Earth 2: Society #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Daniel H. Wilson
Art By: Jorge Jimenez, John Rauch
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: June 10, 2015

Welcome Back Earth 2!

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

It's time to get back on track!  After seeing one of the best titles that DC had to offer, run through the mud do to event after event, we can finally get back to some sort of normalcy.......well, as normal as we can get on a new planet with two suns........ that bit doesn't matter here though.  Yes, Earth 2: World's End got really rough due to characters and events having no continuity and then Convergence coming in and doing a number on the characters and continuity again........ So all in all, Earth 2 has had it rough for a long time.  Hopefully that's all about to change here because it's just one issue each month and it can take it's time to flesh out the characters again and give us some semblance of a understandable story.  Yeah, this is all very harsh, but Earth 2 was my favorite title at one time and I'd like to see it return to it's former glory.  So let's check out our Wonders on their new world and find out what's going down.



Explain It!:

Right away I'm impressed with this book because it acts as if it heard me bitching about what Dick Grayson would do about his back being broken and him being enveloped in a Telos metal shell so that he could stay up right.  With Telos gone, the shell keeping Dick together fades and he's left paralyzed again....... So right away, that's a plus that we're dealing with issues instead of simply overlooking them.  All that though is right after Convergence, let's head to the meat of the story that takes place one year later, where Dick is now a very strange but cool looking Batman, who's on the hunt for Terry Sloan......... yeah, sadly Terry Sloan survived and I know we saw him survive at the end of World's End, but I was kind of hoping that he could simply die of space malaria or something along those lines............ Hell, there was even an opportunity for him to die as the escape ships of Earth 2, came to this world and Terry Sloan ordered the ships to land...........even though they weren't built to land.  So yeah, even though thousands died do to the crash landings all the ships had to do, Terry Sloan's still kicking and apparently some sort of dictator of the world now.  It doesn't sound to hard to become that actually because everyone just used their crashed ships to create cities and this new Earth 2 only has twelve cities made from the wreckages....... So yeah, if I was the smartest man alive like Terry Sloan is, I might go the dictator route.

I don't know why it's taken a year, but Batman's after Terry Sloan for his crimes against humanity, from when he ordered the ships to crash land and it seems that Batman and the Wonders aren't the only people looking for a little payback.  After Batman gets sidetracked from his Sloan hunt, Terry finds himself in the company of Johnny Sorrow and his gang, but it doesn't look like we'll be getting a lot of Sorrow in the future because when Batman finally shows up, Sorrow tries to show him his face, which is his go to move when killing folk and Batman uses his cape as a reflective surface, showing Sorrow his own twisted face, thus causing the villain to drop to the ground screaming.  So much for Johnny Sorrow.  We continue to go back in time like we do throughout this book, seeing people come out of their ships and even though I like the fact that Dick's broken back is addressed, we never see it fixed here and I guess we'll see more of the solution to his back problems in the future, but we do get to see Mister Terrific find Dick lying in the grass and I like to think that this humiliation of having someone carry you over their shoulder is a kind of payback for him never remembering his son's name.  Remember Daniel H. Wilson, it's Johnny.  I don't want any of that Tommy shit in this series!

In the end, after Sorrow saw that he looked like Rocky Dennis, Batman tries to subdue Sloan, but the smartest man alive isn't without his tricks.  He pulls a Data from The Goonies and produces a jetpack out of his coat and he leaves Batman behind wondering who else Terry Sloan is running from.

That's it for this first issue of Earth 2: Society and where I thought all was lost for these characters because of their prior series, here I see a glimpse of hope.  Yeah, I've been burned before for believing such things, but this really comes off like it might be really interesting.  At the least it has certainly got my attention and makes me look forward to the next issue.  Basically, it has everything that I wanted from an Earth 2 book.  We have a planet that isn't under threat of being eaten and we have an opportunity to see these characters simply being heroes and going about day to day things....... Yeah, it's on a weird world with cities made out of broken down space ships, but at this point I'll take what I can get.  I really dig too that we have this duel narrative getting us right into the action one year later, while sprinkling in tidbits of what led to it throughout.  With a very appealing art style and colors, this book might actually be returned to it's former glory.

Bits and Pieces:

Holy shit, Earth 2 just went and got my attention again.  Yeah, a lot of us felt burned after World's End and seeing the regular Earth 2 book simply turned into World's End's companion, but this issue is very promising that we may get the Earth 2 book we've been wanting since Apokolips hit the scene and spit in our faces.  The story is interesting and the art is fun, so anyone who loved Earth 2 before but gave up, this might be something you should check out.  I'm certainly looking forward to the next issue.

8/10