Cyborg #14 Review and *SPOILERS*

Parallel World's End

Written By: John Semper Jr.

Art By: Will Conrad, Ivan Nunes, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: July 5, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Goddamn, has this story been rough and that sucks even worse to me because even though we've had different arc names, we're essentially still dealing with the same story from the beginning of this series.  In our previous issue we saw our villain Anomaly enact his master plan to bring about cybernetic dominance on Earth and that had to do with bringing online a device that opened a wormhole, which a voice in head was telling him to build this whole time and we saw our heroes sucked in.  Hopefully, with the fact that Black Narcissus wasn't around for the big suck, she'll be able to do some reverse-o, switcheroo on the gizmo and get them back, but until then let's check out what's on the other side of the wormhole and find out who was talking to Anomaly this whole time.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

When our issue begins, we see Anomaly, Variant, Exxy and Cyborg being flung through a wormhole, where out of nowhere, our hero has to go up against a big ass robot that starts kicking his ass, until that turns into the jazz saxophone player Blue, telling our hero that he's about to face a big ass challenge coming up and in order for him to survive this challenge, he's going to have to look deep inside of himself.  Yeah, all of this is odd nonsense that turns out to only be a dream, but our characters were flung into a wormhole and on the other side they find themselves in a parallel world, where Anomaly has succeeded in his plans of creating his cybernetic world.  I just want to know why Dr. Sarah Charles wasn't sucked into the wormhole too because in the previous issue I was pretty sure that she was in the room with the rest of our characters.  

Before our characters can really get their bearings, they're attacked by cyborg monsters, that are trying to inject them with nanites that will turn them into monsters as well, but they're saved and brought to a safe place by Beast Boy, who because of his constantly changing DNA, has an advantage of being pseudo immune to their attacks.  Once everyone is safe, we find out that the voice within Anomaly's head that has been driving him to get to this point is actually the mother of Cyborg, Elinore Stone, who apparently brought Anomaly here so that he can see his Utopia is actually the end of the world because even though humanity is shit, humanity mixed with robotic is still a part of humanity so they're given more at their disposal to make it into shit...... that's the gist I got at least.  

In the end, we find out that this is a parallel world, where Silas succeeded in curing Elinore of her cancer, but the Anomaly he was working on came to life, stole the OTAC formula and created a virus that swept throughout the world making it what it is and now it's up to our characters to get to a secure location that hold the cure, but to do that, they'll have to go up against the Metal Men.

That's it for this issue of Cyborg and while I'm happy that we're at least doing something different with the book to try and make it interesting, I do have a problem with this parallel world that they're on because it's just done all willy nilly and it doesn't as far as I can tell jive with the Multiverse as we know it.  Yeah, you could say that there are multiple Multiverses like we saw at the end of Grant Morrison's The Multiversity or even with what we're playing with in Batman Metal right now, but it just feels odd to me that DC would just let Semper Jr. throw a parallel Earth into the mix.  Also, I'd like to know what the hell happened to Dr. Sarah Charles from the last issue because she just disappears here, but with all that, this is a step in the right direction it seems because at least it didn't infuriate me that we were just holding off the inevitable fight with Cyborg and Anomaly.  The art in this issue was as decent as it always is and I'm a bit happier with this issue than I've been over the past couple of months, but maybe that's just because I can see an ending to this story on the horizon.

Bits and Pieces:

Cyborg continues to be an underwhelming book, but at least for this issue I can say that John Semper Jr. has changed up the game a bit in the way he's telling his stories because I at least found the concept to this issue interesting, even if it doesn't make a ton of sense in the long run and just throws dream sequences in to fill up page time.  The art was fun and at least we're doing something kind of new in the Cyborg book because goddamn did it feel stale as hell lately.  

5.5/10