Deathstroke #39 Review

Call Me Crazy........

Written By: Christopher Priest

Art By: Carlo Pagulayan, Fernando Pasarin, Jason Paz, Jordi Tarragona, Wade Von Grawbadger, Jeremy Cox, Deron Bennett

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: January 9, 2019

Deathstroke in Arkham sounds like a really good time....... That's what I would have said when asked before this story started because each and every issue that has come out since it did start has just been sliding down the rails on that old crazy train and even though we're jumping around to different characters, like we tend to do with this book........ It's really not coming all together in a way that I feel like I know what's going on.  Yeah, that's probably the point and Christopher Priest is most likely trying to make the reader feel as crazy as Slade Wilson does right now, but I can't say that that makes for the best storytelling.  Let's jump into this issue and see if things start to become clearer here or see if Slade is just as crazy as everyone says he is.  Let's check it out.

Yeah.... Crazy Train.  While the narrative between all our many characters seems to be moving in a linear fashion, all moving towards Rose Wilson fixing her "Willow" problem, the stops that we take in this issue with our main character has just got me scratching my head and wondering if I'm just plain dumb.  We've got VR therapy sessions that don't make sense from where we left off, Two-Face being in two places at once, super villains in space fighting aliens with the help of modified, mind wiping Zeta beam technology, Hugo Strange being the master of reanimating bodies......... that aren't really reanimated and when you add all of this up you have all the ingredients to make a confusion bomb of cluster fuck proportions.

All that being said.......  There's still some of the Christopher Priest charm in how he writes these characters that keeps me interested in this title even without me understanding what the hell he's trying to say in this story.  It's really frustrating though because I fully expect that everything will come together and make sense by the end of this arc, but even with that I have months and months of complete uncertainty that leaves me a little upset at why we have to take this approach to this story.

All in all, the art continues to be great even though we have a heaping helping of pencillers and inkers on this issue and there's certainly some fun to be had with the supporting cast, but Deathstroke himself is just a pile of mind fuck that I'm not having fun with anymore and it leaves me wondering how many people are still enjoying this book with what we've getting out of him.  There's just so much that doesn't make sense that even with me being optimistic about everything coming together by the end and all of us readers having that "Eureka!" moment....... it's getting harder to stay positive with everything that's thrown at us each month.

Bits and Pieces:

While the art and supporting characters in this book remain strong, the main ordeal that our favorite assassin is facing is just becoming more and more confusing, leaving me more and more disappointed with what we're getting here.  Yeah, it could all come together by the end of the arc, but right now it's just a big bucket of crazy that I'm afraid will leave a lot of unanswered questions.

6.3/10