Earth 2: World's End #9 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Daniel H. Wilson, Marguerite Bennett, Mike Johnson
Art By: Scott McDaniel, Tyler Kirkham, John Livesay, Stephen Segovia, Jason Paz, Robson Rocha, Guillermo Ortego, Edwardo Pansica, Walden Wong
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: December 3, 2014

A Bunch of Bad Decisions

Last week in World's End, we saw what looked like Barbara Grayson's end, but as we've seen this week in Earth 2 #29, she survives her ordeal with the asteroid and makes her way to trains leaving Chicago with Dick and their son Johnny.  Speaking of Johnny's, Constantine made his way down into the World Army Arkham Facility and formed his own team with the residents of it's cryo tubes.  We got Brainwave, Obsidian and Jonni Thunder, who's a woman this time around.  While Green Lantern was dealing with that pesky asteroid problem, Sam and Grundy met up with the Furies of Apokolips and Grundy got a little torn in half and things weren't looking good for Sam either.  Down in Desaad's clone labyrinth, the Batman.Superman crew received some bad news when Huntress's tracker read that her vitals had stopped and Flash and Hawkgirl didn't have a fun time last week either when Flash abandoned Hawkgirl to go search for his mother, but don't worry she eventually caught up, but she's now feeling the affects of the Apokoliptian signal which has her chanting "Kill Kill".  So...... That's going on.  Let's dive into this issue and see what stories Earth 2: World's End has for us this week. 

Explain It!:

Our story begins with Sam having a bad time with the Furies, but the tables start to turn as Alan Scott shows up to save his former lover and even after being torn in half, Grundy gets back in on the fight and I'm starting to think that the Furies might be in trouble.  This idea is pounded even harder into my head when we see that the avatar of the Blue is actually that Cthulhu creature that Aqua Woman released a couple issues ago.  I just hope that this monster knows the difference between who it's supposed to "Cthulhu" and who it's not because even the embodiments of the kingdom of Earth seem a little nervous about it being released back into the world and if they're a little nervous, then I'm a freaking wreck.  I can use "Cthulhu" as a verb right?

In Chicago we see Constantine and his new gang checking out the people who have taken control of the trains leaving the city and how they're extorting people to get a ride.  They watch as one woman isn't having any of gang's bullshit, that's right people we're in Chicago and that means Barbara Grayson is jumping into action and even after one of the assholes on the train kicks her in the face when she won't give him anything for a ticket, our not Batgirl picks up a rock and makes the dude less pretty "aboutst" the face.  Now, this bit here is a bit annoying to me.  Barbara Grayson is then shot by the train man and it looks like she's dead...........  What the hell is that?  I looked at the Earth 2 #29 preview and that ended on a cliffhanger where it looked like Barbara was killed by an asteroid, then I read the book and found out she was fine, but then she was almost fed to a parademon, but you know what?  She got out of that scrape too and now she's just shot and possibly dead.  It just seems so anticlimactic to have all that go down just to kill the character off here; while Constantine watches and hates himself for not stepping in when he could of ended this whole scene before it happened.  My only positive take away from this is that I wanted Barbara to die in Earth 2 #29 so she could become the Earth 2 Spectre, but I got over it immediately when I saw that she was alright and even though I still think it would be cool to have a female Spectre, I was kind of rooting for her to live after she survived the last issue.  Oh well, it seems that a gun shot is the main catalyst for becoming The Spectre anyway, but she'll probably just die and I'll begin to weep like a four year old with a skinned knee.

Down in Desaad's cloning facility, Batman is feeling sorry for himself because Huntress is dead and Power Girl gives a "Ra Ra" speech to get the gang back on board to find her because even if she is dead, they don't want Desaad desecrating her body.  It's at this point that the damnedest thing happens.  The group actually look like they find the real honest to god Superman.  I'm not kidding, how odd is it that after all the cloned Superman mess that they've gone through that they actually find Clark?  This would be a real bonus on the saving the world front, but after we see Thomas punch Superman in the face...... You know because he's a jerk, we see that Superman's bleeding, so it looks like our Man of Steel is simply a Man of....... well skin.

Heading back over to The Flash and his current Hawk Girl problem, we see one of the weirdest decisions I think anyone could ever make.  Instead of Flash just using that speed thing he has to stop Hawkgirl from shooting his mother and him, his mother actually pushes past him to save the day herself and you know how she goes about it?  She wants to touch Hawkgirl's face and tell her to remember her mother.  Well of course this doesn't work because it's ridiculous and if Flash hadn't intervened she would of been shot in the face.  When this is all over I think it's time to put your mother in a home Jay.  The day is actually saved by Doctor Fate teleporting in with Jimmy Olsen and casting as spell to drive the crazy out of people, but how Doctor Fate is there after sexing up the mother box I have no idea, hopefully we get a rousing bout of exposition next week telling us what the morning after was like.

Finally we head over to Apokolips where what's left of the World Army's offensive is planning a coordinated nuclear explosion on the planet, but it seems that Mister Miracle, Barda and Fury have gone AWOL.  This team has a plan all their own and me being someone who's never understood Fourth World stuff, I'll say some names and maybe you'll recognize them and maybe you won't but here we go.  So the trio go to Paternus to get the key to the Mobius Chamber and after Mister Miracle rips it from his forehead..... The dude's pretty much all head at that point, we see Paternus freak out and see that he's actually a giant as he rips himself out of the ground.  Barda and Fury try to distract him as Mister Miracle uses the shard to enter the Mobius Chamber and it seems that he's on his way to go after Darkseid and that never seems like a good idea to me.  I think Mister Miracle has some Daddy issues because while he believes his father is Darkseid, Paternus layed down some info making Scott think twice about it.  So it's time to confront Daddy and get some answers.

That's it for this week's World's End and man did a lot of stories here just piss me off.  Barbara just getting shot, Flash's mother being an idiot, Constantine......... you know, being Constantine.  There was some interesting things here that I can't wait to see the outcome, but the characters were just making so many bad decisions that I found myself yelling at the comic book.  Besides me yelling at fiction, I also didn't like the art in the book this week.  There's a ton of artists like usual and since DC decided that I didn't need to know who did what, all I can tell you is that the sections with Flash and Hawkgirl was the only bit that I really liked, the rest was "Meh" going on "Blah".  So this issue is really a mixed bag between good and bad and I hope it gets sorted by next week's issue.  See you then.

Bits and Pieces:

There's elements to this issue that I really like but there's also a bunch that I don't.  I love the world of Earth 2 and get hyped every week to read about it, but this issue doesn't really live up to my normal excitement I have.  The majority of the art is subpar and the characters were making very odd decisions throughout the book, so they just came off a bit wrong.  I'm still looking forward to next week's issue but as for this, I'm a bit disappointed.

5/10