Cyborg #12 Review and *SPOILERS*

Kid Tested, Mother Approved

Written By: Marv Wolfman
Art By: Felipe Watanabe, Daniel HDR, Julio Ferreira, Oclair Albert, Adriano Lucas, Rob Leigh
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: June 22, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

This series is almost like a "Be Careful What You Wish For" situation because where I was begging DC to put out a Cyborg book for years, now that I've got it, it really wasn't what I hoped it would be.  Just a bunch of Technosapiens, who we don't really get a clear case of who or what they are and how they were connected to Cyborg's new operating system, just that he was some sort of mechanical Jesus, who was destined to be the savior of the their species....... It was weird.  So yeah, besides for those strange aliens, it seems that it's also all been about Cyborg hacking things and while I know that's a part of his wheelhouse, it's also kind of boring.  That's about it though with our Cyborg series, at least from my perspective and now we get to our final issue........ which is also weird because nothing in this says "The End" or "Not The End" like writers like doing so maybe this is just our temporary stop until Cyborg picks back up at some time in the future.  Hopefully that series finds its footing better than this one though.  Let's jump into this final issue and see what's what now that Cyborg spent the previous issue making sure that the Technosapiens weren't in any of his systems.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with me realizing how impressionable Cyborg really is because after hours of him catching up on all the sports he's missed over the last couple of months....... since he had twenty hours to kill during his system scan, our hero realizes that two people have broken into STAR Labs and he goes through what's going on just like he's a sports commentator.  I can understand this to a degree because I remember after watching Space Jam as a kid I started having aspirations of being an NBA player...... even though I was terrible, but Cyborg is in his twenties........ Grow up Vic.  We're getting a little off topic here, so besides for me wanting to poke fun at Cyborg, these two intruders named Parker and Autumn........ who, even though I paged through this book a bunch of times to find out their identity, we strangely from what I can see never find out their last name, even though what seems to be the central point of the story is all about their father who once worked for STAR Labs, we never find out his name either.  Now maybe I just skimmed over it again and again, but I'm pretty sure it isn't there, but the point is, these two intruders have the ability to shape shift and to alter the density of their bodies and they've broken into STAR Labs to find one of their father's inventions to revert them back to normal because this ability is killing them........ Which Cyborg is all about helping them do, it's just too bad that he doesn't answer his texts.

After getting the whole backstory about how this brother and sister duo broke into STAR Labs to get their father's invention called The Inoculater because their father created it to save their mother...... who has since passed on because STAR Labs refused to let the scientist use it on her, which led to him and his kids breaking into STAR Labs years ago to get it and their father getting arrested in the process and them getting exposed to some alien gas in the Red Room........ which leads us to our current predicament, where the exposure to this gas gave them remarkable powers, but it's also killing them and they need the Inoculator to cure themselves.  Initially Cyborg is all about it and even starts the process of curing them....... without telling anyone of course, but halfway through Dr. Stone and Sarah Charles come busting in to let Cyborg know that these two killed a security guard when they were breaking in and with this revelation out and about, Parker decides that since it was an accident, they don't deserve to go to jail and starts fighting his way out of the Lab.  It's too bad though that there were never any tests with the Inoculator because maybe they would have found out that it doesn't actually work.

That's right, in the end of our issue we find out that the Inoculator is creating a tiny blackhole within them, but to go out doing something right, the siblings decide that they'll form a cocoon around one another to try to save everyone at the bottom of a lake........ and it actually works.  As our issue closes, we see Cyborg have a little bit more respect for his father for waiting awhile to make sure that the process that turned him into his super hero persona would actually work, instead of going about it all willy nilly like Parker and Autumn's father.  It's weird with this being the final issue to this series because after Cyborg has this revelation about his dear old Dad, we see that Parker and Autumn have survived the black hole implosion.  

That's it for this series of Cyborg........ even though there's nothing to indicate that it's the final issue, so maybe another issue will come out of nowhere and surprise us, or maybe DC considers the new series that's coming out as just a continuation...... I don't know, but what I do know is that this issue was weird as hell, especially if you take it as a final issue, which I do.  The whole point to this story seems to be to get Vic to get over what his father did to him to save his life, but goddamn does it take a long time to do it, without really saying anything throughout.  I mean, it was a decent enough issue with Cyborg getting to kick a little ass without hacking something, but the whole backstory to this sibling duo was ridiculous to me because they just wound up in the most secure part of STAR Labs and gained powers, but then have this vendetta against the Lab, when we all find out in the end the reason for all of this is because of their flake of a father who liked to cut corners.  That's not even the worst of it with Cyborg just helping these intruders without talking to anyone or even finding out what this Inoculater would do.  Everything seems really willy nilly in this and like I said, I do enjoy seeing Cyborg taking on some people in a decent fight, but after the issue was all said and done, it really wasn't worth it.  I will tell you that I really enjoyed the art in this issue though, but after having a series, where the art was never the problem, this should come to be expected...... It's just everything else that is sub par. 

Bits and Pieces:

Cyborg may or may not end with this issue....... it's never really spelled out here, but with this issue we get our hero taking on a brother and sister duo and while I enjoyed the fight scenes, the rest was really forced in and didn't make our hero look like he's that smart of a guy.  The art like always though was fantastic so at least we have that going on for us, I just found the majority of this issue very lackluster.

6/10