Earth 2: Society #5 Review and *SPOILERS*

The Fastest Ass Alive

Written By: Daniel H. Wilson
Art By: Jorge Jimenez, Alejandro Sanchez, Travis Lanham
Cover Price: $2.99

Release Date: October 14, 2015

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Let's head back to Earth 2, where our Wonders are in the middle of a crisis.  After spending an issue finding out Val-Zod's relationship status and how things ended terribly between Power Girl and him, our issue finally started getting interesting when Terry Sloan's old spaceship, Overwatch-One was hacked and forced down into a collision course with Neotropolis.  Too bad that this development was our cliffhanger and all we had to show for our time with our Wonders was us seeing how creepy Val-Zod has gotten since his baby left him and Batman and Flash deciding that they should team up with the Earth-2 Man of Steel so they can find out who was behind Terry Sloan's assassination.  Let's jump into this issue and see how our Wonders will save the day against a crashing spaceship.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

For this issue, our heroes have to come up with a way to save Neotropolis from a crashing spaceship and since our Kryptonian characters are pretty much useless in this book do to the binary star system that cycles back and forth between a yellow sun and a red sun........... the red sun always being the one out when shit needs to get done of course, it looks like it's up to Batman and Flash to get shit done here.  While it's cool to have us starting out by seeing Batman's Earth-2 Batwing, I have to wonder just how busy Mr. Terrific has been.  If you haven't been reading this series, Mr. Terrific has pretty much become Dick Grayson's Alfred and Lucius Fox all rolled up into one.......... for some reason........ and on top of building Dick an exo-suit to allow him to walk and have enhanced strength and agility, it seems that he's also built him a bat themed jet as well.  All this in the span of a year on a world where raw materials are from what I understand, pretty scarce.  Anyway, putting my curiosity aside, we see our trio of heroes Bat-jet there way up to Overwatch-One.......which even though it's in free fall, we see that our heroes have enough time to land, get out onto the ship and come up with a plan on how to move some kind of gigantic ball into place........ that will right the ship's systems somehow.  There could be some kind of actual thought behind how any of this would work in the description given on what our heroes need to do...... but all I get out of it is, move a giant ball into position.  Now, all of this needs to be done fast and who better to have than The Flash?.......... well, as we find out here, pretty much anyone who could move fast because Flash isn't strong enough to move the ball by himself and is a bit of a sad sack.

To give us a little background on the sad sack-ness, we go back to when the Earth-2 ships first crash landed and Flash was forced to do all he could to make a place for people to live, eat and shit....... which involved a lot of bitching, but our boy did it and man did he become a douchebag because of it.  Doing all this awesome stuff for the refugees of Earth-2 garnered Flash a sort of celebrity and he took full advantage of it.......mostly drinking and slaying hood-rats, but all of this simply led Jay to eventually letting Hawkgirl down and just when you think that Jay couldn't get any lower, he surprises us by letting down Jimmy Olsen as well........... don't worry though, Jimmy is scary as hell and we don't want Flash anywhere near him.  

As we saw from the end of World's End, Jimmy has become a god from merging with a Mother Box and now has a city all his own, where people worship his ass....... but apparently being a god doesn't mean shit when it comes to trivia because he claims that Flash got his powers from Apollo....... and that doesn't even make sense.  Anyway, it seems that Jimmy wants a fellow god-like person to hang with so they can shape this world to his whim and luckily Jay bitched out and simply ran away.  I don't know how this exactly helps us understand why Jay's all down about being a hero and using his power, but it's what we got and I'll go with it.

In the end, we still have to get that giant ball into position and while I guess Batman has simply given up because he's just sitting against a wall, Flash comes up with a plan and has Val-Zod take Dick's exo-suit and reshape it so it can fit him and Flash uses his super speed and exo-suit super strength to move the ball and save the day.  Except that we see that Jimmy Olsen was behind this attack and is the person who killed Terry Sloan........ maybe this issue would have done more in showing us how the hell Jimmy Olsen became a villain out of nowhere.

That's it for this issue of Earth 2: Society and this series continues to disappoint because there doesn't seem to be any understanding....... from the writer or the reader about how this world works and what our heroes are actually supposed to be doing.  There just seems to be an overwhelming feel of apathy from everything in this book and it's not what I want to see from the Universe I love and the heroes that encompass it.  As I've said before, the constant flashbacks that this series seems to use as a narrative isn't doing it any favors because it feels like lazy story telling, where you think you know the characters until the inevitable flashback will come along and change everything.  It also just halts the current story and becomes annoying.  I like the art in this story enough, but at times it gets over the top cartoon-y and just isn't consistent enough to really get me excited to look at it.  I say every month how I hope that this series can find it's footing and become something great, but anymore I just wish I was reading something else.

Bits and Pieces:

If you want to see the Flash simply get out of a rut because........ it's what the story needs at the time, then this issue is for you, but if you're looking for something more, than you should look somewhere else.  This series doesn't feel like it really wants to do anything and that apathy seems to be rubbing off on our heroes as well because throughout this issue, they all seem bored.  I love the Earth-2 heroes and it's the Earth 2 title that originally got me to start reading DC again, but this is so far removed from what that series was that it's almost unrecognizable........ and I don't like it.

4/10