Earth 2: Society #4 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Daniel H. Wilson
Art By: Jorge Jimenez, Alejandro Sanchez
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: September 9, 2015

A Super Break Up

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Ding Dong, Terry Sloan Is Dead!  Well, at least until he isn't....... but that doesn't matter right now because the hunt for his killer is on.  As we all saw in Earth 2: Society #3, Terry looked to have a few screws loose as he was screaming about some hidden threat that would use the Source Vault if he didn't act first.  Well, our heroes banded together to take him down before he remade the whole world, but out of nowhere, a lightning bolt shot down and killed Terry before Green Lantern shut the genesis machine down.  While we can never say that anyone is definitely dead in a comic book, two things that we know for sure from last issue are, the Source Vault is missing and Power Girl and Val-Zod must have had themselves one hell of a breakup.  Let's jump into this issue and see more on those two subjects.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

When we begin our story we see that Val-Zod has gone and created himself his own Paradise City.......... OH WON'T YOU PLEASE TAKE ME HOME!!!!  Anyway, this city isn't his own private City of Solitude though, apparently it's for anyone who feels like an outsider to this new world and the new cities that have been built from their escape ships.  After we see this "Nexus", the story jumps into high gear when the Dick Grayson Batman shows up and tries to apprehend Val for the murder of Terry Sloan.  It's pretty funny because while we normally know Batman to be the world's greatest detective, here he's just playing a hunch because Terry Sloan ruined Val and Kara's relationship........ let's use that as a transition to the flashback that brings us up to speed.

First we get a recap of the events of World's End and then when the escape ships first crash landed on the new Earth 2.  Val, using his super smarts and his super powers to reconfigure Sloan's nano-bots to build a city from the crashed ship and Neotropolis is born...... This is all pretty good stuff, but almost immediately the story forgets what's come before it.  After the city is complete, Kara and Val just seem to be enjoying one another on their new world...... When tragedy strikes!....... Well, tragedy is a little dramatic.  Someone set off a bomb in Neotropolis and when Val-Zod and Power Girl arrive......without powers, you know because of the binary star system jumping from yellow sun to red sun...... our heroes immediately yell that they're ship's engines are gone and I don't know where these engines were supposed to be because all I see are people in a street...........were the engines in the middle of the street?  Anyway, Anarky seems to take responsibility for the explosion, but before we can explore this character anymore, she disappears when Sloan activates a death ray from orbit and kills a shit ton of people in the streets to avoid a riot........ they mean business on Earth 2!  The two refusing to be treated like regular folks on the street when Wesley Dodd's Sandmen show up and begin telling everyone to make a like a tree, our heroes knock one of them out...... powerless mind you and then they use his teleporter to get on Sloan's ship to make him pay for what he's done.

In the end, Terry Sloan stops the attack on him by simply telling Power Girl that Val-Zod is the one that figured out how to detonate the fire pits that killed Superman............. and then I'm left wondering what the hell he's talking about since we all know that Superman died inside of a barren fire pit that held Desaad's clone lab........ where Superman sacrificed his life to save everyone from Yolanda Montez clones.  Even though Power Girl knows this, she gets all upset and blows a hole in the space ship and falls down to Earth, where Val follows and then both of them have no idea how they survived........What I want to know is how Terry Sloan survived when a giant ass hole was blown in the side of his space ship.  So Kara decides that she never wants to see Val again and when we jump back to the future, Val and Batman are friends again and they decide to work together to take on their newest threat in the form of someone hacking into Terry Sloan's space ship and making it crash land into Neotropolis.  

That's it for this issue of Earth 2: Society and I don't get it....... The majority of the issue was all about how Superman died because of fire pits detonating and since we all know that not to be true, I'm just left wondering........"huh?".  We've had so many inconsistencies with the Earth 2 series since World's End began that it seems that anything is possible from month to month even if it contradicts something we just saw...........  I know that the DCYou is all about story over continuity, but this is ridiculous....... especially how Power Girl reacts since she knows that Val was being used as a pawn of Sloan during the time.......... You might say it's because Val never brought it up, but it's still a huge over reaction for what these two have been through.  All in all, I like Jorge Jimenez's art for the most part, but he makes some strange choices in what to show and what not to and all this story really gives us is that Val-Zod is not a killer.

Bits and Pieces

The inconsistencies in this book are getting down right infuriating, especially since all the continuity is from the current writer.  Characters seem really off and ultimately all we get from this issue is a misunderstanding and a flashback that doesn't make sense.  The only thing that is really worthwhile is Jorge Jimenez's art and Alejandro Sanchez's colors.

3/10