Black Hammer vol. 4: Age of Doom, Part 2

I said that the way things wrapped up in the previous volume was just enough to get me to come back for this one.  Now, if you’ve already listened to the latest podcast, then you’ll know that I didn’t think it was worth it.  The “Black Hammer” saga (or at least this leg of it) ends by making its point in the most pedestrian way possible:  By recycling his own ideas as well as Grant Morrison’s. Specifically, that writer’s idea of a limbo where forgotten comic book characters go and what happens when a character meets their creator from his run on “Animal Man.”  The first two issues are essentially an extended riff, or rather rip-off, on that idea with Col. Weird standing in for Buddy Baker. The Colonel doesn’t have the charisma to sustain such an exercise, and neither does Rich Tommaso’s otherwise appealingly straightforward art.

We finally get back to the regular “Black Hammer” crew who have finally made it back to Spiral City.  The only thing is that they’ve lost their memories in the process. So we’re essentially back to where we were at the start of the whole series, only this time the monstrous Anti-God is making his way back to this reality to destroy it all.  The only way our heroes will be able to stop him now is if they return to the farm and forget about their previous lives even harder this time!

I probably should’ve put a *spoiler warning* before that last sentence, but if one person reads that and goes, “Man, that sounds really dumb.  I’m not going to bother with this,” then it’ll have been worth it. While it’s in service of the point that Lemire appears to be making here, that the old superheroes are going to need to go away for the new ones to thrive and to break the endless cycle of event storytelling, he goes about making it in the dumbest way possible.  There’s no real invention or surprise to the story being told here, just a lot of references to better stories and characters published by corporate entities. The “Black Hammer” team even teamed up with them in a “Justice League” crossover whose collected edition will be hitting print soon. I won’t be bothering with it. I’m done with this particular brand of comic-book-style navel gazing.