Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye #4 Review and **SPOILERS**

It’s Heaven Underground

Written By: Jon Rivera 

Story By: Gerard Way & Jon Rivera 

Art By: Michael Avon Oeming 

Colors By: Nick Filardi 

Letters By: Clem Robins 

Cover By: Michael Avon Oeming and Nick Filardi 

Cover Price: $3.99 

On Sale Date: January 18, 2016

**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**

You know, ever since Chris mentioned (on the podcast’s Young Animal segment, every week whether there’s a comic out or not!) that the title of this series is tailor-made for a K-Pop style anime theme song, it’s all I can think of when reading this comic book.

Damn you, Chris Sheehan. Either get out of my head or let’s write this damned theme song so I can put the thing to rest. In the meantime, read my review of Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye #4, just below this text!

Explain It!

Cave Carson is scanning the carnage at the City of Muldroog with his cybernetic eye, and it seems able to reconstruct some of the stuff that transpired here in translucent, monochrome form. This more or less amounts to seeing Muldroogans running to and fro in chaos, but at one point he does see a recreation of the time he met his deceased wife, Mazra. Who was the Queen of Muldroog. But you should know this by now. While poking about the corpse-strewn city, Chloe leans on the wrong doohickey and opens a gigantic ornate door that releases a gross, decrepit ghost version of Cave’s wife. And of course she’s being all sickly seductive and creepy to drive the point home that this is some pretty messed up stuff.

Fake Mazra lunges at Cave and Wild Dog, and Chloe closes the door just in time to make the ghost vanish before our stomachs turn. Just then, Johnny Blake and his team from EBX show up in the Mighty Mole II, or maybe III, I’m not sure. Johnny asks Cave to surrender and come topside peaceably, just for old time’s sake. Of course Cave tells him to stuff it. So a couple of goobers with tranq guns jump out of the ship, but before they can apprehend diddly-squat their heads are lobbed off by congregating green crawly-things that seem to morph as needed. Johnny’s men try to fend off the gross-outs, and seem to be doing a pretty good job of it, then Cave whips out some kind of electro-blaster that presumably paralyzes or fries the little buggers. Having rescued Johnny Blake, Cave tells him “don’t start a war,” and frankly that’s good enough for him! Johnny tells everyone to pack it in, they’re going home.

Back on their Mighty Mole, it’s a different story. Ace tells Johnny that he’s locked onto the other Mole’s signal, and that their mission remains the same despite having been made to look like pansies by Cave. This discussion does give Cave and crew a little head start, though, because five minutes later they seem to have put some distance between themselves and the previous event. Cave knew (from working at EBX) one of the people killed in the conflict, Aleister, who also had a sister on the retrieval team. But enough of that, they’re on their way to Sha-Muldroog, the happiest place under earth! It’s a lush paradise, by cavern standards, and there Cave meets his mother- and father-in-law—Chloe’s grandparents—to tell them that their daughter is dead. Meanwhile, back on the surface, Simon is extracting some strange stuff from his father’s molding, misshapen body, which is something I’d rather not discuss further if it’s all the same to you.

This was a fairly fun issue that had a lot of enjoyable moments, but didn’t do too much to advance the plot. It was also a bit too formulaic, with antagonists stepping up, one after another, only to be whisked away by interruptions and conveniences. That being said, there was some development, though mainly on the last two pages, and I really love the way this book looks. There’s more to learn about the Massacre at Muldroog—I hope we get to it sooner rather than later.

Bits and Pieces:

Cave and the gang fend off successive threats in turn, and there's a dangling plot point on the last two pages of the issue, but otherwise I'd say this is the most "normal" issue of the series. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, the scenes were appropriately cool and the action was wacky enough that one might think this concept could support a more conventional comic book series. But who would want that?

7.5/10