The Fall and Rise of Captain Atom #6 Review and *SPOILERS*

Quantum *BLEEP*

Written By: Cary Bates, Greg Weisman

Art By: Will Conrad, Ivan Nunes, Saida Temofonte

Cover Price: $2.99

Release Date: June 7, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

We've come to the end of our six issue Captain Atom mini and while I pretty much enjoyed the ride, I really hope that it can be finished up well and not leave us with more questions than answers.  In our previous issue, we saw our hero take on the villain of this story, Ultramax, when the villain made a house call to General Eiling's.  It's at this point that we realized that the General, all around bad fellow that he is was even worse because before Ultramax was arrested for being a hitman and sentenced to death, the General was one of his last clients and it was one of those clients that got him arrested and put on the path to death.  Too bad Max Thrane didn't start with the General because goddamn did he kill a bunch of people just to make sure that he got the vengeance he believed he deserved.  Let's jump into this issue and see what Ultramax's plan is now that Captain Atom sent him packing with a bit of a quantum ass whooping and hopefully find out what the future holds for Nathaniel Adam's' son Genji.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with us finding out that General Eiling contracted Max Thrane back in 2008 to kill a known terrorist who was hiding out in the United States and who was planning on an attack in the future and after the job was completed, General Eiling turned Max Thrane into to the FBI because the General believed that this sick puppy liked his job a little too much.  We head back to the present then, where Captain Atom is confronting the General about his involvement with Thrane, which our hero found out when Thrane momentarily phased through him while they were in a higher quantum field, but apparently General Eiling is above the law or some such nonsense because it doesn't seem like anything will ever come of this except that Captain Atom will have to protect the General until Ultramax is put down.

Too bad, that when Captain Atom saw Ultramax's memories, Ultramax saw a brief piece of his too because now the villain has found Nathaniel's son and is using the boy as leverage to make Captain Atom bring the General to their original meeting place when Eiling put the hit out and the terrorist........... and we get a battle obviously, but it's not all that spectacular, just Captain Atom using his powers better than Ultramax, which should be a given and our hero simply winning the day by putting Thrane into a coma.

In the end, Dr. Megala is going over the surveillance of the battle and sees that Nathaniel's son Genji took a quantum blast during the fight, but was able to put up an energy aura around him, protecting him, but letting the big bads in control of the future of Captain Atom know that Nathaniel's son does indeed have powers of his own that he doesn't even know about yet.  As our issue comes to a close, we find out that Dr. Megala was the one who was secretly sending Nathaniel information about his son, but sadly, the story never really ends in a proper manner because we're told that this is only the end for now, while the Justice League watch a news report about Captain Atom in the Watchtower.  The most interesting part of this is, it looks like whatever future we're dealing with in this story, Hawkman's a part of the Justice League.

That's it for the finale to the Fall and Rise of Captain Atom mini and while we did get to see Captain Atom take out the bad guy and get the idea that Genji has powers that the government is interested in, there wasn't much to this story.  We spent a lot of time in this issue seeing General Eiling's involvement with Ultramax, which we knew about by the end of the last issue that it seemed like we didn't have any time left to deal with anything else in this issue besides the final battle and that's a bit of a disappointment to me because while yes, we did get to see Captain Atom become recognized by the media and the public as a hero, it just felt like we lost a step in telling a more internal Captain Atom story with what's going on with him personally since he was on this wacky time travel adventure that brought him to the future and gave him a son.  It just felt like this was all about a superhero beat down by the end and I thought that this story would be more than that from the beginning of this mini.  On top of that, I hate these open ended minis because instead of getting a proper conclusion, we're left wondering when and where these characters will pick back up again and from what we saw in the Death of Hawkman mini, it might be a goddamn Hanna-Barbera series and I don't think that anyone wants that again.  All in all, the art in this issue was enjoyable, but the story just seemed to stall out from what we were originally getting out of this.

Bits and Pieces:

While the art in this finale issue continues to be on point, the story just seems to stall out so that this can simply be a paint by numbers superhero vs super villain beat 'em up tale and that's disappointing for all the fresh things we were getting at the beginning of this mini.  Hopefully this was only a first taste of Captain Atom stories to come because this by itself turned out to be pretty underwhelming.  

6/10