Earth 2: Society #3 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Daniel H. Wilson
Art By: Jorge Jimenez, Alejandro Sanchez
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: August 12, 2015

Tornado Warning

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Oh boy, it's time to get back to Earth 2...... Well, the planet currently called Earth 2..... You know because of Convergence and all that.  Anyway, Earth 2, the place where our parallel heroes now call home and as of last issue, the place that Terry Sloan is trying to terraform into the previous Earth 2.... Yeah, I can see how that could be confusing, but just go with it.  So far, we've jumped into this series a year after the refugees of the destroyed planet crashed landed on this Telos world and began calling it home, but as we've been given the current Terry Sloan madness story, we've also been given flashbacks to "Crash Day" and exploring who our heroes are now and what they've been through.  It's been a slow go so far, but hopefully this issue will give the story a nudge and get it to start going.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Terry Sloan standing all maniacal on top of his terraforming machine that's equipped with the genesis vault, that can remake everything from the old Earth 2.  He's going all nutso, talking about some mysterious person that would use the vault for their own means and him doing this is simply a matter of using it before it can be used against this new world...... and really, if I happened to be a hero of this world I might actually believe him...... you know, if he wasn't a habitual maniac in this series, but since he is, it's up to all of our Wonders to come out of the woodwork to stop him...... even though up until this point it only appeared that Batman was on the case.  So we've got Red Tornado, Power Girl and Val-Zod joining our Caped Crusader and that sounds awesome....... Only thing is, it looks like during that year we haven't fully explored yet, Val-Zod and Power Girl went and had themselves a bad breakup.  Yeah, Power Girl doesn't want to be anywhere near this world's Superman and instead of thinking first and acting on logical ideas, she just flies through the terraforming machine and before anyone can do anything like "save the day", a lightning bolt shoots down from the sky, hitting Sloan and screwing the machine up completely.  This part was a bit odd because the way it was laid out on the page, it looked like Val-Zod somehow went and got himself some lighting powers, but that's not the case and now we have a mystery on our hands.

We don't have time for mysteries though because we have to talk about what happened last year when our heroes first came to this world and for this issue we have Red Tornado's missing year.  When the ships first crash landed, Red Tornado found herself to be an outcast because when she went to rescue folks, they were scared of her robot body and cast her out claiming that she was a parademon.  I can understand all of that, but what I can't understand is why General Lane built a robot body for his daughter that was able to feel pain and also cry....... Lois seems to be happy about the crying thing, but the pain addition just seems like a dick move.  Anyway, Green Lantern finds Lois damaged from the crash and somehow uses his "Green" powers to fix her robot body........ and then just disappears.  We see Alan doing some more saving throughout this issue, but he's so disconnected from humanity at this point and apparently has the ability to do anything that he might as well just be called Dr. Manhattan..... So that's a bit disappointing.  Eventually Lois finds her place in the world when she begins reuniting families that have been separated by the new cities' walls and even finds her identity by dressing like she once did....... I just don't get the glasses thing.

In the end, we head back to the genesis machine and we find out that between the lightning bolt and Power Girl's rash actions that the machine is now spewing out monsters instead of animals........ Oh good.  It's a good thing that Red Arrow and Huntress were there to kill the mutated dogs..... because that's gross...... and that Green Lantern showed up to destroy the machine completely, but as the issue ends we see that Terry Sloan has been killed and whoever called down the lightning also stole the Source Vault.  Okay Dick, prove to me that you're Batman with those detective skills I know you don't have..........Lousy wanna be Batmans.

That's it for this issue of Earth 2: Society and while this isn't the best issue to come out of this series, it actually gives me hope that this title plans on moving forward and giving the fans something that they want to read....... and I realize how odd all of that is to say about a third issue to a series, but I really want to believe that we're heading towards something that will redeem what we've been given for so long now.  The world is already built for our heroes to simply go into action and do their thing and all we have to deal with for a while is some flashbacks in each issue to simply catch us up, which shouldn't be that bad as long as we actually have these heroes acting like heroes and doing heroic things....... Ya dig?  I'm still afraid that the writing might be too simplistic and won't do anything to "wow" us, but I've been wrong before and I really hope that I am here because I want this series to be good and with this issue being the second best issue so far, it still might be.  It's all up in the air right now, but I enjoyed us getting into a mystery that will force all our heroes to work together in the future and I loved the art in this book all the way though........... So yeah, it's a step in the right direction.  

Bits and Pieces:

While this series still might not get you all excited about the future of Earth 2, it does manage to be a decent read that gives fans of these characters a speck of hope that this might become the series they've wanted.  On top of that hopeful hope, we also had a issue that had great art all the way through.  Even though I've said this so many times before from series rocking the Earth 2 brand, I'm one of those hopeful fans and I really want to like this series and I'd like to think that this is the first step towards that.

7/10