DCeased: Hope at World’s End

How popular has “DCeased” turned out to be for the publisher?  Popular enough for them to greenlight a fifteen-chapter digital-first series of comics telling additional stories in the same setting.  “What kind of stories?” I hear you ask.  Well, the transformed version of Black Adam that’s on the cover of the print edition should give you a pretty good idea.  Though most of the pages here are dedicated to showing how the heroes saved regular humans and fought against the antihero’s assault, it’s not the sole focus here.  Jimmy Olsen provides a first-person account of what happened at the Daily Planet when the outbreak happened.  Damien Wayne deals with his father’s death by stealing Wonder Woman’s invisible jet.  Detective Chimp and the Super-Pets also get their moment in the sun as well.

All of this is illustrated by a host of capable artists, including:  Dustin Nguyen, Marco Failla, Renato Guedes, Carmine Di Giandomenico, and “Unkillables” Karl Mostert who does the best story in this volume – the one about the Super-Pets.  It’s dark, but also weird and fun in its own way, with some surprising connections being made through the characters that wind up working together.  The same can also be said of the Jimmy Olsen and Damien Wayne stories, though they don’t have the same, “Well, I wasn’t expecting to see this!” energy that Mostert’s has or the detail and style that the artist brings to this one.

Though these are fun stories, none of them feel like essential chapters in the “DCeased” saga.  The same can also be said of the main story about Black Adam, which is meant to take place alongside the events of the first miniseries.  While the antihero is a big enough threat to build a story around, the one that’s delivered here feels like unnecessary scaffolding tacked on to the solid structure of previous events.  That doesn’t turn “Hope at World’s End” into a bad collection of comics, just one that’ll be best appreciated by those who are thoroughly invested in the ongoing saga of “DCeased.”