A Rundown on the Brink
No, not the entirety of writer Dan Abnett and artist I.N.J. Culbard’s series from 2000 A.D., just one volume of it. Along with several other volumes of comics that have been lingering in my To Review pile from last year. If you’re thinking that not only was I struggling to come up with a clever title for this column as well as not having a lot of good things to say about what follows, then I’d say that says more about your own mindset than anything else. I mean, you’d be right, but the point still stands!
When Darkseid “died” in the pages of “DC All-In” his death sparked several notable anomalies throughout the DC Universe, which the Challengers of the Unknown are tasked with investigating along with some of the biggest heroes around. Seeing Christopher Cantwell tackle this B-team of DC explorers seemed like it’d be a good fit for his brand of weirdness and general quirk. However, even if there’s some decent character writing to be had, the story itself goes nowhere in a way that doesn’t feel like it has any relevance to the larger story of the DCU being told right now, or set up future stories with the Challengers that I’d be interested in reading. Sean Izaakse feels like he’s really trying to channel Jim Lee with his art, but delivers work that’s still pleasing even if it’s not nearly in the same league.
The Plot Holes are a group of fictional characters who invade other works in order to edit them so they can be published and saved. That’s become a lot harder to do these days as mysteriously powerful alien worms have begun tracking them from work-to-work now. This comes to us from creator Sean Murphy, and it’s a great showcase for his artistic skills as he makes all of the genres and settings he gives himself to draw look fantastic, while also spotlighting his love for fantasy adventure, mecha manga, and old-timey cartoon characters. It’s a far less impressive demonstration of his writing skills, however, saddling a very familiar “chosen one” plot with some worldbuilding regarding the title characters’ purpose that never quite makes sense.
Carl Brinkman and Bridgit Kurtis are private security enforcers in the future of Brink, Book One where the remains of humanity have been crammed onto giant space stations called Habitats. Most of their cases just involve humans being horrible to each other, but their latest takes them down a rabbit hole of drug smuggling, cultists, and possibly even some cosmic horror. Abnett and Culbard do set up an interesting world here with a surprising twist halfway through the first volume. It’s just that their slice of sci-fi/horror/noir never quite clicks in a way that made me go “I have to read vol. 2 now!” kind of way. I’ll likely pick that up at some point to see if it does come together, but I’ve got other things to read before that happens.
I may not know a whole lot about the history of the Teen Titans, but I do know that Slade “Deathstroke the Terminator” Wilson is their traditional big bad. So when he shows up as the main villain in the story that opens this volume, that means it should be a big deal. Right? Well Teen Titans vol. 4: Terminated never makes good on that threat, serving up a pretty standard slice of superhero action. It’s not bad, but I was expecting better from writer John Layman and artist Pete Woods (with Daniel Bayliss pitching in on the first issue). It’s probably telling that Layman, and artist Max Raynor, feels more invested in the two-parter that closes out this volume which sees Beast Boy and Cyborg team up with the Doom Patrol on an island of monsters, as that allows the writer to showcase some of the weirdness that has made his work so worth reading in the past.
“Absolute Power” turned out well enough and while Amanda Waller was stopped at the end, she was still alive with a head full of superhero secrets that she couldn’t access. So when she goes missing, Jon “Superman” Kent, Jay “Gossamer” Nakamura, and Nia “Dreamer” Nal, go after her for their own reasons as well as those of national security. That they meet up with the likes of Deadshot, Catman, and Black Alice along the way should’ve given Secret Six some of the darkly comic vibe and nasty storytelling that drove Gail Simone’s version(s) of the series from several years back. Writer Natalie Maines doesn’t really deliver any of that here, serving up instead what feels like an editorially-driven exercise in getting characters from Point A to B for future stories while serving up lots of circular arguments between the cast. Stephen Segovia, along with Cian Tormey and Roger Cruz, do what they can with the material, but this is a miniseries whose most notable developments will be summed up in recaps and is probably best experienced that way as opposed to reading it.