familiarity of the tired and tested, and simultaneously immensely bored with the same old crap? You try and dip your toe into something new, running the risk of wasting time on something you won’t enjoy or weighing up the uncertainty of the new thing simply being not what you want right now, so you go back to the well that ran dry years ago. My wife and I have been caught in that rut for some time now.

We are looking for that ever elusive unicorn of a product that feels recognisable but exotic. The best way I can explain it is… Do you remember the wait between Games of Thrones seasons? You scratch around trying to find something Game of Thrones shaped to fill the Game of Thrones hole. You pick up various things like The Witcher or Wheel of Time and they just aren’t the right flavour or texture. But Soph and I just don’t know what shape the hole is right now.

I have a suspicion it's the MCU. We’ve loved a lot of Marvel’s offerings, but Love and Thunder left such a bad taste that we’ve been put off. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 was good! But it still didn’t cleanse the pallet. With all this in mind, I scoured my shelves for something that I haven’t read, but knew what to expect. 

What am I Reading?

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 3: Century. Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Kevin O’Neill.

What’s it about?

The year is 1910, and an ill omen hangs over London. The newly formed League are still finding their feet in the new century's infancy. Mina Murray’s team now consists of the gender fluid immortal Orlando, the ghost-finder Thomas Carnacki, the gentleman thief A.J. Raffles, and the recently immortalised Allan Quartermain (courtesy of the fountain of youth).

The year is 1969, and the league is dying. The space age and decade of free love has left the league scattered or lost. All that's left is Mina, Allan and Orlando. They live as a throuple in the hidden safe house beneath a beat bar. The league may be gone, but the apocalyptic threat from fifty years before still looms large across the city. 

The year is 2009, and the end of the world has begun. 

What’s good about it?

I’ve read the first two volumes dozens of times, but the third instalment has been left on the shelf for a good long while. I don’t really know why I haven’t read it before. It must have just got lost between other more appetising titles at the time. It's good to revisit this horrible world. This is by far the bleakest of the three. Alan Moore rarely holds back with the doom and gloom, but this grim. It's all the more grim because the filthy face of it isn’t buried in drab colouring. The techno tie dye luminosity of the sixties is twisted into a sinister landscape. 2009 is worse, because it somehow captures the rescission riddled streets sublimely. I don’t know how O’Neill has captured the hopelessness of that time in so few panels.

This won’t come as a surprise for those who know me, but in my opinion this is the best Harry Potter book. I’ve read all the Potter books, and listened to the wonderful Stephen Fry audiobooks countless times. But it's only the dulcet tones of Mr Fry that make it wonderful, I think the stories are absolute dross. Harry is a void, just a vessel for exposition. He is a characterless protagonist; he stands for nothing, rarely puts forward anything as his own, he is just a passenger through the plot, never questioning the injustices he sees in plain sight, he is no hero. The Wizarding World is a neo-liberal new labour nightmare that doesn’t promote morals or equality. Harry Potter dissolves under the slightest scrutiny. It’s a touch of genius to make him the Antichrist. Even smarter to have him washed away by the ultimate cosmic corrector of naughty children, Mary Poppins. 

I think my favourite new addition to the pantheon of literary characters is Andrew Norton, from Iain Sinclair’s delightfully bizarre Slow Chocolate Autopsy. If you’ve not read it, I would strongly recommend it. Norton is a man displaced in time, if not space. He is eternally trapped within the bounds of London, but not within the linear timeline of its existence. He bounces from date to date, observing all the coming and goings of the city. The league uses him as a kind of informant, even though his messages are always garbled cryptic clues (due to his lack of time to adequately explain). However, from his first meeting with Mina in 1910, I saw the way the story would unfold.

What did I struggle with?

