Art By: Allan Goldman, Freddie Williams II, Andy MacDonald, Stephen Thompson, Scott Hanna, Hi-Fi
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: April 1, 2015
You Want An Ending?
*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
This is it all you future fans, it's time to wrap up this year long event and see what all the hubbub was about showing us the events of Five Years From Now. It's been a strange year filled with ups and downs, badassery and boredom. Hopefully this issue will be able to find a happy medium as we close the book on Futures End. In the last issue, Tim Drake took the mantle of Batman Beyond and went back in time to........ Well, our present and stopped Brother Eye from sending out a signal to our Earth 2 refugees, stopping the people from Earth 2 ever coming to New Earth. If that wasn't enough to keep the future from happening, Brother Eye obeying his programming to make sure the Earth is safe, began his self destruct sequence and somehow sent Tim Drake back to his own time....... But was it Tim's time or the Batman Beyond suit's time? Let's find out as we dive into this final issue.
Explain It!:
Our final story begins with Batman Beyond standing in the middle of a garden that appears to be a place to honor heroes because it has statues of various heroes throughout the DCU and if that wasn't a happy enough future from what we've seen this past year, Madison appears to be this area's gardener and has been waiting for Tim to return. It's all very emotional and it seems that our hero is actually getting rewarded, but then the two hug and we see that Madison is trying to reenact the final scene from Michael Jackson's Thriller because she has herself some monster eyes and all I hear in my head is Vincent Price laughing............ Is everyone still following?
It appears that this whole beginning to the story was just a ruse and Tim finds himself thirty five years in the future (where Terry McGinnis started off in issue #0) and that he made no difference whatsoever and Brother Eye still controls the world......... Well that's depressing. Tim and the defeated prisoner version of Mister Terrific banter for a bit with the ruler of the world: Brother Eye and things seem like they're about to get worse when Brother Eye starts talking about assimilating Tim into the collective and all that. It's a good thing that a bunch of freedom fighters barge in and save Mister Terrific and Tim from their horrible fates. After escaping and regrouping in a subway station, we find out some bullshit reason why Tim didn't affect the timeline when he went back to our present last issue and I don't get it.......... Something about how the timeline was affected, except for the events going on in this series at Terrifitech......... Now time travel is a odd thing to try and explain sometimes but this really comes off as one of the cheapest explanations about why shit didn't turn out that I've ever seen.
In the end, we find out that Madison was one of the freedom fighters that saved Tim and the two reconnect with their lips and I'm just sitting here thinking gross, but that's just me...... Maybe all of you out there are into that sort of thing but all I know from this issue is that Tim digs them old. As the issue closes we find out that there is nothing that Tim can do to stop this future now because Brother Eye controls everything and apparently that includes the moon as well........... Oh and before I forget......... THIS BOOK HAS NO ENDING! I've been an excited reader and sometimes a patient reader all this time and nothing is resolved in this book. I guess this year long event was just a way to lead to the Batman Beyond comic in June and I feel really ripped off.
That's it for the Futures End series and after all we've been through, we were robbed in the end and I'm totally disappointed. The time travel elements that birthed this series made absolutely no sense and this was just one of the worst finales that I've seen from this sort of event. The art left much to be desired and at the end of all this I realize that following this series for this long wasn't worth it at all. The only things that remain that kind of come as a consolation is that this has affected what we'll get in the Earth 2: Society title and is the beginning to the Batman Beyond title both starting in June........ That's all though. I really dislike being negative but I truly hate this ending.
Bits and Pieces:
For all of us that have been following this story for it's entire run, this finale comes off as a smack in the face. Nothing is resolved, the explanations for it are nonsensical and all it accomplishes is being a prologue to the Batman Beyond series in June. This was really one of the most underwhelming, face palming endings that I've ever read.
3/10
I'm starting to wonder if this'll even continue into the batman beyond in june as the cover features the likes of superman in his black and white costume, the justice league beyond... just starting to think that the batman beyond is gunna be something totally different, i really hope I'm wrong about that, because i need an ending, a real one... not a freaking cliff hanger after 48 issues of build up and cliff hangers....
