Radiant Black vol. 5: The Catalyst War — Crisis

“Choose.”

That’s what the robot at the heart of Radiant Black told Marshall and Nathan at the end of vol. 4 after they tried to figure out what was going wrong with their power.  It turns out that only one of them can be the hero in this story after all and it’s up to them to decide.  Which is something they’ll have to do quickly as the alien civilization behind the Radiants has come to take them all back and subjugate Earth as they have all the planets they’ve encountered before.

While I’ve still been enjoying this series, its storytelling has felt more routine with each passing volume.  The part where Marshall assumed control of Radiant Black back in vol. 1 was a genuine surprise that the series has yet to replicate.  So what better way for the series to get its mojo back by kicking off an interstellar war with the biggest threat our protagonists have seen yet?  How about a genuine, bonafide gimmick to go along with the event-level storytelling on display here.

Remember when I said that Nathan and Marshall were going to have to choose who became Radiant Black?  Well, the gimmick in “The Catalyst War” involves showing from both sides of that decision.  The issues collected here were originally published as #’s 25, 26, 26.5, 27,  and 27.5 to differentiate whose side of the story you were seeing.  This series doesn’t appear to be going full Multiverse with this development yet, but we’ll see where things are at the end of this arc.

As for how it’s working so far… not too bad.  Writer Kyle Higgins, working with co-writer Joe Clark on this volume, doesn’t provide dramatically different paths for the diverging timelines here.  I imagine that’s to keep things manageable as they’ve been doubling up on their workload for this arc, but it feels like they’re playing it safe here.  There are differences, however, and one of them does promise to take things in a significantly different direction next time.  However, that’s an issue for next time, and while the potential is there to surprise the reader I’ll be disappointed if it just turns out to be a setup for one of our protagonists to make a heel turn.

The writers and artists, regular artist Marcelo Costa trading off with Eduardo Ferigato, do fare better with the action, however.  We get to see some impressive levels of carnage in the opening arc, quality superheroics, and clever uses of Radiant Black’s powers in these opening issues.  Both in the big and small scale as the first part has them taking on one of the Catalyst’s war mechs, and the next has them duking it out with their religious warrior faction.

I just wish we had a better sense of who these people were and why they’re fighting.  I get the all-conquering alien race bit, but it’s not much more than that at this point in the story.  What little we’re told makes it seem like the conflict stems from the old control-vs-free-will dichotomy which is as exciting as it sounds.  I imagine this will all be explained more as the story goes on, even though that does nothing to get me invested in The New Way right now beyond the fact that it’s what the Radiants are fighting for.

So what we wind up having here with vol. 5 is a volume of “Radiant Black” that is solidly Not Bad.  The gimmick in this volume is decently interesting and the conflict feels suitably wide-scale at this point.  However, the dual-timeline setup doesn’t feel like it’s living up to its potential yet, and a lot of the blanks behind the Catalyst need to be filled in quick if they want to hold my attention.  This is the very definition of a volume whose quality is better quantified in potential than actual means.  In other words:  If vol. 6 delivers the goods, then everything set up here will have been worth it.