Artists: Patrick Zircher, Jesus Merino, Aaron Lopresti and many more
Collects: The New 52 - Futures End #18-30
Volume one was a decent start but felt too slow at times, which became a bit of an issue by the end. The first volume contained eighteen issues worth of material including the FCBD special that kicked it all off, inching close to half the overall weekly in one tome, a lot of ground to cover without speeding up. Thankfully, that's less of an issue with volume two. Containing a lighter thirteen issues, it also shifts out of first gear and actually starts to get some momentum going.
We do start to get some answers as to what exactly is going on and some threads start to converge. The Firestorm arc starts to bleed into Tim Drakes plot, while Terry is also starting to think that he needs Tims help, thereby tying that in. It's made plain who attacked Stormwatch, though if you have a clue about what symbol said enemy uses you'll see it coming. Grifters plotline dips into Brother Eye shenanigans, so we're getting closer to whatever the hell let him take wider control, while also dealing with the mystery of the missing Earth 2 refugees. Most importantly, back in the future Terry escaped, Brother Eye realizes that Terry has traveled through time, which means he has to do his best Skynet impersonation and send someone back to deal with the threat.
By the volumes close, we've got all the pieces in play for the last volume. Brother Eye has escaped to the wider world, we have a new Firestorm, Brainiac is coming, Tim Drake is starting to realize he can't really leave this life behind and Mr. Terrific barrels onward with his tech ambitions, despite warnings from friends. Also, Frankenstein and his team manage to escape the danger they were in, warping away, but we don't actually see where they end up in this volume. For some reason, it happens in the middle of the volume and the remaining four or five issues are dealing with other things. A strange breakdown, but might simply be the nature of how the divisions for the collection broke down.
It's hard to say a lot about the writing that wasn't said last time, because I'm not at the end yet, but as mentioned before this volume moves faster and that does it a lot of good. Unfortunately, my nitpick about Terry needing more page time holds over from the prior volume, but it is what it is. They really are juggling a lot more ongoing plots than I expected and they all need page time. Thankfully we start to see him more as the volume wears on and with plotlines intersecting I expect it will be less of an issue in the final volume.
As for the art, it's the same deal as last volume. Hard to critique. Competent work that blends together well enough. Never horrid nor spectacular.
Obviously I'm going to hold any opinions on if the weekly is good overall until I finish the final volume, but the second is a bit of an improvement over the first, which I already thought was a decent read. So far, as long as it doesn't completely shit the bed with the ending, it'll probably hit somewhere in the middle as far as ranking DC's weeklies.
Bit of a short review, I know, but there isn't a lot of bad that sticks out and any good I could emphasize depends on how the series closes out.
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