ReplyDeleteAs much as I hated this ending, I can't believe that this is how things were meant to end. With Batman Beyond's title in June and the solicit playing coy about who Batman Beyond is....... I just have to assume that this leads into that and the cover could just be a clever way to play between the parallels of what's going on now and what we know Batman Beyond's world to be......... Kinda like "This ain't your Daddy's Batman Beyond"
DeleteSo all this series was one long convuloted set up for batman beyond . That's that bull! They went full blown terminator, but I read that one of the bottled cities in convergence is new 35 years from now so maybe they may resolve brother eye there since we see kamandi and the justice league beyond on the cover for #1 of beyond but maybe it's a misleading cover, who knows
ReplyDeleteYea, the back of this week's books have the cities listed and on is Futures End, so maybe there is hope.
DeleteThe cover may have been a place holder...something to use until the end of FUTURES END to prevent spoilers.
ReplyDeleteThat would make sense.
DeleteWhat?! I waited half a year just to learn they killed off Terry and replaced him with Tim? Really? Do people in DC hate McGinnis that much?
ReplyDeleteWay to destroy the ENTIRE POINT of Batman Beyond, DC. Way. To. Go.
My excitement for Batman Beyond did go down a bit.
DeleteYet another example of how DC is a giant mess of editorial bungling and lack of creative ideas. They also LIED and deliberately and with fore knowledge and intent led readers to believe that Futures End would in fact have an END. Inexcusable!
ReplyDeleteI would love to say you are wrong...but you are not! This ending was inexcusable.
Delete*through out the multiverse, all versions of Jody scream in anguish for dedicating time and extra money to THIS!*
ReplyDeleteI think you might be treating this issue a little harshly...not that it was a stellar ending, it was certainly a let-down, but it did a few great things:
ReplyDelete1. It quelled a bunch of know-it-all comics jerks who bitch and moan about every event, and bitched and moaned about this event being inconsequential because it would all be "wiped away" at the end anyway. Well, this time it wasn't. So what say you now, aggregate jaggovs who make sweeping generalizations based on previews or less?
2. This acts as sort of the reverse trick that was employed when the New 52 began, that all events prior to Justice League #1 took place (miraculously and impossibly) in the span of five years. And five years from now--four years, considering--Brother Eye will start taking over and the world as we know it will end. It's a sort of bleak but neat little trick, that this dystopia lies in the future for everyone no matter what (unless DC decides to change or ignore it.)
I was really put off at first, but after a couple of minutes I saw a kind of bittersweet quality to the ending, that heroes might not always win but they will always keep trying.
Now can anyone explain what Cadmus Island, Fifty Sue, Green Arrow's island compound, King Faraday and his league of weirdo assassins, everything that happened in space with the JLU and Stormwatch, and Lana Lang having freaking insect powers had to do with anything??!!??!
Eric was so sure it would be wiped away and now he has to come to grips with that. He's not good at coming to grips with anything...especially life!
DeleteI am not as upset as everyone else is about this issue, but I laughed reading your last question...none of that made sense at all...especially Lana Lang and those damn insect powers.
All the side story stuff that you're wondering about was ways for Brother Eye to get to where he was going and for the Brainiac God to get where he was going thus creating Telos and Convergence. Now for the timeline, I can't say that this is true but after (overly) thinking about it, I'm not sure that the dystopian future that we saw at the end will be the inevitable future for our heroes. Tim Drake managed to stop Earth-2 from crossing over and I believe that did affect the future but the one that should have been erased was still existent kind of like a time lock for everyone who was in Terrifitech when Tim went back in time. So since Tim was from that Future and the Batman Beyond suit was from the further future, he went back to where he existed in time.
DeleteHmm...I dunno, the way issue #47 ended it seemed like Brother Eye wasn't going to send the beacon to Earth-2's refugees so presumably they will fuck off to some other planet or dimension (to be revealed, as shown in the last panel of this week's Earth 2: Worlds End, in Earth 2: Convergence.) Then again, Brother Eye said he would self-destruct and he obviously didn't do that! I personally loved the shit with Fifty Sue and her warped nuclear family, and I liked the stuff with SHADE and Stormwatch a lot. But it was all a lot of filler in the final analysis!
DeleteI can't help thinking that if DC had ended FUTURES END with issue #47 and titled issue #0 & #48 as, say, ALPHA & OMEGA, respectively, they wouldn't be quite as harsh when judging this issue. It WAS just an epilogue, after all.
ReplyDeleteIn the End, the Future refused to change
ReplyDeleteIt sure did. All we are is dust in the wind
Delete