The New 52: Futures End #33 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen
Art By: Aaron Lopresti, Stephen Thompson, Art Thibert, Hi-Fi
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: December 17, 2014

Hey!  Little Girl!  You've Got A Bug In Your Brain!

For our quick recap this week you'll need to know that the new Stormwatch consisting of Atom, Frankenstein, Amethyst, Hawkman, Engineer and Black Adam have returned to Earth only to find that Father Time and SHADE want to take possession of Engineer and use her as a way to fight Brainiac when he comes, but I don't think that the new Stormwatch is willing to let her go so readily. Elsewhere, Fifty Sue seems to have lost her way since Cadmus was destroyed and Deathstroke was killed, it's really up in the air to be about who she'll kill since she wasn't given the opportunity to kill Slade for his betrayal. More elsewhere, Batman Beyond and Plastique are still on the hunt for Brother Eye and since we saw Brother Eye's consciousness escape Cadmus Island on a phone, I guess their hunt could still be fruitful.  Finally Madison Payne and Jason Rusch were fused together to make the new Firestorm after Dr. Yamazake kidnapped her as a test subject for his teleportaion machine and everything blew up in their faces.  So Ronnie Raymond is dead, Tim Drake thinks Madison is dead and Madison and Jason are stuck together with no way to separate and Dr. Yamazake got himself some superpowers.  Let's check out this week's foray into Five Years From Now and see what's going down.

Explain It!:

Our story begins with Father Time making good on his threat to unleash Godzilla like monsters on the new Stormwatch if they didn't hand over Engineer and let me tell you, I'm so happy that they didn't comply with Father Time's demands.  This is a Stormwatch team that I would really love to see a monthly book with.  Some really great scenes here as we watch Hawkman and Black Adam fight off the Kaiju monsters and Atom, Frankenstein, Amethyst and Engineer take on humanoid robot soldiers.  Finally Black Adam has had enough and just rips right through the monsters as Atom shrinks down inside of Father Time's mouth and finds his way to the parasite source of the timeless figure.  Father Time's true form is actually a little fucked up and reminiscent to a starro parasite, but really it's a freaking intelligent bug in a little girl's brain.  With any luck this thing won't cause any major problems and Atom can make good on telling everyone that he will now be in charge of SHADE.  I'm rooting for you Ray!

Now we'll jump to Las Vegas where Sgt. Rock and King Faraday are talking about recruiting Ethan Boyer to join their team so they can use some of his geneticist know-how for Cadmus.  You guys remember Ethan Boyer right?  He's that dude that Rampage broke out of prison a long time ago and we haven't seen anything of in months............ Well apparently he's important again, so here he is being terrified by Fifty Sue in Deathstroke's mask.  Yeah, to get him on the Cadmus trolley, King Faraday sent Fifty Sue to be convincing and I have no doubt that she did just that, hell just reading about her makes me nervous enough to agree with anything she'd say.  Now this bit is pretty funny, Fifty Sue sends Boyer to Faraday and walks out of his motel room to see Grifter's tech guru Justin walking by on the phone with Cole, she overhears who he's talking to and hits him in the gut, takes his phone and starts being pissed about why Grifer and Lana didn't call her first.  The cherry on top of this hilarity sunday is the last panel where we see Cole on a park bench with his head down, just not believing his terrible luck.  Seriously he's like the father in that old Twilight Zone episode about the child that could do anything and kept his family hostage.  Poor poor Grifter.

Let's head over to New York and see how the hunt from Brother Eye is going for Batman Beyond and Plastique..................Oh, not well.  Now I said in previous issues that Brother Eye hitched a ride off of  Cadmus Island on Green Arrow's phone, but as it looks like it was actually Lois Lane's phone and now that she's plugged it in, we see Brother Eye going all over the place like in Tron.  Light bike style.  Now what do you think would be the worst possible scenario here?  If you said Brother Eye finding the future Borg-ed out body of Plastique and waking it up, then you'd be correct............ Holy shit, the robot war is going down!  I'm a little curious about this part though.  Terry has his Alfred A.I. searching for Brother Eye and we see Brother Eye's signal crisscross all over the country and eventually end up right around where Batman Beyond and Plastique are............. So what exactly is the Alfred A.I. parameter for searching?  Some tech from thirty five years in the futures should be able to pick up on that unless it really doesn't want to............... Dun Dun Dunnnnnnnnn!

Finally we take a look at how the new Firestorm is doing and I'm not positive on the artist for this part because we have two pencilers on this book for the first time but I'm saying it's Stephen Thompson here and man do I love the way he's drawing Firestorm.  This whole last section is great and I'm a little pissed because it's the end and cliffhangers are kind of against my instant gratification lifestyle that I like to lead.  Okay, Jason has Madison fly back to Dr. Yamazake's lab which is now highly guarded and we get to see Madison use her transmutation powers to sneak her way in.  I just hope that was enough practice, because we see that she isn't alone when the new Dr. Polaris makes his entrance.............. It's Dr. Yamazake for all of you who didn't put that together and he hates Firestorm's jerk off face.

That's it for this week's issue of Futures End and man there wasn't much here not to enjoy.  I mean even the slower parts with Batman Beyond and Plastique gave you a bit of excitement as we saw Brother Eye on the hunt for a body.  The part I'm really interested in though is the new Stormwatch taking control of SHADE.  I don't know how it's going to work or what kind of resistance they'll run into, but man am I excited to find out.  For art this week we have something new......... well I'm pretty sure it's new............ I don't remember it being like this before......... is that good enough?  We've got two artists on this week's book and they come in the forms of Aaron Lopresti and Stephen Thompson and I'm a sucker for a good Lopresti which we've got here (except for Fifty Sue who comes across as a Garbage Pail Kid) and I'm not familiar with Thompson, but his bit with Firestorm looked great and he's someone that I'll look out for in the future.  Make sure you're back here next week as we take a trip back to the future and see what's going down in the strange land of Five Years From Now.

Bits and Pieces:

I love me some new Stormwatch.............. Where the hell was this team when the series was struggling before?  In case you didn't realize, I'm all for this bit to the story and even though I was thinking about the badassness of Black Adam and Hawkman throughout the issue, I wasn't too distracted to realize that this was a really fun bunch of stories.  Definitely one of the better issues in this leg of the series and I'm seriously hyped to see more of them.  

8.7/10