The New 52: Futures End #34 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen
Art By: Patrick Zircher, Scott Kolins, Hi-Fi
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: December 24, 2014

Giant Teddy Bears Aren't Soft!

Last week when we were five years into the future a bunch of stuff went down........... but for this week the things you'll need to know are that the new Stormwatch made their way back to Earth only to be confronted by Father Time and his SHADE monsters and robot soldiers.  Atom trying to get on top of the situation shrunk down and entered Father Time and confronted the man behind the curtain....... or the space parasite behind the curtain.  Either way Father Time is gross so let's move on.  After the destruction of Cadmus Island it seems that King Faraday's group he put together to kill Fifty Sue is going to have to reevaluate their situation because it seems that they are Fifty Sue's group now....... only they don't know about it yet.  Speaking of things that people don't know about, let's talk about the new Firestorm Madison Payne and Jason Rusch not knowing about Dr. Yamazake surviving the explosion in his lab and him becoming the new Dr. Polaris.  Okay now we've spoken about it.  Finally you'll need to know that Batman Beyond's search for Brother Eye might have gotten more serious when we saw Brother Eye enter the future Borg version of Plastique in Terrifitech and also the fact that thirty five years from now Brother Eye has created a terminator like figure by combining Batman and Joker together and plans on sending it back to kill Batman Beyond.  Okay now we're all caught up let's check out what this week's foray into the future has in store for us.

Explain It!:

This week's story begins with Stormwatch still fighting off Father Time's flunkies but the fight is quickly put on hold when they see Father Time morphing between his past incarnations and the little girl he is now, until finally it all comes to a vomit inducing hault when Atom rips out of his body holding the parasite that Father Time actually is and while everyone was dumbstruck by what they were seeing, one of those robot soldiers gets a shot off; mortally wounding Frankenstein.  Remember he hasn't been right since he replaced one of his arms with one of Hawkman's Nth metal ones.  So yeah, Frank's in trouble.

Next we see that Firestorm has herself her first fight brewing when she sees that Dr. Yamazake is now Dr. Polaris and he's out for some Justice Leaguer blood.  Jason tries his best to try and talk her though defending herself with transmutation and other Nuclear Woman powers but she learns that turning a semi truck into a teddy bear with the same size and weight isn't the best use of her powers.  Hopefully she gets the hang of it soon because that will be one short run for the new Firestorm if she doesn't.

Over in Las Vegas the group consisting of Voodoo, Mercy, Banger and Mash aren't too thrilled about learning that Fifty Sue is now their team leader and in the office of Sgt. Rock we see that Fifty Sue doesn't really care what Faraday's plans are when she disintegrates Ethan Boyer's hand and then knocks him out before he could start screaming............ Yeah, this whole team thing to recover the DNA samples from Cadmus Island is going to go well.

Finally we head off to New York where Batman Beyond is still trying to search for Brother Eye and he finally gets some good news from his A.I. Alfred when it locates a possible hit for Brother Eye.  Only problem there is that Alfred becomes compromised and shuts himself down.  If you think that's bad then you should realize at this exact time Brother Eye has sent back his Batman/Joker Terminator who has located Plastique.  Yeah, that's pretty bad but we did see that the current Batman is watching Batman Beyond so hopefully these two bats can work together to save Plastique and take down a monster from the future......... Pretty much it's a constant that things are bad all over.

That's it for this issue of Futures End and with the exception of Fifty Sue and her team recovering samples of DNA, I love all the stories and entries to those stories here.  Fifty Sue has become more interesting as Futures End has gone on but now it seems that we're back peddling to her just being that scary child monster that she was in the beginning and pairing her up with Voodoo and her team who are themselves one of the most boring aspects to this book just seems like a bad idea........... But I'm just a regular Negative Nancy so what I think about things usually doesn't matter.  But we've got things coming to a head with Firestorm, Stormwatch and Batman Beyond so that's not a bad set of things to look forward to.  We've got Patrick Zircher and Scott Kolins on this week's art and while the entire book looks great, the segment with Batman Beyond was just above and beyond.  It was certainly the highlight of the book from it's story to the great art and colors.  See you next week when we hopefully get more in depth with Batman Beyond and see if our heroes can actually fight the future.......... not this future but the future future............ and then when this is all over our current heroes can fight this future.

Bits and Pieces:

We've got a lot of cool stuff coming at us this week and it would of been even better if it wasn't bogged down with Faraday and Fifty Sue stuff.  While I enjoyed Cadmus Island's story before, it just feels odd now that we're still dealing with it just in a more boring fashion.  To me it's like going from blowing up the Deathstar to watching a movie about planning to rebuild the Deathstar....... It's just not interesting to me but maybe it will pick up in the future and I'm just jumping the gun on disliking this segment.  Besides for that though this issue is a really fun read with a lot going on.  If you like Fifty Sue and King Faraday you'll love this issue and if you don't but are able to grit your teeth and get through it, you'll also love this issue.  Go check it out.

7.8/10