Earth 2: Society #2 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Daniel H. Wilson

Art By: Jorge Jimenez, John Rauch, Andrew Dalhouse
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: July 8, 2015

World Building

*Non Spoilers and Score At Bits and Pieces*

Welcome Back to Earth 2!  The world that was destroyed and then remade from the ashes of Convergence and as we saw in the first issue, a world where Terry Sloan is public enemy #1.  Taking place a year after Convergence........ for the most part, our story showed us Dick Grayson in his role as Batman as he chased after Sloan because....... as we saw in our year previous flashbacks, Sloan made the escape ships that fled the original Earth 2 crash land on this new planet......when they weren't meant to land.  So thousands of people died because of Sloan's order and in the end of the issue, he managed to give Batman the slip.  Let's get into this issue and see what we can find out about this new world and hopefully see a few more heroes.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with us getting a recap of Dick Grayson's bumbling when it came to take out Sloan.  When the book finally decides to quit making fun of Batman, we see Sloan enter the South Hull of The TSS Endurance...... which the majority of the ship now makes up the city of New Gotham.  With Sloan going into the bowels of the former ship, we head into flashback mode to a year prior, where the ships first crash landed........even though we already saw that last issue.  Here we see the ship that Sloan and Commander Sato are on, The TSS Overwatch-One, is under attack by a mysterious survivor aboard the ship that supposedly took over the weapon systems.  Somehow this leads to Sloan saying that they need to act first........even though they're already being shot at and Sloan has the other ships crash land at the designated places he wants them to land and then he takes back the ship's systems and decides that they can't face the people now, so they'll simply back away from Earth enough so Green Lantern can't get to them........... even though Green Lantern just flew out real far to get the survivors at the end of Convergence.... So I guess, Sato and Sloan just watch over the world from their ship........ Oh and Sloan was on The TSS Endurance at the end of World's End, but so was Sandman and he's on Overwatch-One now as well, so we'll just say Sandman teleported them both and go with it....... but the rest of Wesley Dodds' Sandmen are there too and I was pretty certain they had died...........Weird.

Okay, so we've established that the world is pissed at Terry Sloan for making the rest of the ships crash land, killing thousands of people and now we establish that the heroes are even more pissed at him because during the confusion and vulnerability of the crashed ships, Sloan had Dodds and his Sandmen go down to the TSS Endurance and steal the Source Vault that Bruce Wayne created before he died to contain the entire DNA catalog of their former world in case Apokolips destroyed their planet.......which it did.  So Sloan gets the Source Vault and for some reason, we then skip ahead a year to Sloan being in the TSS Endurance, where he takes the Source Vault and hooks it up to a Genesis Machine to remake the world............. because he wants to make sure that it's done right and no one tampers with the protocols set by Bruce Wayne........ yeah, this is all very odd.  Why the hell did it take Terry Sloan a year to go forward with his plan?  Why did anyone believe him or still believe him when he he said that someone took over his ship and then when he decided to stay in space orbiting the planet?  Commander Sato, who we don't see here besides for the flashbacks is really coming off a dope because even though we aren't meant to know that Sloan is up to no good, it's pretty damn apparent with his sketchiness here and with his past actions.  

In the end, Batman finally catches up with Sloan and this part is pretty cool because we get Batman contacting Mister Terrific and them talking about the exo-suit that Terrific made for Dick, so the shattered spine explanation is locked away and I feel better about that.  Batman isn't able to stop Sloan from activating the Genesis Machine with the Source Vault and our issue closes with gigantic pillars forming out of the ground and Sloan getting all maniacal with him saying " Behold Earth-2!  I am become life, the maker of worlds!"  I don't know if these pillars are part of the Genesis Machine being activated, but if it's not, I don't think Sloan was on the up and up about his intentions with the Source Vault.

That's it for this issue of Earth 2: Society and I really don't know what Daniel H. Wilson was going for here.  We had what I thought was a really good first issue showing us just enough to get us interested in the series, but here where we see more......... well, I kind of don't want to see it anymore.  There are other heroes in this and a brief talk about this world being a binary star system, but if you read the Sneak Peek in May, well you aren't missing anything by me not bringing it up.  This issue mostly just reiterates what happened last issue with the ships crash landing while making us trust Terry Sloan less than we already did and I've already seen that throughout the run of Earth 2 and World's End, so it doesn't really feel like it's needed again here.  Terry Sloan is bad, I get it already.  The biggest problem for me in this issue though is the fact that we jump back and forth between a year with little to no reason.  I want to know what took Terry Sloan so long to make his move.  Hopefully this series gets better in the future because Earth 2 has suffered enough already.  Hell, even the art by Jorge Jimenez, which I normally like comes off really odd here and besides for the parts at the end with Batman, the rest of the book didn't look that great.  The best part of this whole thing is the colors by Andrew Dalhouse.  Dude can totally make anything look beautiful.

Bits and Pieces:

All the optimism and high hopes I had for this series from the first issue were really damaged here and almost obliterated beyond repair....... Yeah, I was that unhappy with this issue.  We've got Terry Sloan continuing to be untrustworthy while we get a recap of things we saw last issue and adding in nonsensical explanations to things that didn't need to be explained right now.  If that wasn't enough to get to you, the art wasn't as strong as the first issue either and I'm left wondering if this story wasn't better left concluding in Convergence.  

3/10