Cyborg #15 Review and *SPOILERS*

Metal On Metal Violence

Written By: John Semper Jr.

Art By: Cliff Richards, Will Conrad, Ivan Nunes, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: August 2, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Cyborg's fight against Anomaly continues in this issue and while our main bad guy of this series so far doesn't seem to be the threat that he once was, it's the actions of an Anomaly from a parallel world that we're currently dealing with now that our hero and his friends have been sucked through a wormhole to another world, where that Anomaly unleashed the OTAC virus, that began changing people into "Mecha-Humans" with the desire to make the world in their image.  Only a few humans are left to resist and as we saw in the previous issue, one of them is Cyborg's mother, who in this world is alive and summoned her son through Anomaly to come and save the people of this planet.  Hopefully Cyborg is capable enough to do it because it looks like in order to get the cure, he's going to have to go through the Metal Men to do it.  Let's jump into this issue and see if this installment picks up the pace of the series or if it's just more of the same nonsense.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with Dr. Elinore Stone recapping the things we learned about last issue, like Anomaly actually achieving his goal to destroy humanity in this world and the weird part is........ we never see the Anomaly from our world do anything in this issue.  You'd think after showing him the nightmare he would have created that he'd have flip flopped or something and joined our heroes in their quest to find the cure, but instead he just disappears without an explanation at all.  So yeah, after the recap is over, we find out that before he died, Dr. Elias Stone had developed a cure against the OTAC virus, but in order for it to work, it would have to first be injected into Cyborg because of his special blood, then it would be able to cure the world, but the only problem here is, it seems that the Cyborg of this world has already died, leading Elinore to find an alternate version of her son to fulfill the task.  

Once the exposition is out of the way, we see Cyborg, Variant, Beast Boy and Exxy make their way to Silas' old lab, where they're met by a shitload of Mecha-humans........... and this book becomes nonsense again, but where this nonsense has come out of nowhere before without any explanation, here we at least learn that there is a man or something behind the curtain of all this because Cyborg starts having problems with his vision again, where he's forced to fight some robot monster before seeing the jazz player Blue, who now tells him that a lot is riding on him and that he needs to start paying attention to what's around him.......... yeah, it's not much of an explanation to what's going on in this book, but it at least allows me to know that there is a reason for Cyborg to be having these visions now besides for John Semper Jr. just dropping acid and writing weird shit.  

In the end, after Cyborg's vision has passed, we find out that Variant has been taken by the Mecha-humans and the only way to get her back now is to find the cure in the lab........ which Cyborg finds by having his vision get all fucked up again and then talking about how everything is digitized data....... yeah, I don't quite understand what's going on with this bit, but this whole thing leads to a big fight with the Metal Men, who have been programmed to only give the cure to Cyborg, but see this version as an impostor.  Exxy finally pulls his weight in this issue and finds a way to reprogram them, but we've got bigger problems than the Metal Men for our cliffhanger because instead of finding the cure they were looking for, they find a hologram of this world's Cyborg, who seems to be alive and has the cure...... and wants to kill our Cyborg so that he can rule the planet.  

That's it for this issue of Cyborg and while I find this new story about saving this parallel world from disaster more enjoyable and interesting than what we were getting previously, it's still a bit boring at times and it really chaps my ass that John Semper Jr. is just throwing parallel worlds out there all willy nilly when we only have a certain amount of Universes to play with in the Multiverse and we already know what the majority of them are.......... which isn't this.  The art in this issue is decent and I like that we finally know that something is up with Cyborg beyond Anomaly's viruses with these visions he's having, but there isn't enough explained to really give me a understanding about what this is supposed to be and that's frustrating.  All in all, Cyborg still isn't a book that I really enjoy and with this story continuing on, I don't see it becoming one. 

Bits and Pieces:

Cyborg, while giving us a little more of an interesting plot, still comes off a bit boring and weird at the same time and while we're getting dribs and drabs of things that are trying to get that weird bit out of the way, it's not all the way there yet.  The art in this book is decent and conveys the story well, but the story not being that interesting overall is the problem.  Yeah, I still hope that I'll get a Cyborg book that I'll enjoy, but with this long drawn out plot, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

5.3/10