Earth 2: Society #17 Review and *SPOILERS*

Ghost World

Written By: Dan Abnett
Art By: Bruno Redondo, Juan Albarron, Rex Lokus, Travis Lanham
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: October 12, 2016

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Well, it's finally happened.  Our Wonders have gone and fucked up another world, but I guess the good news is........ This title isn't cancelled so it looks like they'll luck out and get another chance at being heroes and hopefully do it better this time.  In our previous issue we saw the Ultra-Humanite going after the Pandora Casket so that he could remake Earth 2 into his image...... which is a crazy plan because we don't really know shit about the Pandora Casket so how could he?  From what we do know though, it seems that this device...... or end table decoration has the ability to hold memories and since Fury figured it would be better if she used it instead of Ultra-Humanite, I'm guessing old gorilla face was on to something.  Too bad that when Fury opened the object the world was bathed with light until it finally faded on us and them as the issue closed with darkness.  Let's jump into this issue and see if Earth 2 survived and if all of our heroes did as well.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with.......... Well, nothing.  The world as we knew it, as terrible as it was is gone, but even with that it seems that a handful of our heroes have survived and where they're surviving is some kind of empty white void, where you can see the outlines of buildings that appear to be a city, but besides for that, nothing.  

As we go through our issue we run into heroes running into other heroes as we see who actually was transported to this non-world and we start out with Flash finding Fury.  Yeah, Fury goes on and on about how she's destroyed the world and the great grief and shame that she'll feel for the rest of her life and maybe because Flash gets tired of hearing this, he moves on and finds Red Tornado and Power Girl.  You'd think that with our heroes finding one another that things would get a bit better in the morale department, but with Red Tornado hearing some mechanical voice saying that cohesion will begin in eighty seven minutes............ well, this book gets an ominous tone.  Especially when that voice can only be heard by Red Tornado and then suddenly starts talking about extrinsic lifeforms being detected and containment or extermination is required.  Besides for Lois being the only one who can hear this strange voice, this also comes off odd to me because from how Lois describes it, this voice that must be the Pandora Casket comes off as some kind of advanced technology instead of the mystical feel that something called the Pandora Casket invokes.  

In the end, we see this device's way of extermination is all about creating duplicates of the Golden Age Sandman to go after our heroes for some reason and even though our heroes recognize these forms to resemble Wesley Dodds, it's just weird as hell that they would take this particular visage instead of the one he had throughout this series.  Eventually though, the fight and this issue comes to an end when Val-Zod shows up rocking his Superman shield once again and takes out all of the threats.  This ending is a bit weird too because the rest of our heroes seem either shocked to actually see Val-Zod or that he's wearing the El symbol again.  I'd have to go with the shield, but when you're stuck in some sort of ghost world being shocked at something as silly as that seems weird.

That's it for this issue of Earth 2: Society and I have to say that I'm actually excited for this turn of events because from what we learn in this issue, the cityscape that our heroes are actually in resembles their original Earth's Metropolis and not the Neotropolis that we've had throughout this series.  That lets me in on the fact that the Earth might actually remake itself and everyone who died on it during the Apokolips invasion and the reason the Pandora Casket is trying to kill our heroes off is because it needs to remake them so that it doesn't have duplicates.  If this is the case then I'll finally be getting everything that I've wanted from this series and I can't wait to see where it goes.  That's just the impact of what this issue represents though, as for a single issue, it's a fast read that doesn't really do much besides getting that speculation machine running.  The art in this issue was great, but with no backgrounds to really speak of, I'm guessing Bruno could put some extra time into the character work.  Overall, not much to write home about here, but the book looks great and it gets me excited for things to come.

Bits and Pieces:

While this issue is full of mystery about what the future of this series will bring, it doesn't really do much but get you to start speculating about things to come and wonder why the hell a Golden Age character is represented throughout.  The art looks great though and I'm already getting excited for the next issue.

7/10