There is a touch to much sexual assault for my liking in this story. Of course it's gross and awful and scary, but it's also quite a cheap way of showing that people are bad in my opinion. You can show that people aren’t to be trusted without them being rapists or perverts. Outside of Jani’s assault in the 1910 section, I don’t think any of the other attacks are needed to progress the story. Mina being touched whilst unconscious in 1969 is entirely unnecessary as she is already battling for control against an evil possessive force. I would have just made her assailant a thief, trying to steal the talisman that’s protecting her: Giving Mina more agency and urgency to get back to her body before it's lost to the cult leader, rather than some random dude feeling her tits.  

The biggest gripe I have with this book is… what the fuck is going on? Turns out you really need to read the Black Dossier for big bits of this to make sense. The whole Duke of Milan stuff went right over my head. I found it immensely off putting. It's such a hard left turn away from the previously semi-grounded lore of the League that it had me baffled. I’m used to a small amount of hand holding from Marvel and DC (because no way are you going to remember, let alone read, all the back catalogue that establishes the macguffins used from issue to issue) so having this sudden shift jump out at me feels like an idiot. 

Would I recommend it?

If I’m being honest with myself, probably not. It’s a clear statement that as a culture Britain has lost its way. I think most of us will agree with that. As a comic and story, this is by far weaker than the earlier volumes. 

DCEASED

 DCEASED

Off the back of Gyo, my appetite was wetted for some zombie goodness. In a post pandemic world I think zombie media has evolved into something scarier. We now know that human stupidity will be the biggest threat in any fast spreading infection scenario (we all suspected it would be in any case, but now we have recent empirical evidence). Also I think we’ve shed some of the tired tropes of the genre. I love the Ramero movies, and Mark Brooks’ phenomenal World War Z gave me sleepless nights the first time I read it, but the pinnacle for me is The Last of Us. The horror of a world ending scourge on the human race is greatly magnified when brought down on scale in my opinion. Following individuals throughout the panic is a lot more terrifying because we get to know and care for them as people. 

That’s hard to do when the infected are truly brainless. What World War Z and Last of Us taught us is that if you remain calm and keep thinking, you can simply pass through a dead world. What if the zombies are smart? What if they retained their attributes and knowledge, but were driven by that insatiable hunger? Now that's scary. That being said, the tone has to be right. For me, Marvel Zombies never hit the mark. It was always too comedic. Yes I love Spider-Man and don’t want to see him turn into a brain scoffing beast, but if he still makes quips whilst he does it, is he really gone? DCEASED on the other hand balances the scales. 

What am I Reading?

DCEASED, the entire collection, written by Tom Taylor. Reading order: 

DCEASED #1-6, illustrated by Trevor Hairsine, coloured by Rain Beredo. 

DCEASED: Unkillables #1-3, illustrated by Karl Mostert and Trevor Scott.

DCEASED: Hope at Worlds End #1-14, illustrated by Karl Mostert, Renato Guedes and Daniele Di Nicuolo.

DCEASED: Dead Planet #1-7, illustrated by Trevor Hairsine and Gigi Baldassini, coloured by Rain Beredo. 

DCEASED: War of the Undead Gods #1-8, illustrated by Trevor Hairsine, coloured by Rain Beredo. 

What’s it about?

DCEASED: After abducting Cyborg, Darkseid has finally reached his goal and completed the Anti-Life equation… but he miscalculated. The equation drove him into suicidal madness, leaping into the core of Apokolips, causing the planet to explode. Split seconds before detonation, Cyborg escapes back to earth. The moment he arrives, the Anti-Life equation virus leaps to the internet, causing the insanity to spread through screens. The end of the world comes swift and brutal. Heroes are lost, families destroyed, but those that are left band together to save who they can.

Unkillables: There are only two sides in this war, the living and the anti-living. A rag tag crew of anti-heroes and villains are drawn together to save an orphanage swamped in a horde of ravenous killers.

Hope at Worlds End: A collection of survivor stories during the chaotic days of the fall of earth. Can the heroes defend the few sanctuaries left standing before the exodus? 

