The New 52: Futures End #25 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen
Art By: Patrick Zircher, Jesus Merino
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: October 22, 2014

"I Should Have Stayed In The Phantom Zone"

It's that time again, where we jump in our DC Tardis and take a quick trip to Five Years From Now to check in on the awful future our heroes face.  For your quick recap this week, you'll need to know that Frankenstein, Amethyst, Ray Palmer, Black Adam, Hawkman and The Engineer got back to "The Carrier" but were being chased down by robot minions of Brainiac.  In Africa Superman went searching for the robot Brainiac monster, but it seems that the monster decided to doubleback and Constantine found himself staring at his friends being slaughtered.  It's a good thing our Man of Steel came back to lay a little smack down.  Back on Cadmus Island, Brother Eye has taken over all the systems and has even taken over all the locked up Earth 2 heroes.  If someone ever wants to give you an implant, tell them no.  Anyway Fifty Sue, Lana Lang, King Faraday, Grifter and Deathstroke go and hide in Fifty Sue's super secret bunker while they try to figure out how to take down the psychotic satellite.  Tim Drake's ex-girlfriend Madison Payne has been spending a lot of time with Ronnie Raymond and Jason Rusch and Dr. Yamazake have made a breakthrough in developing teleportation technology, that the steadily getting crazier Dr. feels is being kept from the people by the superheroes he despises.  That should do you for this issue, so strap in and let's go.

Explain It!:

Our story begins in deep space where our SHADE/Storm Watch heroes battle against the forces of Brainiac, so they can escape his reach.  This is the scene where the header for this review comes from and it made me laugh so much.  There are our heroes battling against robots and Black Adam yells, "I should of stayed in the Phantom Zone!"  How bad does it have to get for someone to make that statement?  Eventually The Engineer gets "The Carrier" working enough so that they can jump out of there, but the only problem is they don't know where in the multiverse they might end up.  I guess anywhere is better than here and they "jump" into the bleed, leaving their enemies behind.  This is one of the best parts of this book and now that they might end up in a parallel world, just makes me so much more interested in what happens to these characters.  Plus I'm a  huge Hawkman fanboy and I love that Carter is getting so much play after his book was cancelled.  Hopefully it works out for them and hopefully we find out soon.

Back on Cadmus Island the survivors of Brother Eye's siege regroup in Fifty Sue's Ultra Top Secret, Authorized Personnel Only, Trespassers Will Be Eviscerated, Super Secure Sidekick Bunker.  No I'm serious that's what it's called and man does that sound like Keith Giffen is writing this issue.  Now I'm not positive who writes what book, but I'd bet on Giffen being behind that name and while I'm not usually fond of his style of humor, I do have to admit that I find this funny.  Anyway Fifty Sue and the rest of her team are off the grid and invisible to Brother Eye there and Fifty Sue continues to show us that she can pretty much do anything because she continues to interact with Brother Eye via her mind.  So technopath, check.  The whole point to this part of the story is that Grifter is able to read deception in people like King Faraday thought and recruited him for, but the only problem here is that King Faraday is the one who's been deceiving everyone.  Cadmus's teleportation technology is actually a power that King Faraday has and once he was outed by Grifter, King teleports to safety leaving everyone else to deal with Brother Eye on their own.  This section ends with Fifty Sue's grand plan to simply storm the Cadmus facility and turn off Brother Eye.  Good luck there.  It seems like a lot of characters are on their path to storming Cadmus and in doing so taking on Brother Eye, so it's not out of the question for them to actually win this thing.  We've got Green Arrow and his army on way, Mister Miracle and Fury still on the island and biding their time, so I give the operation decent odds.

Over in Africa, Superman battles the robot Brainiac monster and while he's at it Constantine has a very disturbing narration about how the true Brainiac is a god that's older than anything that they know and that every time Superman's faced Brainiac, it wasn't really him.  They've all been avatars and surrogates, but for some reason he's always been afraid of Superman and that's what Constantine finds interesting.  Something on Krypton made Brainiac realize the potential and even made him leave this robot monster long ago, so that one day it could take out Superman.  The only problem is Superman beat the robot monster and Constantine believes it was actually left there to test what Superman could do.  Even though we saw Clark do a complete smashy smashy job on the robot, Constantine believes that it's still out there at one of the seven portals around the world and now it's up to Constantine and Superman to track it down.  I'm not entirely sure what Constantine is talking about in this section.  Damn Brit is being so cryptic with his mystical nonsense that he's barely telling a story here.  Hopefully it will become clearer as the story progresses towards finding Brainiac.

In New York, Madison Payne and Ronnie Raymond are hanging out at Columbia University, just spending time together and I bet pissing Tim Drake off, who is probably watching them from somewhere, when Ronnie hears on the news about a Tsunami heading for Samoa.  Ronnie excuses himself and for some reason thinks he can just go to Jason Rusch after keeping him locked up in the Firestorm Matrix for weeks........... and after that Jason Rusch saying that he never wanted to see him again and that Firestorm was over.  So yeah, I don't think Jason's down for a little "I want you inside me, so we can save the day" time.  That's how they become Firestorm right?  They hold hands and Ronnie yells "I want you inside me" while Jason yells "I want to be inside you".  Maybe I've been reading the wrong books.  As you'd imagine Jason is pissed at the selfishness of Ronnie.  It's not that he wants to save the people of Somoa, it's that he misses being the hero and Jason doesn't want any part of him.  So the two argue a bit, Ronnie apologizes and leaves, but the real problem here is that the crazy superhero hating Dr. Yamazake was watching Jason through his web cam and now he knows Jason's secret and he believes he's been sabotaging him this entire time, so that the superheroes can keep teleportation tech to themselves.  This will not end well for Jason.  He should of just went inside of Ronnie.

That's it for this week's Futures End and this might be the best issue that didn't reveal anything.  Usually I go all bat shit when they reveal something huge like when we saw Green Arrow was still alive or when we found out Shazam was now acting as Superman, but this issue didn't have any of that and it was still entertaining as hell.  Make sure you're back next week to see if they keep up the momentum and see if the future isn't all bleak miserable nonsense, but something fun.  See you then.

Bits and Pieces:

I really liked this issue and while it's had it's ups and downs, I think it's found a really good pace and I couldn't be happier.  Everything in this issue had a reason for the characters to be there, unlike Madison constantly saying that Tim betrayed her trust and just getting me pissed off.  All fun here and the art by Patty Z and Jesus Merino is just great and I'm so happy that Zircher was finally on a book that I found....... not bullshit?  So definitely go and check this out and have a fun foray into the world of Five Years From Now.

9/10