Written by: Si Spurrier
Art by: Rachael Stott, Felipe Sobreiro, and Simon Bowland
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: June 27, 2018
**NON-SPOILERS AND SCORE AT BOTTOM**
This book should be good. It has a cool concept with the thousands and thousands of different strings, it has mech suits, and it has family conflict. So why isn't it good? Why does it have to force that conflict over and over again? Why do the characters seem to progress a little bit one issue, only to go right back to the way they've always been the next issue? I had high hopes for this series coming in, but my thoughts on it have steadily declined since the start. Maybe, just maybe, this final issue will change my mind a bit, but I wouldn't count on it. Let's take a peak in, shall we?
Explain It!
I try to go into every issue without any preconceived notions of what it's going to be so that I don't bias my scores based off of previous issues. But it's very hard to do that when the interactions are the same in every single issue. So coming into this one, I wasn't expecting much, and therefore I wasn't disappointed. Picking up right where the last one left off, this whole issue revolves around the cliffhanger revelations we were left with. Tabitha and Selena haven't gotten along very much throughout the series, and they aren't going to here either.
In fact, Tabitha holds up a gun and nearly kills her mom's clone before she heads off to hunt down her brother that doesn't remember her. Yes, that's right: Selena has actually been dead for a couple of weeks and Tabitha has been traveling around with her clone. It turns out that the original Selena set this entire thing up to attempt to make amends with Tabitha and keep Bubba out of jail. Instead of just actually giving her daughter a call and trying to talk to her and be a good mother, she put on this elaborate scheme that is supposed to make the reader feel bad for her and empathize with her. But instead, I'm left thinking she is an even worse mother than I already thought, and that is saying something.
So after all of the struggles of finding Bubba through the first five issues, this time Tabitha finds him like it's nothing and goes in. After getting naked and completely obliterating some Braintrust henchmen, she sets her sights on Bubba. Why did she have to be naked for this you ask? Who the hell knows, but she was for some random reason. She goes to let Bubba run free, but he turns on her and brings in his boys to steal everything. After unleashing a tirade of "fucks" on Bubba long enough to distract him, New Selena shows up to save the day.
The issue ends with what is meant to be a touching moment between daughter and cloned mother, but it just comes off feeling empty and forced. The art is about where it was last month, but this time the progression of art didn't make a whole lot of sense. There was one point where Tabitha gets shot through the shoulder, then in the very next panel the blood and bullet hole are gone, and then they show back up in the following panel. I think that shows that the creative team and editors care about as much as I do by this point. This is not a series I would recommend.
Bits and Pieces
Despite an intriguing premise, this book has never been able to grab me. Nearly all of the interactions between mother and daughter, including the ones here in this issue, have felt forced and unrealistic. The art has been on a decline since the beginning, none of the characters are likable in the slightest, and the story is all over the place. I have been a fan of a lot of the Vertigo books here lately, but this is one that I'm not going to miss.
2.8/10
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