Slipped Through the Cracks
Script: Magdalene Visaggio
Pencils, Inks, Cover: Sonny Liew
Colors: Chris Chuckry
Letters: Todd Klein
Assistant Editor: Maggie Howell
Editor: Andy Khouri
Cover Price: $3.99
On Sale Date: May 9, 2018
**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**
It’s another go-‘round with that depressed, retired superhero, Eternity Girl! I wonder if she figures out how to kill herself in this issue? Only one way to find out: read my review of Eternity Girl #3, beginning below!
Explain It!
All must envy the opportunity afforded George Bailey by his guardian angel in the film It’s a Wonderful Life: to see what the world would be had we never existed. Without being too maudlin, it’s an interesting thought experiment, because there will be no satisfying sobs over a casket adorned with flowers, no annual reminiscences dedicated to your life; people would never miss you because there never was a “you” at all. In this sense, Caroline’s intention to end her own life by necessarily ending all of reality isn’t selfish at all. No one will ever know the difference. The very concepts will cease to be.
The funny thing is, Caroline’s space adventures with Madame Atom (who still insists on calling her Chrysalis!) and her relatively more mundane doings in the real world seem to be bleeding into each other…or, perhaps, informing one another. I think it’s more like the sunglasses in the movie They Live: if you don’t have ‘em, you remain blissfully unaware of the fact that reality is unraveling. Caroline old boss Sloan is fully “woke” to what’s happening with Madame Atom, and knows something more about Caroline besides: with her powers, she can create nuclear fission, becoming the world’s first atomic bomb on Xanax. In space, this is explained as “firing up the chaos engine,” or something, but the result is nuclear death and the like.
To combat Caroline, Sloan summons the Never Man, a meta-dude in a costume similar to one-time Outsider Geo-Force, exposed hairdo and all, who will be able to do…something. Madame Atom lets it slip that she killed Caroline before, and she’s only around due to the universe-rebooting events of “Milk Wars…” which I did not entirely expect. This somehow leaves her immortal, however, which I fail to understand—many “rebooted” characters in comics have died and come back to life several times over! Despite this revelation, Caroline juices up the Chaos Engine, and in the third dimension this manifests as Caroline stepping off her apartment building roof, just as her friend Dani makes it and tries to stop her, and on the way to the street Caroline has her meltdown. The nuclear one.
I had a good time with this issue! The story is coming into focus and I find myself very interested to know what happens next. There was a glut of exposition between Caroline and Madame Atom in the middle, and this whole other thing where anthropomorphic Cosmic Forces discuss intervening on the proceedings (I thought that was a Marvel thing?), but overall I was really engrossed in this issue. I think that by keeping a relatively tight cast, the story can be more heady and ethereal without losing the reader (me). Fans of off-beat comic books should give this series a once-over.
Bits and Pieces:
Some new information is revealed about Caroline, and she gains a new sense of purpose, just in time for Armageddon. Isn't that always the way? As this story congeals, it begins to taste like marmalade...laced with psychedelics. My favorite flavor!
8.5/10
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