Earth 2: World's End #3 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Daniel H. Wilson, Marguerite Bennett, Mike Johnson
Art By: Eddy Barrows, Eber Ferreira, Tyler Kirkham, Joe Weems, Eduardo Pansica, Jaime Mendoza, Jorge Jimenez, Paulo Sequeira, Cam Smith
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: October 22, 2014

It's The Pits

Last week in Earth 2: World's End, we saw most of our "Wonders" take on the first of four Furies of Apokolips, War.  Well the fight didn't go to well after we saw that one of War's abilities is to get inside people's heads and turn them into her puppets.  We had Huntress, Power Girl and Red Tornado become her sexy puppets and man did they ever beat the holy hell out of Batman and Val-Zod.  One positive thing to come out of last week's issue though is the fact that Mister Miracle, Terry Sloan and Mister Terrific escaped Bedlam after Mister Miracle trapped him in Sloan's mind forcing the evil genius to face him and eventually kill him.  So I like to believe that there's a tiny skeleton inside Sloan's brain now......... That's how minds work right?  Let's see how well our "Wonders" fair this week as Apokolips continues the assault and the World Army has to deal with the actual planet of Apokolips heading for a collision course with Earth 2.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our story begins with Batman about to have his head busted in by War, but luckily he's saved by Val-Zod and not really caring about destroying these "Wonders" anymore, War goes to meet up with her sisters and orders her puppets to kill the heroes, destroy the city and then kill themselves.  This would of been a terrible ending to our story, so it's a good thing that Red Tornado's robot body realized that her memories were corrupted and started a reboot.  So after cutting her strings, Red Tornado gives Power Girl and Huntress a whack on their noggins to get them back in order.  So all our heroes in Geneva are back to normal and you know, not dead and instead of going after War, they figure they should go down into the fire pit and shut it down so no more monsters can invade their world.  I don't know about this plan because a long time ago I saw Captain Steel enter one and it didn't turn out well for him.  He came out all injured and crazy talking about a Red Lantern in the pit.  Oh well let's check in on Mister Miracle.

Oh good, Since Mister Miracle is from Apokolips the World Army thinks it's a good idea to try and torture him for information.  Well more accurately the bureaucrats behind the World Army want this to go down, good old Commander Kahn wants no part of it......... He's a good guy.  After Sandman interrogates Mister Miracle about Apocolips coming towards Earth and learning that the planet's nukes won't have any affect on the God planet, they figure they'll give Mister Miracle, Fury and Big Barda a chance to escape, so once they Boom Tube it back to their planet, the World Army will just follow their teleportation signal.  Now this bit I don't understand.  A long time ago we were introduced to Mister Miracle and Big Barda by them fighting Fury, then we didn't see them for a long time and then it looked like Fury and Big Barda were working with Bedlam to keep Mister Miracle under his control, now they all seem to work together and are friends.  Is this bad story telling?  Am I just missing something?  I can kind of get the idea that Barda and Fury were under Bedlam's mind control, but I never got the impression that Fury needed the mind control because she always been so "Yay Darkseid" in her demeanor.  I'll go with the three working together for my reading sake, I'll just never understood how we got here from them fighting in issue #15 of Earth 2.

Elsewhere Dick Grayson and his family are feeling the pressures of living in a refugee community when the world doesn't look any closer to getting saved and supplies are limited.  Also Hawkgirl and Doctor Fate, who the solicits said would be featured in this issue only make a brief cameo so we can see that they are in England, where Doctor Fate searches for a new, I guess not crazy host.  It looks like Constantine might be playing a larger role in this series than his solo series suggests, because wouldn't you know he's in England as well and it looks like we're getting to what spawned the events of Constantine's Futures End.

In the end it looks like Dr. Crane is one step closer to becoming Robot Man of Earth 2 because...... Well we see his Robot Man body while he's working on some sort of cube which apparently they need Jimmy Olsen's expertise in studying.  I don't know if you remember it from Earth 2's Futures End or not, but somehow it started as a rubik's cube and then became a source of knowledge for Mister Terrific, so that's going on.  Also Aqua Woman returns to her home to find that it's been destroyed and it's denizens taken over by the Fury Death.

That's it for this week's Earth 2: World's End and man was I looking forward to a Hawkgirl and Doctor Fate heavy issue that the solicits promised, but that's just me being a naive dummy like usual.  Solicits telling the truth, everyone knows that can't happen.  While I love these characters I don't know if I can fully get behind one big battle after another, which it looks like this weekly series is only going to give us at this point.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for a good fight scene, but these characters still need a lot of background and characterization and I don't think background exposition by fire is the best way to present that to the readers.  But then again, I don't have a comic, so who am I to talk?  Another week and another disaster, that's what this book conveys, that and the unbelievable idea that they might introduce another "Wonder" soon and that just seems strange to be doing that at this point.  See you next week as we enter the fire pit and hopefully see more story with Hawkgirl, Doctor Fate, Constantine, Green Lantern and Flash.  See you then.

Bits and Pieces:

I complained last week about the amount of artists in this book and how the jump in style threw me off, but somehow even with the same amount of artists, this week pulls off a good looking issue.  I'm getting a little pissed at the fact that the characters I want to see featured in this book are relegated to mere one page entries, while the Superman and Batman related characters seem to be the main focus of every story told.  It's something I hope changes in the future, because I care way more about the other stories than the mere beat 'em up entries featuring Batman and Val-Zod.  It's not a bad series so far, but it's not quite a good one either.

6.8/10