Deathstroke #40 Review

Assault IN Arkham

Written By: Christopher Priest

Art By: Fernando Pasarin, Carlo Pagulayan, Trevor Scott, Jordi Tarragona, Jason Paz, Jeremy Cox, Willie Schubert

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: February 6, 2019

It's time to finish up our Arkham arc and goddamn do I hope that everything comes together smoothly in wrapping up all the craziness that this story has thrown our way.  We've got VR therapy sessions, aliens, cursed daughters and a double your pleasure, double your fun Two-Face going on here and I'm worried some of this will get lost in the shuffle of the pages in this book.  Let's jump in and see if Priest can make our favorite assassin sane.......... or find out that that was never really the plan.  Let's check it out.

So as I've said over the last couple of reviews on this title...... this are confusing and while at first they were confusing in a fun way, as we've progressed, that fun as turned into frustration.  While I would like to say that all of that frustration was well worth it in the end as we get our wrap up here, where we see the man behind the curtain, holding the smoking gun and all that jazz....... I felt kind of empty after all of this was said and done.  Now, I'm not saying that things weren't brought back up or that there wasn't any fun to be hand this issue, it just feels like this may be a story that is best read in a trade because by the end things were brought up that felt vaguely familiar, like they were supposed to be important, but after months and months of just having the crazy thrown at us, I'm not entirely sure of what was actually real and what wasn't and felt a little left behind by the conclusion because of that.

With all that, the side stories we had throughout this story seem so non ancillary because by the time we end this issue I don't really know what was the purpose behind Rose Wilson and Two-Face's because it's left ambiguous as to whether anything real was accomplished.  Yeah, the stuff with Joey and Wintergreen was fun, but by the end they don't seem to matter and because of that I'm just left with the crazy of Arkham and Hugo Strange's strange ass motivations behind this entire arc.

Overall, the art was great in this issue and the conclusion to this story did leave me happy in the fact that I still want to continue this Deathstroke adventure, it's just that this whole story just kind of seemed to get out of hand for the simple fact that we're still supposed to question Deathstroke's mental capabilities and it just took a long ass time, with some really strange side roads to get there that I'm still not sure come together completely.  So yeah, a definite mixed bag for me here, but I'm looking forward to what next issue brings.

Bits and Pieces:

You might get some satisfaction out of this conclusion, but I still think that this will probably be a better read once it's all collected in a trade because goddamn are there things that will throw you for a loop if you haven't been paying close enough attention, not to mention if a month between issues was enough to make you forget a couple of things.  The art was great though and the cliffhanger made me want to dive into next issue, while throwing some fun in throughout the middle.

6.5/10