Telos #1 Review and *SPOILERS*

Written By: Jeff King
Art By: Carlos Pagulayan, Jason Paz, Sean Parsons, Hi-Fi, Travis Lanham
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: October 7, 2015

Telos' Fists Are Going To Converge On Brainiac's Face

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Hey everybody, remember Convergence?  It was a two month tale that brought all the doomed timelines from the past together and made them fight to see what doomed timeline was the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla, but since it would be impossible to choose just one, all the heroes from these doomed times teamed up to take on the Skartaris sorcerer Daemos.  While this big bad was originally a part of the domed worlds that were forced to fight, he took it upon himself to capture all the time travelers so he could suck on their power a little to take control of the situation.  Well, luckily Parallax was kicking about and put an end to the nonsense and after Booster Gold, who was transformed into Waverider released Brainiac from Futures End, Brainiac took the power of the time travelers to purge himself of his ugliness and put all the timelines back where they belonged.  Yeah, that sounds really weird all summed up like that, but it is what it is.  Brainiac purged the Thunder Dome planet and Telos went to search for his family.  I guess we pick up from there with this strange ass title that will tell the adventures of Brainiac's former lackey.  Let's dive into this first issue and check it out.



Explain It!:

Our story begins in a very strange way.  It begins with Telos confronting a non gigantic god-like Brainiac, who resembles the more traditional Brainiac than we saw in Futures End or Convergence......which isn't all that odd because he did say that he was going to use the powers of the time masters to purge himself of all his cancer-like deformities..... and gigantism that he picked up from all his travels throughout the Multiverse and different timelines.  The odd part is all the ass whoopin' that Telos is able to lay down on Brainiac.  Now I'm going to call some shenanigans right off because Telos is on a mission of vengeance because the place that Brainiac told him he could find his family...... well, it just wasn't there and feeling that he had been played, Telos goes after Brainiac for making look the fool.  The shenanigans part comes from Brainiac's explanation.  It seems that while Brainiac was able to revert back to normal from his monstrous form, it cost him most of his memories and him telling Telos where his family was supposed to be was just a misunderstanding........ Now if you don't remember Convergence, Telos was given the information about where he could find his family before Brainiac's quest to find his former self and while all of this just might be a ruse, Telos should know better than to trust Brainiac, especially because he was there when all of this went down.

To remember the location of where Brainiac actually put Telos' family, he requires his former servant to travel down to his home planet, where he kept a backup file on everything that he witnessed through his adventures in time and space.  The only problem is, his world isn't exactly like he left it.  The ruler of the world is a former experiment of Brainiac's called Computo and Telos' only hope in beating Computo and retrieving the data is meeting up with the leader of a rebel alliance on the planet that Computo is desperately trying to force out of hiding by holding mass executions until her whereabouts are discovered.  Now that's a lot to take in, but hopefully some of you Legion fans will get a thrill out of seeing Computo and that Validus is apparently acting as one of Computo's Lieutenants........ It doesn't really do anything for me, but I know a lot of folks have been screaming for anything Legion lately.

In the end, against his better judgement and me screaming at the damn page, Telos agrees to Brainiac's plan.  As the issue closes, I wonder how the hell Telos was able to keep as much power as he seems to have since we saw that he was severed from the Convergence planet that was pretty much his power source and on top of that, we see that Brainiac contacts Computo and says that he's delivering Telos as they had agreed upon.  Oh man, I hope that this is the ruse I was talking about and I can retroactively take back my claim of shenanigans.

That's it for this first issue of Telos and while it was competent enough in keeping to most of the continuity that was established from Convergence....... It just wasn't all that interesting.  Here we have Telos, a character that was little more than a robot for the majority of Convergence and only began showing any kind of emotion towards the end of the event, but the emotion was really just him whining about the raw deal he'd been dealt and how he couldn't even remember his name.  There isn't much going on for the character in this because instead of maybe making the character a little more defined, all we have is him beating the hell out of Brainiac, while whining about his family and every time Brainiac opened his mouth, it was back to the beating and the whining.  He just doesn't come off as a compelling character and this initial issue doesn't do anything to change that or really make us care about the adventure that Telos is going to undertake.  I enjoyed the art enough and even though Brainiac wasn't really consistent with the way he looked throughout this issue, I loved the way that Telos was presented........ He looked like a bad ass.  So Telos is here and hopefully he becomes a real character with the issues that follow, instead of a whiny death robot.

Bits and Pieces:

This is one of the weirdest titles to come out in a long time in my mind, simply because it's about Telos.  There wasn't a lot of character development going on in Convergence that would make me think that we'd ever see the character again and sadly there isn't much here either.  This issue sets up the story, but I don't know if it's something that I really want to see because of how one dimensional the title character is.  The art is half decent though and if you were a fan of Convergence than there's no reason you shouldn't continue the further adventures of Telos here....... I'm just personally not sold on it yet.

 5.5/10