Art By: Cully Hammer
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: September 24, 2014
The Word On The Street
This week's recap is going to be an easy one. All you have to know going in is that Emiko and Diggle have led Big Barda to Green Arrow Island where we learned our hero Green Arrow is still alive and apparently isn't any better at naming his things. Come on, Green Arrow Island? So our Emerald Archer has put together an army and is planning on taking on Cadmus Island. What's up with Cadmus Island you ask, well for awhile they've been holding the heroes of Earth 2 prisoner there and lately they've been taken over by Brother Eye and now it's an island full of puppet super heroes being controlled by the villainous Eye in the sky. Cool thing about this issue is that normally we're jumping about to different characters, but here it's a straight forward story letting us in on what happened to Earth 2 and the war that ensued after their arrival here. I mean here as Prime-Earth because I obviously have reality issues. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
Our story begins by correcting me from when I stated that this Red Arrow was Roy Harper the last time we dealt with this story in Futures End. As it turns out this is Red Arrow from Earth 2 here with Oliver and that raises more questions for me than I had before when I thought it was Roy, because we clearly saw Red Arrow die in a fight with the doppelganger Superman and a horde of Parademons in the Earth 2 title. So I guess he's alive and since it's Five Years From Now, there's plenty of time to write in his resurrection or how he didn't actually die. With all that out of the way, we get into Red Arrow's story on how he got here and what transpired on the last days of Earth 2 during Darkseid's second invasion.
So as you can imagine war is hell and eventually the "Wonders" of Earth 2 couldn't hold the line against Darkseid's forces and they were forced to flee their world. So a bunch of heroes and civilians boarded ships and using technology from Mister Terrific jumped universes to Earth-Prime. The celebrations didn't last long though because Parademon ships followed them through and to make sure that the civilian ships made it to safety, Mister Miracle and pretty much all the heroes stuck on Cadmus Island's ship self destructed; taking out the majority of the enemy ships. Again all celebrations must be held because while the civilian ships also holding Red Arrow and Big Barda made it safely to Earth, Parademon hordes came down and the Earth 2 war began on Earth-Prime.
Eventually after a lot of casualties to heroes and civilians alike, the war was over and then began the Earth 2 integration process; where the Global Peace Agency was formed. Green Arrow being the anti-government spokesperson that he is, began to investigate the agency, which led him to find Red Arrow and the two using Green Arrow's Queen Foundation tech and Justice League tech discovered that the defense codes to Earth were hacked by Maxwell Payne days before the Earth 2 people arrived, leading me to think that Red Robin's girlfriend's father who was convicted as a traitor during the war was kind of a hero here and was hung out to dry. It had to have been him that allowed Mister Terrific to find the right coordinates to Prime-Earth and after the dust of the war settled, our man of fair play just let Maxwell Payne go to prison for the rest of his life. Eventually I think this will come back to haunt our T Sphere'ed hero. The other thing that the Arrows found out is that before the Earth 2 hero's ship exploded, Brother Eye beamed them aboard itself, but besides for a Cadmus ship about to board the satellite all records were lost apparently due to the heroes thinking they'd been captured and going ape shit on Brother Eye's insides.
In the end after digging too much, Cadmus was onto Green Arrow and so he had to fake his death to set his plan in motion to take out Cadmus Island and set the refugees of Earth 2 free and as you know Big Barda's all in.
So holy shit, a straight forward story, I never saw that coming. Hopefully the many writers of this book will continue this trend in the future so I don't have to constantly follow a hundred things going on at once.......... Yeah I doubt it too. It looks like we're going to see Green Arrow and his army of Outsiders bring the pain against Cadmus Island, but with their intel not exactly telling them that a psychotic satellite has taken over all the super powered beings that they're trying to rescue, I don't know how well Oliver's assault will go. Make sure you're back here next week where we'll hopefully find out. See you then.
Bits and Pieces:
While I enjoyed the straight forward narrative here, I feel that it just conveyed a lot of information that we've already pieced together from character's brief musings on the subject throughout the series. Now obviously there was some new stuff here, but it felt forced and even the characters objected to it because it's information that they already knew and it came across feeling really odd and made you wish that you just put the rest of the story together through piecemeal like we've already been doing. But for all my bitching, the issue looked great and didn't diminish my interest in the title, so at least it wasn't more questions and is there for everyone that hasn't been paying close attention to the story so far.
6.8/10
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