Artists: Patrick Zircher, Jesus Merino, Aaron Lopresti and many more
Collects: The New 52 - Futures End #0-17
I was pretty excited about this back in the day. It's a time travel, avoid the bad future story and I often dig those. It's a weekly with Batman Beyond, one of the best variants of Batman ever put to paper, front and center. It has a bunch of writers I generally like. But reviews of it week to week were mid and money issues put me off from getting the trades in a timely manner. It became one of those "I'll read it when I get to it" projects, only who the hell knew when I'd get to it.
Well, I finally did. It's pretty decent? I want to say good, but this is only a third of the overall weekly so I don't know how it will shake out. It's not quite the slam dunk I expected from the talent involved, but I'll get into that. Still, I enjoyed it.
The series starts out hot with its zero issue, which is entirely set in the devastated future of thirty five years out from the then DC Universes present day. And when I say devastated, I mean it. Brother Eye has taken over everything its eye can see, assimilating heroes in frankly horrifying ways, and the whole thing is essentially the last stand of the remaining heroes. Seriously, there's some body horror going on, as much as they can get away with for a general audience. Circumstances leave them unable to pull it off, leading to Batmans backup plan; he's going to go back to the past and destroy Brother Eye before he and Mr. Terrific even build it. Unfortunately, he's injured in a standoff, so he sends his protege Terry McGuinnis in his place.
From there, the series is structured similarly to past weekly projects. 52 comes to mind. There are multiple running stories throughout that dip in and out when necessary. The duo that make up Firestorm are on the outs and we see what leads to the two agreeing never to merge again. Grifter is caught by agents of Cadmus for shadowy business. Frankenstein is lured into rejoining S.H.A.D.E. to investigate a sudden attack on Stormwatch. Mr. Terrific is completely up his own ass and marching the world toward the dark future without realizing it. Lois Lane is investigating the Green Arrows death. Tim Drake is in hiding and it's unclear why. Then there's the most important plotline, Terry McGuinnis working to avert the future entirely.
Well, it's the most important in theory, but one of the things that keep it going from decent-to-good all the way to great is that it feels like, at times, that plotline is the one that has the least focus. After we're past the zero issue, Terrys story is around, but as you can tell from the preceding paragraph, it's one of like eight narrative strands the weekly chooses to service. I don't think any of the narratives lost me, but it's a lot to juggle and none of them have fully merged by the end of the volume.
Which leads to the other issue that keeps the first volume from being a bit higher up on the quality chain. With so much to juggle, the book often feels like it's moving very slowly. We're jumping between a bunch of narratives, for a good chunk of the volume all of them are in setup mode and you can go a couple issues before you see a plotline return again. I imagine this is a very large part of why the weekly issues god middling reviews. If the pace feels slow to me in a collected volume, it must have been absolutely maddening to follow week to week.
Having yet to finish the overall story, I'm not a hundred percent sure which you cut, but maybe Lois Lanes plotline could have been folded into one of the others at the least. I'd have said Tim Drake just going off this volume, but that's the one plotline I DO know the destination of and yeah, can't really be cut. Maybe some pages could have stood to be trimmed from Grifter on Cadmus island. But whatever could have been decided, Terry needed more pages. He was the big draw of this weekly and he could have stood to be front and center more.
The art is about what you would expect for a weekly. There's a rotating cast of artists, some regular and a few pinch hitters. They all generally hit a baseline of quality so it looks consistent enough to carry the day, you just can't expect any standout artwork because that's not really what you see on these sort of projects. I kind of wish there was more to talk about, but the demands of a weekly schedule mean consistency of the whole mean more than any individual part. No shade from me, it's about the only way to hit a weekly schedule for a year. Wildly different art across one project almost never works out anyway.
It's difficult for me to pass judgement on a single volume of such a large series. A good chunk of the plotlines only just kick into gear by the end of the volume. I'll have more formed opinions by the time I'm finished. But for one volume, it's a pretty decent read with the caveat that you understand that it's a slow burn and there are a lot of plotlines being juggled. If that's not a turnoff for you, feel free to give the first volume a go.
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