Dead Planet: Earth is abandoned, left to the anti-living. The few uninfected hold little hope for rescue now that most of the heroes have headed for the stars. In the last moments of earth, Cyborg has discovered the truth, there is a cure! But can it be done before doom ends it all?

War of the Undead Gods: Darkseid is back, and he’s bringing the full wrath of the anti-life with him. His scourge across the galaxy has turned some of the most powerful entities and armies to the poison of death. Even with the cure, can the new Justice League stand against him?

What’s good about it?

In recent years Tom Taylor has been the poster child for DC’s alternative timeline stories. Injustice being the big one, with over a hundred issues, but also to the smaller scale such as the twelve issue run of Dark Knights of Steel. Alongside that, I’ve also seen the forever vocal minority on Twitter throwing a considerable amount of crap at Tom. They rarely have anything constructive to say, just a seeming disdain for how he treats some characters in these stories. Here’s the big thing they need to understand; these aren’t necessarily the characters as you know them from other books. And that's entirely the point! These books are meant to be fun packages twisted from the expectations of cannon. If you can’t get past that, why read an elseworld? For me, I love it!

I’m not ashamed to say that some of the emotional beats in this hit me hard. Tears were shed at some of the goodbyes and more so at some of the reunions. All you need to do to get my waterworks going is put Pa Kent or Alfred in danger. On the other side of the coin, there are some seriously awesome moments in these books. Jon telling Orion to stay down is up there with one of my favourite Superman moments. Much like Injustice, Taylor doesn’t leave any concepts off the table in the fight against the Anti-Living. He fully empties the toy box, pulling insane stunts with the powers and tools of the Justice League and beyond. He’s not afraid to do this for both sides of the war. Of course a Zombie Superman or Wonderwoman would be scary but I found some of the smaller hitters all the more terrifying. Mirror Master, Plastic Man and Mr Mxyzptlk are far more frightening for me. 

I’m finding it hard to pick a favourite of the books. All of them are a fantastic mix of emotions, heartfelt, heart pumping and fist pumping. There are some subtle character moments that outline Taylor’s love for DC and underline the messaging of what it means to be a hero. The best one that runs throughout the books is the parallel between Black Adam and Shazam. In Hope At Worlds End, Black Adam ruthlessly destroys all the blighted in Kahndaq, despite the collateral damage. He mocks the Justice League’s lack of steel to do the necessary evil to do the most good. However, whilst walking the streets of Kahndaq unpowered, he is infected by the Anti-Life equation. Terrified, Black Adam invokes the lightning in an attempt to save himself and hands the horde a god… dooming his country to death. In contrast Billy silently sacrifices himself in the Unkillables. He was strong enough to know that he would be a threat, and hid himself away amongst the infected as a brave but dead young boy. 

What did I struggle with?

I can’t pick a favourite book, but I can say that War of the Undead Gods is the weakest for me. It's full of good moments but I couldn’t get on board with the twist. It’s too far out of left field in my opinion. It also offers a definitive end to the threat. In other Zombie media, the infection becomes a thing the characters need to live with, and in a covid world, that rings true. 

I think my favourite issue is possibly the smallest scale story in Hope At Worlds End, featuring Detective Chimp, Ace the Bat-Hound and Krypto. In that they address that the equation doesn’t affect animals. That raises the biggest gap in DCEASED for me: The Red. Where is Animal-Man? If animals aren’t impacted, they are as big a resource to the Justice League as The Green is. I honestly expected this to be a bigger thing and it feels like a massive missed opportunity to do something interesting. Or Ratcatcher? We could have had survivors ferried between sanctuaries ringed in an army of rats, much like the end of The Suicide Squad.  

A tiny thing… I have the hardbacks of each of these books, each with a nice stylized metallic shine on the font. But the covers are a mix of artists and images. Why?! Why not keep it consistent? I personally much prefer the covers showing infected characters.

Would I recommend it?

For the DC fan, I don’t think you can go wrong with DCEASED… just don’t get too attached to anyone.