Black Lightning: Cold Dead Hands #6 Review and **SPOILERS**

Believe in Cleveland

Writer: Tony Isabella 

Artist: Clayton Henry & Yviel Guichet 

Colorist: Pete Pantazis 

Letterer: Josh Reed

Cover: Clayton Henry & Tomeu Morey

Cover Price: $3.99

On Sale Date: April 4, 2018

**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**

And now we come to the conclusion of the miniseries Black Lightning: Cold Dead Hands. What have we learned? How have we grown? It seems like six months have passed since this journey began…wait a minute, six months have passed since the first issue! So let’s see what’s what today in my review of issue #6, right here!

Explain It!

One would think that one of the difficulties of writing comics is the limitation of space. Here, on this blog, I can wax for as long or as little as I wish—perhaps at the expense of readership, but there is nothing hard-wired into this website to curtail my word count. Due to printing requirements, a comic book will always be thirty-two pages, including ads (or some multiple of 16 after that), and those ads will always appear in the same places every issue. The story, therefore, must be written around them, and still conclude on the final page of story, of which there are a mere twenty. It’s not an easy trick, and having to omit or adjust plot points is certainly a common complaint of the comic book scribe.

It begs the question, then, why this issue concludes about halfway through, in much the way we might have expected, leaving several pages of epilogue that might have been better used otherwise. I have to ask why three issues of a six-issue miniseries were spent on the events of one evening, so that the final issue could conclude with Black Lightning simply beating the pants off of Tobias Whale. Turns out Tobias’ set-up was actually Jefferson’s set-up: he was the distraction while the Cleveland Police did a sweep of Tobias’ warehouses and cleaned up the scourge of alien guns. And then Pierce’s shape-shifting buddy turns out to be alive and turns off that power-suppressing doohickey. And Miss Pequod, Whale’s assistant who was so loyal that she assassinated four people in order to secure Tobias’ criminal stranglehold on Cleveland? She just runs away. She just. Fucking. Runs. Away.

This series was treading water in the previous issue, but I have rarely been as disappointed as I was to read the conclusion. What a waste. This series is visually very strong, but really it’s just a waste of money. This should have been one or two issues, tops. There not enough here to justify twenty-four bucks.

Bits and Pieces:

This series ends pretty much how we'd have guessed, and then it finds itself in the position of having several pages to fill. This is simply one or two issues worth of story expanded into six issues. In other words: a rip-off.

5/10

-->