Telos #4 Review and *SPOILERS*

Sorry Telos, But Your Princess Is In Another Castle

Written By: Jeff King

Art By: Carlo Pagulayan, Igor Vitorino, Jason Paz, Marc Deering, Jose Marzan Jr., Peter Steigerwald, Travis Lanham
Cover Price: $2.99

Release Date: January 6, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Telos is kind of a hard sell and after reading the first three issues of this book....... well, it's not getting any easier.  We've got our boy from Convergence going on a crazy mission for Brainiac in order to get information about where his family is and along the way he's made friends with Techne: the leader of the resistance against Computo, K-Rot and Stealth from Threshold and Captain Comet doing all he can with his telepathy and wouldn't you know it........ they all want Telos' help before they'll help him with his own mission........ Well, not K-Rot and Stealth, they just seem to be along for the ride and like shooting at things.  So yeah, we got a big story, involving a lot of characters and a big evil computer man and as for Brainiac...... well, we don't know what the hell Brainiac is up to, but maybe we'll find out here.  Let's jump into this issue and see what happens now that Telos is confronting both Computo and Brainiac and the rest of the crew are facing off against a back from the dead, upgraded Validus.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

We begin our issue with some serious shit.  Telos takes on advanced drones that Brainiac created to specifically take on Telos in order for Computo to get the piece of Brainiac's old shell within him that gives our title character his powers, while Techne, Captain Comet, Stealth and K-Rot take on drones of their own, not to mention an all new, all terrifying Validus.  The beginning of this book is strange, talking about roleplaying....... or I guess, how everyone has a role to play, but I sat there and thought about roleplaying for awhile after reading this issue, so I just might go with that, but the gist is how everyone is playing a role in this game and I have to say that it keeps the story interesting because until it's revealed at the end, I didn't know what role Brainiac was going to take in this story since he originally teamed up with Telos, only to betray him as soon as he went off to fulfill his mission.  

It turns out that Brainiac was playing the long con and while Telos was keeping Computo's attention, Brainiac sent out a signal that disabled Validus and the rest of the drones attacking our supporting cast and when he tells Computo that he programmed Validus to explode if it looked like the rebels were going to win, we get a real sense of satisfaction in being in on the joke that our favorite collector was playing the computer scourge of Colu.  It's not all RC Cola and Pinatas though because even after we see Telos get the upper hand on Computo and actually tear the dictator apart, what sentient computer wouldn't have an even bigger and badder backup of itself waiting in the wings?...... I'm guessing not a very good one.  So yeah, we get Computo version 2.0 going on here and he's just totally fuck starting Telos' brain........ if you didn't know, that's a bad thing.  It's all part of the plan though and all will be get back to the party favors if Telos can just hold out a little longer while our super gang get to Computo's backup satellite and when they get in position, Telos gives Brainiac the signal and the big bad transmits a even worse virus than Techne did previously into Computo's system, while the rest of our gang blow the satellite.  Computo is no more and to add a little exclamation to it, Telos rips his new body apart.

In the end, the day is saved, but it turns out that the data Techne downloaded in a previous issue about the whereabouts of Telos' family was corrupted and she figures that it might not have ever been there to begin with and that Brainiac was just playing Telos in order to gain control of Colu again.  It gets worse too because Telos has found out that Brainiac has sent word to the Citadel Fleet that a rebel uprising has destroyed Computo and they're on their way to apprehend Telos and Techne.  So yeah, Brainiac's going to fuck everyone over in the end anyway and before Telos goes out to take on the Citadel Fleet on his own, he tells Techne that they lied to her about her tenth level intellect and that's she's actually twelfth, just like Brainiac and she can use that against him.............. but this is all over the place because in the first issue, Brainiac said that Techne was a tenth level intellect and in the second issue she says that she's a twelfth, so I don't know why this is a big revelation to her now.... apparently she knows that shit.  

That's it for this issue of Telos and it wraps up our first story arc pretty well, while giving us some interesting battles between Telos' confrontation with Computo to the rest of the gang's fight against Validus, while making Brainiac's actual allegiance a surprising twist........ even if that allegiance doesn't last long.  This is by no means a great comic, but from what we've gotten in the first three issues, it's at least decent to read and entertaining enough.  I just wish that level intellect would remain consistent from comic to comic and that we'd be one step closer to finding Telos' family, but as we saw at the end of this issue, we're no closer to finding out about them from when we started this series.  Another gripe I have is the introduction/reintroduction of Telos' supporting characters because while they never felt really important to what Telos' mission was, it seems really weird from all the team building skills that they've gone through together to just dump them at the end of this issue.  As for the art, I enjoyed it for the most part, but when the panels get really small, it's hard at times to really distinguish what's going on and with all the fire surrounding Computo by the end of Telos and his fight, it was down right impossible.  This issue is a step in the right direction and I can't wait to see where Telos will go next when he meets up with Parallax in the next issue.

Bits and Pieces:

While I don't know if I'll ever be able to get fully on the Telos trolley, I have to admit that I enjoyed this issue the most out of what we've gotten from this series so far and it does a decent job in putting a pin in our first story arc.  The majority of the art is really awesome, but at times some of the details of what's going on gets lost in the over the top action that this issue presents.  There are still some problems with this book, but I actually find myself interested in where this series will go from here.

6.5/10