If the Cabal Didn’t Exist, We’d Have to Invent It
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Adriana Melo
Colorist: Kelly Fitzpatrick
Letterer: Simon Bowland
Cover Artists: Tess Fowler with Tamra Bonvillain
Editor: Kristy Quinn
Cover Price: $3.99
On Sale Date: October 10, 2018
**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE
BOTTOM**
Pado Saskatoon! Plato asked a spoon! Task the room
with matching runes. Flasks of booze! Glass spittoon! Alas, the fastest path is
doom. Raspy crones in fashion swoon. Masked the moon with flashy tunes. Amassed
a boon and dashed it by noon. At last, or soon, my review of Plastic Man #5, kaboom!
Explain
It!
When I was around eleven years old, I came home very
late from school. My grandmother was waiting for me and asked where I’d been. I
don’t remember what I was really doing that day, maybe hanging out longer than
normal at the candy store to play video games (or watch others play video
games,) or maybe I went to somebody’s house for a little while—whatever it was that
I really did, I lied and told my grandma that I’d been mugged. She was
concerned and I kind of shrugged it off, since it didn’t actually happen, and
went to my room to read MAD magazine
or whatever. And then, a week later, I
actually did get mugged.
They got fifty cents and a really cheap gold chain my
church had given to me (I was eleven, after all.) That time, I felt humiliated
and violated, and walked home from school crying, but when I got home I
couldn’t rightly say I’d been mugged twice in two weeks, so I had to swallow my
feelings and act like everything was fine. That’s kind of what’s happened in Plastic Man: Obscura put forth a fake
Cabal in order to manipulate Plas’ emotions into battling a real cabal
consisting of various leftover DC Comics villains. And uh, this might be the
worst plan ever conceived. They wouldn’t even come up with something this
hackneyed on Three’s Company. But you
know, it’s not a bad plot to a comic book story arc.
The problem is, it’s like one of five things
happening concurrently in the same six issues. I know I’m normally beating the
drum for arcs shorter than six issues, but here’s a case where we might have
done better with a few more issues—or perhaps these stories could have been
arranged differently within one six-issue arc, because I am having trouble with
A) juggling these different yarns, and B) caring about all of them equally. The
parent/child relationship that’s supposed to be developing between Plas and
Pado Saskatoon doesn’t really read. Plas spends the first part of the issue
trying to dump the kid on Man-Bat, then later goes to the carnival with Pado
and one of the strippers. Where Pado gets taken away by Child Protective
Services, who Plastic Man had called earlier in the series. It looks like a
heart-wrenching, tearful scene, but since O’Brien was trying to dump the kid
off a few pages earlier, I’m not feeling the drama.
Then there’s the fake Plastic Man that kills people
and scrawls JLA next to them. Turns out this is a hired Durlan. I don’t know
what to make of this plot, I feel like there are no stakes to it because Plas
isn’t really shown dodging the authorities over it. Plus, there’s the gangster
and his girlfriend that’s turning into granite. She kills some other mobster at
the end. The whole thing with her feels like an entirely unrelated thing,
connected only marginally. I dunno. The art in this issue is back to what it
was from numbers 1–3, so that’s nice. But I just can’t wrap my head around this
miniseries. If only it were made of plastic.
Bits and
Pieces:
It's the penultimate issue of the series, and I'm still unclear about what are the stakes and where I'm supposed to be emotionally involved. It's going to take a masterful final issue to wrap this up neatly. If anyone can do it, it's this team.
4.5/10
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