The New 52: Futures End #32 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, Keith Giffen
Art By: Scot Eaton, Scott Hanna, Hi-Fi
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: December 10, 2014

Over My Resurrected Hawkman Body!

For our quick recap this week all you future fans will need to know that Cadmus Island was taken down by the combined forces of Green Arrow and his army, Grifter, Lana Lang, Mister Miracle, Big Barda and Fury.  It was a big old fight and in the end the main complex of the island went boom boom and we all rejoiced.  So now that you know that, are you familiar with Mister Terrific's upcoming new product that he's selling to the masses?  Yeah, I'm not too familiar either, it's called the uSphere and as far as I know it jacks your mind into Twitter and everybody and their mama wants one.  Another tidbit you might like to know is that Madison Payne...... You know Red Robin's ex-girlfriend.  Well she's now fused with Jason Rusch and the two are the new Firestorm, but even though that sounds awesome, the two can't separate and Jason is now trapped inside of Madison.  During the experiment that went wrong that made them the new version of our hero, there was an explosion and Ronnie Raymond died and the mad scientist in charge; Dr. Yamazake's body was never found.  Besides for all that and Fury tearing Deathstroke's head off, we had a bunch of heroes out in space fighting off the forces of Brainiac and last time we saw them they were jumping into the bleed to escape.  Hopefully the new Stormwatch will make it back to Earth and actually have it be their Earth.  Okay let's check out what this week's foray into the future has in store for us.

Explain It!:

Our story begins with Batman Beyond and Plastique spending some time together and what looks like Terry getting himself a little crush going on.  I think it's a prerequisite for anyone who time travels to fall in love and be left with a dilemma about does he follow his heart or his head.  The right answer is you follow Batman because that dude hits hard.  So besides for future love going on, we see Mister Terrific and Bruce Wayne having a meeting about Terrific releasing his uSphere and Bruce thinking it's a bad idea.  I don't know if Mister Terrific was just waiting for his air time to start broadcasting or if he just hacked all the electronics in New York but he starts broadcasting a rousing consumer speech about how he loves New York and that he's offering his uSphere to the New Yorkers first.  I just kind of hope he's arrested for hijacking everyone's electronics.  By the time Terrific is done his live commercial we see that Bruce has left and that Brother Eye is the one who gave him the idea to let New York get the uSphere before anyone else.

Now that Cadmus is kaput, it seems that all the prisoners of the island need identification and we find Grifter arguing with the man in charge of Earth Registration about who he really is.  You see Grifter faked his death about nine years ago and so he's believed to be a Earth 2er and the husband of the Earth 2 Lana Lang and man does Lana have a lot of fun making things worse for Cole.  Well not exactly worse because she does prevent him from demanding that he's this supposedly dead Cole Cash who is wanted by Daemonites all over the planet, so not exactly worse, but she sure has a whole lot of fun picking on him about what their children would think.  So now Grifter's ID is Cole Lang and it looks like he's going to be spending a lot more time with Lana.  You know what?  If I was supposedly married to Lana Lang, I'd be hanging around her a lot too.  These two are having some fun while getting over the events on Cadmus Island, but we see that Fifty Sue isn't having such luck.  We see her put on Deathstoke's mask and promise that she'll kill Brother Eye and she actually looks pretty cool wearing the mask with her pigtails sticking out.

For the Firestorm portion of this story we see that Dr. Yamazake didn't die in the explosion at his lab, but his physical body was transported to a magnetic field, so now he's simply incorporeal, but has the ability to move metal.  So before he states his mission statement about destroying the Justice League for doing this to him, he creates a metal body to wrap himself in and kind of looks like a tiny Galactus........... Doctor Polaris is born!  Elsewhere Madison Payne and Jason Rusch are still trying to separate from each other and having no luck whatsoever.  To get a better idea about how they might go about it, Jason tells Madison to go back to Yamazake's lab.  Its too bad that that was where tiny Galactus was going too.  Hopefully Madison has tried out some of her powers before she has to go up against the DC Master of Magnetism.  I really hope that just because Yamazake became Dr. Polaris here that it doesn't mean we won't have a Dr. Polaris in the main timeline............ He's just too cool to keep in the future.

In the end we see that our new Stormwatch crew has made it successfully back to Prime Earth, but before Hawkman and Engineer can have a proper celebration, it seems that SHADE is right there to pull the carrier into The Ant Farm.  This part was really weird because The Ant Farm actually grew in size and it threw me off guard.  Maybe it's just me but when I know something can shrink, I really don't think about it growing.  So since SHADE has been secretly monitoring all the things that these heroes have been through with Brainiac, Father Time now says that they need to keep Engineer there and to use her as a weapon against Brainiac in the future.  I know that she overcame Brainiac's control, but using her as a weapon doesn't really seem like a viable option to me.  Our issue ends with Father Time saying that if they don't hand Engineer over, he'll let loose his monsters on them and being the coward that I am, I'd immediately hand her over.

That's it for this week's Futures End and while we're moving forward with stories that I want to see, this came off almost as a filler issue.  Nothing really new was added here with the exception that Stormwatch is back and Dr. Yamazake is still a bad dude but now he has superpowers.  Just kind of a let down.  At this point I just want the book to become a straight forward story featuring Stormwatch and when the writers get that story over with they move on to another.  The jumping around bit gets really old when they don't offer anything legitimate to the story.  I mean they had a section where Firestorm still couldn't separate......... That's not new, that's unfortunate but not new.  Scot Eaton is on pencils this week with Scott Hanna on inks and Hi-Fi on color and they do an excellent job.  I really wish I would just stop talking about the art of this book because I haven't read an issue yet that didn't look great and at this point I really don't expect to.  So awesome art all around wrapped around a boring week of storytelling.  See you next week when hopefully we see some more Frankenstein, Hawkman and Black Adam....... Those are my boys!

Bits and Pieces:

There wasn't really much going on in this week's issue and while everything looked great as always, the story just lacked anything to really grab your attention.  I mean we get an introduction to a new villain in the New 52 and what happened to a team we haven't seen in awhile, but besides for that nothing really new here at all.  Hopefully next week there will be something to grab my attention and it will be able to entertain the hell out of me.  Here's hoping.

5.5/10